Grammar is good but it ain’t God

“God grant me the graces of nonchalance The alacrity — even now — to not miss the main chance Though the petals leave the calyx as the years advance Just one thing more, boss — let her save the last dance From

Suttee to Slutee by Bachchoo

The present Indian government and the destroyers who make up her flotilla are intent on changing history and other texts. The revisionism has brought howls of outrage from “secularists” who characterise the change as political vandalism.

Nevertheless, there are things to correct — changes of emphasis, the telling of neglected truths and a case for putting political considerations aside when researching and relaying the atrocities that Indian history has suffered. The great hope. of course, is that in a modern, civilised, democratic country this revision and correction can take place with heightened emotions, objections and debate, but without murderous divisions on the agenda.

It has long been recognised that British historians, who wrote the texts my school generation studied, were biased in certain ways. They thought Robert Clive was something of a hero, even when they did detail the perfidy he practised and the loot he accumulated.

But distorted perspective is the least of it. I have a deeper complaint. There I was, reading “history” in a school in Pune (then Poona) and was taught nothing of the kingdoms of the Deccan before Shivaji. Nothing! And of the kingdoms of the South A passing mention of Vijayanagar, but otherwise history happened where Alexander, Ashoka, Babur, Cornwallis and Curzon left their mark. I remember school trips to Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta but had no idea of the history that generated them.

My recent reading of an Indian history text book did yield chapters on the Gurjara-Pratiharas, Rashtrakutas and the Cholas.

So a partial welcome for such corrective texts and none for those which might maintain that Stonehenge was built by Hindus who ruled Wiltshire in pre-historic times.

Critics of this revisionism complain that it is ideologically driven. All revisionism is. That victors write history is a cliché. Democracy allows different classes, groups and interests to come to power — witness the turbulence if not turmoil of the 2016 US presidential candidate-selection process. There can be no doubt that if the US gets a President Donald Trump, some text books, those that maintain a Darwinistic view for instance, will be up for revision.

In the UK, there is in progress, in 2016, a seemingly gentler but really drastic revision in education. The Tory government has asserted its right to tamper with the curriculum of schools and has over the last few years led an assault on what it characterises as the libertarianism that has crept into the education system.

The assault, the reassertion of “factual” learning and the encouragement of schools that “adopt the old no-nonsense values” has emerged as a distinct and reprehensible philistinism.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed. The eminent poet Michael Rosen, who writes and recites provocatively imaginative verse for children, wrote a brilliant critique in The Guardian of the newly adopted approach to poetry in the prescribed national curriculum. He argues that poetic expression ought to stimulate the imagination in several ways and encourage nuance of interpretation. The prescribed curriculum reduces the understanding of poetry to right and wrong answers in a multiple-choice table. Poems are not Euclidian theorems and treating them as such is a constraint on learning. Rosen is not saying that an interpretation need have no relation to the values and connotations of the words in a line or a poem, but resists reducing the act of reading poetry to a grammatical or mathematical exercise.

The new orthodoxy advocates the re-introduction into schools of Latin and Greek. Nothing wrong with that. Neither is there any harm in teaching Sanskrit and getting pupils to marvel at the rules and codes of the ancient Indian grammarians such as Panini. Such studies ought to pay homage to the disciplines of linguistic construction but must leave room for an appreciation of the way in which languages evolve.

Hindi didn’t emerge from Sanskrit because any grammarian prescribed a change. Neither did modern Italian emerge from Latin without historical erosion and collective creative influences. Grammar is good but grammar ain’t God, and yet the new orthodoxy tends to sideline the imagination in favour of rote learning and the absorption of the single taught “answer”.

Part of the anxiety that has bred the new orthodoxy is the perception that Britain has fallen behind in the international table of scholastic achievement. The government wants it to be acknowledged as at the top of the ladder in maths, sciences and information technology, when, in fact, it is close to the bottom. To try and get British schools to acknowledge and tackle this lapse is laudable. But how is it to be done

I achieved a good degree with Physics as my major subject from Pune University. It enabled me to get a place studying “Natural Sciences” — physics — at Cambridge (UK, not Massachusetts). In Pune, we were required to learn Kepler’s laws, Newton’s laws, mathematical proofs of the theory of relativity, Heisenberg’s constant and how it came about and a thousand other “facts”. In Cambridge, I suffered a certain amount of bewilderment when the entire Physics course entailed solving problems to which the textbooks and lectures afforded no clue. The laws and theories were treated as background. Problem solving, identifying and applying the appropriate laws and theories, was all. Looking into the text books or at lecture notes for the solution to a parallel or similar problem was futile. The question-setters were always a step ahead of the texts.

There is no evidence yet that the government will tamper with the way science is taught in British universities, but there are anxieties and resultant schemes to promote more scientifically-minded and mathematically-accomplished school matriculates to these universities. This can only succeed if the absorption of fact is complimented by the encouragement of imaginative solutions and understanding.

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