About the Work
An Indian Looks at American Education is a short book—a pamphlet, in its original form—by the Indian educationist and public figure Humayun Kabir. It appeared as a title in the series “Eastern Economist Pamphlets,” whose general editor was E. P. W. da Costa. The book gathers four articles that had first been published in The Eastern Economist; at the request of many readers, these were collected and issued together in pamphlet form. Da Costa’s preface, dated New Delhi, November 1, 1956, introduces Kabir as one of the foremost authorities on education in India, notes his long service as Secretary of the Ministry of Education, and mentions his visits to a number of countries—among them the United States and the Soviet Union—undertaken to assess educational development. On da Costa’s account, Kabir writes with a unique authority that is at once theoretical and factual.
“America is perhaps the first country to provide free and compulsory education to all its nationals to the end of adolescence.”
The work itself is not a formal treatise or a statistical survey. It is a reflective, comparative essay: the impressions and judgments of an Indian educationist who has spent two short visits of about six weeks each in the United States, and who uses that limited experience deliberately, as a vantage point. Kabir is candid about the limits of his knowledge. He disclaims any detailed or comprehensive survey of American education, arguing that no one can truly judge another nation’s system without far greater preparation. But he defends the value of a visitor’s first impressions: the outsider may raise questions that those at home take for granted, and may see familiar arrangements with fresh eyes. The book is written in that spirit—curious, comparative, and argumentative rather than exhaustive.
Context
The book belongs to the middle of the twentieth century, to the years of newly won Indian independence and of intense international interest in how nations educate their citizens. Its immediate occasion is journalistic: four articles written for an Indian economic weekly and then reprinted for a wider readership. Its deeper occasion is comparative and political. Kabir writes as an Indian about America, but always with India in view. He is interested in what the American experience can teach a country that is itself trying to build a system of universal education, to widen opportunity, and to hold together a vast and diverse population.
The comparison he draws is carefully framed. India and America, he observes, have much in common despite their obvious differences. Both are large countries with wide geographic and climatic variety. Both are inhabited by peoples derived from many racial and cultural traditions. Both are seeking a common culture that can give unity of outlook and purpose amid diversity. America, he notes, is the oldest democracy but one of the newest countries of the modern world; India is one of the newest republics in history. In both, universal free education is integral to national policy and is regarded as both a condition and a guarantee of democratic rights and liberties. Both face the same practical challenge: expanding education quickly enough to meet growing national demands, while maintaining and improving standards and extending facilities to the whole nation rather than to a privileged section. Because America began educating the entire community earlier and has carried the experiment further than India, its policies and practices may interest and serve India. That is the premise of the whole book.
The context also includes the Cold War and America’s postwar global role, which Kabir touches on when he discusses the demand for better-educated citizens. And it includes the specific institutional landscape of American education in the 1950s: local school districts, state departments of education, teachers’ colleges, a federal Office of Education with little power, and a vast array of voluntary professional associations. Kabir’s account is dated in its details—the salaries, the statistics, the particular controversies—but its questions about who controls education, how standards are set, and what schools owe a democracy remain recognizable.
Structure of the Book
The pamphlet is organized into four parts, following the sequence of the original articles. The first, “Who Shapes Policy?”, asks how educational policy is actually made in the United States, given the country’s official commitment to local control. The second, “Secondary Education,” examines the standards and methods of American secondary schooling, and the training and certification of teachers. The third, “Colleges and Universities,” turns to higher education—the structure of the undergraduate and graduate years, the standing of American degrees, and the case made for universal college education. The fourth, “Some General Comments,” steps back to consider the wider social and historical forces that have shaped American education: attitudes toward children, the appetite for novelty, the optimism of a nation of immigrants, the practice of paying children for work at home, and the American passion for organization.
The movement of the book is thus from the institutional to the cultural: from the machinery of policy, through the schools and universities, to the habits of mind and social arrangements that underlie them. Throughout, Kabir alternates between admiration and criticism, and between description of America and reflection on India.
Inside the Book
The book opens with the question of who actually shapes educational policy in America, and Kabir finds the answer far less simple than the official doctrine suggests. The United States Office of Education, he notes, mainly collects information and publishes reports. The average citizen’s first response is that education is organized on the basis of local communities, and that policy is prima facie a local concern; most Americans, he says, would react violently against federal or state control. Federal authorities themselves insist that they have no say in policy and serve merely as a clearing house. The distrust of federal authority shows in the status and emoluments of the United States Commissioner for Education: his tenure is generally annual, and his salary is less than that of a school superintendent in a prosperous city. Kabir cites the recent resignation of the Commissioner to become Superintendent of the Detroit school system, one reason given being the superintendent’s salary of thirty thousand dollars against the commissioner’s fourteen thousand. The powers of the commissioner and of district superintendents, he remarks, stand roughly in the same proportion as their salaries.
The state commissioner is in some respects happier. Education is a state subject, so regulations for school buildings, class hours, and the preparation of teachers are largely determined by the state, giving the state commissioner a larger say in state policy than the federal commissioner has nationally. Consequently the district superintendent of schools has a smaller area but often a larger influence than the state commissioner. Yet state departments and commissioners are reluctant to admit that they have the last word, protesting that local communities decide all educational policies. Local authorities, for their part, complain that their autonomy is more apparent than real: their very constitution is subject to state legislation, which also prescribes the conditions under which schools function; the state exercises authority through inspecting and supervising officers and by prescribing the conditions of service of teachers. If a powerful state commissioner made up his mind to introduce an innovation, it would be difficult if not impossible for a local community to resist.
Teacher training colleges, Kabir continues, also have an important say at the elementary and secondary levels. He calls the divorce between universities and teacher training institutions a peculiar and unfortunate feature of American education. State departments largely organized the teacher training colleges, so one might expect the state commissioner to influence policy through them; but these colleges have become largely autonomous, with an almost independent life. Their influence is exercised not directly but through the convention that restricts the appointment of city superintendents and state commissioners mainly to alumni of teachers’ training colleges. Voluntary and non-official national organizations also shape policy. Americans, Kabir observes, are fond of forming societies in almost every sphere; nowhere else is there such a passion for organization through societies and committees. The National Educational Association is the most powerful of these, but not the only national organization influencing educational policies. Such professional and semi-professional associations often lay down rules for the recognition of teachers and powerfully influence the construction of curricula and syllabuses. They have representatives in almost all teachers’ training colleges.
From this account of policy, the book turns to secondary education and to a central criticism: that the encouragement of adolescents becomes harmful when it fixes standards so low that nobody fails, producing what Kabir calls a caricature of education. Faced with an assignment too difficult for a child, he says, there are two possible responses—requiring greater effort with reasonable assistance from the teacher, or cutting the assignment down to the child’s easy reach. These solutions are not incompatible and are usually combined in varying proportions; most countries emphasize the first, while America tends to favour the second. The American approach, in his judgment, is the less satisfactory. All education should require effort and striving; he quotes Browning’s line, “What is a man worth unless his reach exceeds his grasp?” Children’s capacities are liable to be underestimated, and given challenging tasks they rise to great heights. Relaxation of standards harms a growing child: adult life is full of struggle, and education must teach the coping with and overcoming of difficulties; learning to bear success and disappointment with an even temper is the best training for adolescence.
Adolescence, Kabir notes, brings new interests, new tastes, and an influx of physical and emotional energy. If this energy is not used in useful, creative channels, it finds undesirable outlets; an empty mind, he says, is the devil’s workshop, and even more so for adolescents. Secondary education covers the whole of adolescence; sufficiently stiff standards mean higher attainment and the use of abundant energy in useful work and play, leaving no surplus for juvenile excess or lapse. Europe and Canada, he argues, prove that higher standards are attainable; if they were demanded of American youth, those young people could match their fellows in other countries, and problems of indiscipline and delinquency might be automatically solved.
American teacher training and certification come in for further blame. Professional courses are given in teacher training colleges that are generally independent of, and at times hostile to, universities and liberal arts and science colleges. This separation lowers the quality of recruits: students who fail to gain university admission crowd into the training colleges, and even the abler students lack a college education that would let them take full advantage of professional courses. British and Indian practice—requiring a first degree for entrance to a training college—seems to Kabir more appropriate, and he notes that some American universities have introduced similar graduate training courses. Certification rules, moreover, emphasize professional courses and teaching techniques over general ability, subject knowledge, or understanding of children. Professional courses have value and have raised the status of teachers, but over-emphasis on technique defeats their purpose. Kabir’s own view is that professional courses are most helpful if they follow, rather than precede, actual teaching experience. The rigidity of certification perpetuates existing low secondary standards; inducting sufficient young, enthusiastic teachers with adequate subject knowledge would lead those teachers to demand and exact higher standards, improving secondary education all round.
The third part of the book takes up colleges and universities, beginning with a sharp distinction between the first two years of collegiate education and the years that follow. The American pattern is a four-year undergraduate course followed by one or more years of graduate study. The first two years show, sometimes in sharper relief, the shortcomings of secondary education: many alternatives let students choose almost at will without regard to systematic, sustained study; many do not take their work seriously and waste precious years of early youth; wastage is large, with many dropping out. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kabir notes, hardly half the entrants succeed within the stipulated period. America’s chronic manpower shortage at every level encourages this, drawing students out before they finish.
The bachelor’s degree follows four years, but its standard is generally below that of British universities, mainly because of lower American secondary standards. A British freshman, Kabir says, usually does work that an American undergraduate does in his second or third year; the first two American college years approximate school education. Despite strenuous final two years, the American college man cannot catch up with his British counterpart. Graduate studies largely rectify this. Only those with interest or purpose continue; later undergraduates are more serious and earnest; better motivation and maturity make for harder work, and this is truer still of graduate students. With almost unlimited profitable employment available, only the most serious-minded pursue graduate studies. The later undergraduate and graduate years compare favourably with similar study elsewhere, though they involve greater effort and strain because of less adequate earlier preparation.
Most graduate students seek a doctorate, theoretically obtainable in two or three years after the bachelor’s degree; in practice few take under four years, and five is the general average. A master’s degree can be taken in one year after the undergraduate course, but for most it is only a half-way house to the doctorate. One unfortunate development has been the debasement of the master’s degree. Local autonomy adds further complexity. America is said to have two thousand universities, which is misleading; it is truer that about two thousand institutions award their own degrees. Such an institution may be a giant university with thirty or forty thousand students, or a small college with a few hundred. Some are private and entrenched in tradition; others are amenable to public pressure and political control. Enormous variation in standards results. The older universities—the Ivy League—tend to look down on the giant state-run universities, and the state universities have grades of snobbery among themselves and toward the Ivy League.
University men complain about the inadequacy of secondary education, and this leads educationists to demand universal college education, supported by two arguments. The first is general and applies to all countries: in old hierarchical societies, difficult problems were handled by a small minority of highly educated and able persons; in the modern democratic world every man has a say in society and government; government has assumed more extensive functions; and the growing complexity of civilization and increasing international contacts demand higher knowledge and maturity in the average citizen. Secondary education, however good, is no longer adequate for citizenship. The second argument is specific to America: American secondary standards are low, producing half-baked youths with neither systematic knowledge nor maturity of thought and judgment, while the responsibilities of citizenship continually increase. Recent American contacts with the outside world emphasize the need for better citizens. Since the First World War, America has played an increasingly important world role, generously helping nations with goods and services; even her worst enemies, Kabir notes, have not accused her of imperialism; she has been a benefactor of millions in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. Yet these benefactions have not always been understood or appreciated—a point that leads into the book’s wider reflections on how America is perceived and how education might improve that understanding.
The fourth part, “Some General Comments,” opens with a second reason, besides the value placed on success, why standards have sometimes been lowered to suit the least able children and adolescents: Americans, by and large, hold a more sentimental attitude toward children than Europeans or Asians do. Kabir offers probable historic reasons. Many earlier immigrants were young men who had led hard childhoods; able and ambitious but suffering dire poverty, they left their homelands because these offered no scope for full development. Having succeeded in America, they felt their children should not lack the opportunities denied to them. Greater consideration—almost softness—for children may also have been a reaction against European practice: under the Church and the trade guilds, European children had a hard time, especially from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until the middle of the nineteenth century. By comparison, American children enjoy a freedom and consideration that astonishes the foreign visitor.
American history, Kabir continues, may also explain another characteristic development: the craze for continual change in American life and education. New fashions sweep across America like wildfire across the prairie. Because Americans derive from many races, traditions, and cultures, no single tradition holds the whole group; differing beliefs and behaviors side by side shake faith in the permanence of any social pattern. Only the ambitious and energetic left their homelands, strengthening the American readiness to accept innovation; being able and ambitious, they took risks, and novelty held no terror for them. Many immigrants felt no devotion to their old country’s institutions—they were rebels who left rather than submit to existing conditions. Hence the tradition of stability and inertia is weaker in America than in European or Asian societies.
This fondness for novelty appears in education: more experiments are performed in America than perhaps in the rest of the world combined; almost yearly someone offers new solutions at different stages, and supporters for these panaceas are not lacking. The absence of central direction or control makes local trial easier, so American education seems in continual turmoil—at least on the surface. Kabir says he used the phrase “on the surface” deliberately: despite the craze for change, educational patterns have not changed basically. This paradox is explained by his earlier discussion of educational policy. Despite local autonomy, the great national organizations—the United States Office of Education, the state departments, and the teacher training colleges—deeply influence theory and practice. These are stabilizing factors; more surprising still, the multiplicity of local authorities itself acts conservatively. With about sixty thousand local authorities, no change, however revolutionary, can take effect nationwide at once; all must be convinced of its need and practicability. Typically some authorities adopt the innovation while others cling to old practice, producing a dynamic equilibrium out of conflicting local and national forces.
The development of the American people has influenced education and general life in other ways. Only the able, energetic, and discontented left their homelands; most succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, so the atmosphere is one of hope and optimism, striking even to a casual visitor. Every young American feels no limit to achievement except personal capacity. This optimism breeds confidence and self-assertion—good qualities, but sometimes indistinguishable from cocksureness. Friendly foreigners are struck by the American readiness to solve problems for everybody; Kabir notes that Indians perhaps share this habit of offering free advice to the world. In America this outlook was strengthened by the early settlers’ strong evangelical tradition: they left home for freedom of conscience and were deeply religious; the religious temper has diluted, but evangelism persists.
Kabir then addresses a social practice widespread in America in recent decades: paying children for helping at home. He deems it undesirable educationally and, more than that, harmful to social cohesion. Educationally, it brings the money motive into the child’s life unnaturally early. A child of ten or twelve paid for minding a younger sibling or helping with chores begins to think of all services in terms of money alone; this carries into studies, so that the child views education purely by its monetary utility. This shows in subject choice and in attitudes toward graduation: pupils choose subjects not for their educational or cultural significance but as a short cut to a certificate that raises their value in the employment market. It leads pupils to give proper education as little time as possible and to use spare time earning money. High school and college youth commonly spend vacations at jobs unrelated to their studies. This is justified where students must work to pay educational expenses—such students deserve support and admiration—but where earning is unnecessary, spending vacations on unrelated jobs misuses time needed for education. It is social wastage, Kabir argues, if undergraduates majoring in physics or philosophy spend three to four months a year washing dishes instead of studying their subjects. In European or Indian universities, students are expected to do, and often do, much additional reading during vacations. American high school and college standards cannot rise sufficiently unless it is recognized that during tutelage the pupil’s principal, if not sole, preoccupation should be study and preparation for future responsibilities.
The social consequences seem to Kabir even more serious: payment weakens family solidarity. Since the family is society’s basic unit, weakened family loyalties must cause some loss of social obligation. A child needs not only sustenance but affection and care from parents; in return it must learn to serve parents and family members with affection and care. The money motive undermines the natural bonds that hold the family together. If a child expects payment for a family obligation, why shouldn’t mothers and fathers be paid for doing things for their children? The absurdity of this question highlights, for Kabir, the intrinsic absurdity of paying children for home tasks. Children should receive some pocket money mainly to learn the use of money; occasionally a parent may reward special effort, preferably as a gift from parent to child, never as wages.
The book concludes with one more paradox: Americans may be regarded as individualists par excellence, yet they exhibit a passion for organization perhaps unequalled anywhere. Every aspect of life is reduced to a definite pattern through organizations that encroach on what other countries leave to personal choice.
Main Arguments
The book’s arguments are interlocking, and several of them run through more than one part. The first is about the location of power. American education is officially local, but Kabir shows that policy is in fact shaped by a tangle of authorities: the federal Office of Education, which has prestige but little power; the state departments and commissioners, who regulate buildings, hours, and teacher preparation; the district superintendents, whose influence is often greater than their formal jurisdiction; the teacher training colleges, whose autonomy and whose grip on the appointment of superintendents and commissioners give them a decisive voice; and the voluntary national associations, which set rules for recognition and shape curricula and syllabuses. The result is that no one is clearly in charge, and everyone can plausibly deny responsibility. This diffusion of authority, Kabir suggests, explains both the surface turmoil of American education and its underlying stability.
The second argument concerns standards. Kabir believes that education must require effort, that children’s capacities are commonly underestimated, and that the relaxation of standards—however kindly meant—harms the young by failing to prepare them for a life of struggle. He contrasts the American tendency to cut the task down to the child’s reach with the practice of most other countries, which requires greater effort with reasonable assistance. He cites Europe and Canada as proof that higher standards are attainable, and argues that demanding them of American youth would raise attainment and might even reduce indiscipline and delinquency by absorbing adolescent energy in useful work and play.
The third argument concerns teachers. Kabir holds that the separation of teacher training colleges from universities and liberal arts colleges lowers the quality of recruits and of teaching. Certification rules that privilege professional courses and techniques over general ability, subject knowledge, and understanding of children perpetuate low standards. His remedy is to require a first degree before professional training, to let professional courses follow rather than precede actual teaching experience, and to bring enough young, enthusiastic, well-educated teachers into the schools that they will themselves demand higher standards.
The fourth argument concerns higher education. Kabir distinguishes sharply between the first two undergraduate years, which he finds weakened by the shortcomings of secondary schooling, and the later undergraduate and graduate years, which he finds serious and comparable to study elsewhere. He notes the low completion rates at institutions such as M.I.T., the debasement of the master’s degree, and the enormous variation in standards among the roughly two thousand degree-granting institutions. He reports, without fully endorsing it, the case for universal college education: that modern democratic citizenship demands more knowledge and maturity than secondary education can supply, and that American secondary standards in particular produce half-baked youths unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship in a nation with a growing world role.
The fifth argument is cultural and historical. American attitudes toward children, the appetite for novelty, the optimism of a nation of immigrants, and the passion for organization are all traced to the country’s history. These traits explain both the experimental energy of American education and its resistance to fundamental change. They also explain, in Kabir’s view, certain practices he criticizes—above all the payment of children for work at home, which he sees as educationally harmful and socially corrosive, since it substitutes the money motive for the natural bonds of family affection and service.
Key Concepts
Several concepts organize the book. The first is comparative education itself: the idea that a visitor from abroad, precisely because he is an outsider, can raise questions that natives take for granted, and that educational problems are basically the same in all countries even when the solutions differ. The second is local autonomy—the American doctrine that education is a community concern—and its limits, since state legislation, state supervision, and the conventions of the training colleges constrain what localities can actually do. The third is the dynamic equilibrium between local and national forces: the multiplicity of about sixty thousand local authorities, far from producing chaos, acts as a conservative brake, so that no innovation can sweep the country at once and the basic pattern of education remains stable beneath a surface of continual experiment.
A fourth concept is social mobility. Kabir admires the American achievement of free, universal, and diversified education, and notes that it has been called the greatest single instrument for increasing social mobility in the United States. Education equalizes opportunity and democratizes society, and this is precisely what India needs. A fifth concept is the relation between education and citizenship: as government assumes more extensive functions and as civilization grows more complex, secondary education, however good, is no longer adequate for the average citizen, and the demand for universal college education follows. A sixth is the money motive and its intrusion into childhood, both in the choice of subjects and in the payment of children for household tasks. A seventh is the tension between individualism and organization in American life—the paradox of a people celebrated for individualism who reduce every aspect of life to a definite pattern through societies and committees.
Themes
The most prominent theme is comparison between India and America, and the use of America as a mirror for India’s own educational ambitions. Kabir writes as an Indian for Indian readers, and his admiration for American universal education is inseparable from his sense that India faces the same tasks—extending facilities, maintaining standards, building a common culture out of diversity, and making education an instrument of equal opportunity. A second theme is the relationship between education and democracy. Universal free education is, in Kabir’s account, both a condition and a guarantee of democratic rights and liberties; the question of who shapes policy is therefore a question about democracy itself, about how a society makes decisions that affect everyone.
A third theme is the cost of kindness. Kabir’s critique of lowered standards is framed not as harshness but as a concern for the child: relaxation harms the growing child by failing to prepare him for adult struggle, and the sentimental attitude toward children, however understandable in light of immigrant history, has educational consequences that must be faced. A fourth theme is the tension between innovation and stability. America’s craze for change and its underlying conservatism are presented as two sides of the same coin, both rooted in history and both visible in the schools. A fifth theme is the family and the money motive: Kabir’s discussion of paying children for chores is really a discussion of what holds a society together, and of whether market relations should extend into the most intimate relationships of care.
A sixth theme, present throughout but especially in the later parts, is the formation of citizens for a world role. America’s postwar engagement with the world, its generosity and the imperfect understanding it has received, form the backdrop to the argument that better education is needed for better citizenship. A seventh theme is the paradox of American character: optimism, self-assertion, evangelism, readiness to solve everyone’s problems, individualism, and a passion for organization all coexist, and all leave their mark on education.
The Author’s Conclusions
Kabir’s conclusions are measured rather than sweeping. He does not claim to have surveyed American education comprehensively; he offers the impressions of a visitor, and he insists that educational problems are basically the same everywhere. Within that frame, his judgments are clear. He admires the American achievement of free, universal, and diversified education, and he regards it as a model of education as an instrument of social mobility and equal opportunity—precisely what India needs. He finds the American system’s diffusion of authority confusing but also, in its own way, stabilizing: the absence of central control makes experiment easy, while the multiplicity of local authorities prevents any experiment from becoming universal overnight.
His criticisms are equally clear. American secondary standards are too low, and the tendency to cut assignments down to the child’s easy reach produces a caricature of education. Teacher training and certification are too separated from the universities and too focused on technique, and the remedy is a first degree before professional training and professional courses that follow teaching experience. The first two years of college suffer from the weaknesses of secondary schooling, and the master’s degree has been debased. The payment of children for work at home is educationally harmful and socially corrosive. And the demand for universal college education, whatever its merits, rests on a real deficiency: American secondary schooling produces young people who lack systematic knowledge and maturity of thought and judgment at a time when the responsibilities of citizenship are steadily increasing.
Underlying all these conclusions is a single conviction: that education must require effort, that it must prepare the young for struggle and responsibility, and that a society which educates everyone must nevertheless insist on standards. Kabir’s final paradox—that Americans are individualists par excellence yet organize every aspect of life into patterns—is not a dismissal but an observation, offered in the same spirit as the rest of the book: curious, comparative, and candid.
Significance
The book’s significance lies in several things at once. It is an early and lucid example of comparative education written from an Indian perspective, at a moment when India was building its own system and looking abroad for lessons. It is a portrait of American education in the 1950s—its local districts, its state departments, its teachers’ colleges, its two thousand degree-granting institutions, its debates over standards and universal college—drawn by a sympathetic but critical outsider. And it is a meditation on questions that outlast their moment: who should control education, how standards should be set and maintained, what schools owe a democracy, and how a society should balance kindness to children against preparation for adult life.
Kabir’s authority as a writer on these questions is emphasized by the series editor, who notes his long service as Secretary of the Ministry of Education and his visits to various countries to assess educational development. That combination of practical experience and comparative observation gives the book its distinctive tone: it is not the work of a theorist remote from schools, nor of an administrator without ideas, but of someone who has both run a system and thought about what systems are for. For Indian readers of the time, the book offered a mirror and a challenge; for later readers, it offers a window onto a particular moment in American education and a reminder that the questions it raises are never finally settled.
