Humayun Kabir’s Indian Philosophy of Education gathers addresses and essays written for convocations, conferences, and learned bodies across the late 1950s, most of them delivered at Indian universities but two first given at Oxford and one at a San Francisco conference on education. Published in 1961 and dated from Calcutta, the collection is less a systematic treatise than a working-out of convictions: Kabir says plainly that the post-independence surge of educational activity in India produced programmes faster than it produced philosophy, and these pages are his attempt to supply the underlying thought. The result is an expository book—part report on Indian education, part argument about what education is for—spoken in the voice of an administrator and former teacher addressing the young.
“Whenever India has under-estimated the value of knowledge, she has suffered grievously.”
Running through every address is a single claim: education exists to develop human excellence, not to manufacture passports to employment. Kabir returns to this again and again, defending the disinterested pursuit of knowledge against the pressure of students, parents, and the State itself, which had made university degrees the condition of government service. Around that claim cluster his other arguments—that educational opportunity must follow aptitude rather than birth, that India’s diversity of language and religion is a strength to be accommodated rather than suppressed, and that the country’s future depends on a synthesis of the old and the new that universities are uniquely placed to accomplish.
From Convocation Hall to Classroom: The Argument’s Progress
The Making of a Book and Its Opening Case
Humayun Kabir’s Indian Philosophy of Education arrives with modest framing. The prefatory pages list his earlier books and name the publisher, Asia Publishing House, with offices scattered from Bombay to New York; the copyright is his own, 1961, and the volume was printed in India. In the Preface he explains where the essays came from: most began as Convocation Addresses given at Indian universities, which is why certain themes recur. For each address he tried to isolate one aspect of education and national life. All but three were planned and delivered as lectures. The first two chapters of the philosophical study were delivered at Oxford, and the last was an opening address at the U.S. National Conference of Education in San Francisco, organised by the International Institute of Education. The exceptions are the essay on Community Life, written at the invitation of the United States Office of Education; the essay on the Crisis of Youth, stitched together from two pieces written for the Polish Academy in Warsaw and the International Institute of Ethics in New York; and the third chapter of the philosophy study, written to bring the record up to date.
Kabir ties the book to the post-independence surge in Indian educational activity, which produced concrete programmes and fresh thinking about education’s nature, scope and value. He had described those programmes in Education in New India but felt the need to work out the philosophy beneath them. Human nature, he holds, is basically the same everywhere; philosophies built on nationality, or sciences divided along political lines, are futile. The natural sciences try to eliminate the human factor, while the humanities and social sciences place it at the centre, and their variety across countries and ages deserves sympathetic study. He does not claim a systematic, complete philosophy of Indian education; the title is ventured on the strength of the final essay. The two Oxford lectures could describe the ancient and medieval attitude to education with detachment, since those ages can be studied objectively; contemporary India is harder to pin down, with life and culture in vast change and revolution outside matched by ferment within. The Preface is dated Calcutta, February 22, 1961. The Contents list thirteen chapters, from The Role of Higher Education through to the four-part Indian Philosophy of Education.
The Convocation at Waltair
The first chapter reproduces an address at the twenty-ninth Convocation of Andhra University, Waltair, on December 3, 1955. Kabir thanks the Chancellor, recalls beginning his professional career at that university twenty-three years earlier, and praises two former Vice-Chancellors, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and C. R. Reddi. The graduates, he says, are the real heroes of the day. He prefers the American term “Commencement Day,” since there can be no end to acquiring knowledge; university education merely trains a person to pursue studies alone. He refuses to condemn university education for failing to guarantee profitable employment. It cannot be geared only to jobs; all unemployment is wrong, and if education were universal, any unemployment would at least be educated unemployment, whose vocal protests might force reform. India’s per capita annual income is under three hundred rupees while a university student’s minimum expenses run to a thousand a year, so each student is supported by the incomes of at least four people and must contribute proportionately more. Barely one in a hundred young people of the right age attends university; the privileged carry greater obligations. Higher education is a privilege to be earned, unlike elementary and perhaps secondary schooling, which is every citizen’s birthright in a democracy. Selection must rest on merit, and those chosen must forego other claims, recalling the old Indian ideal of the knowledge-seeker who renounces wealth and worldly power, keeping necessities and perhaps comforts but abjuring luxuries. He defends the disinterested pursuit of knowledge: the world owes more to visionaries than to those chasing immediate practical ends. All vocations matter—let scavengers stop for a week and administrators, politicians, philosophers and scientists would learn their worth; all culture rests ultimately on agriculture—but university people have chosen a special purpose, the development of human excellence.
Degrees as Passports, and the Case for Scholarships
Three reasons explain why this truth gets forgotten. First, higher education has been tangled with employment, partly by State decision: a degree is required for many posts, so students seek degrees as passports rather than knowledge. Higher education must stay general and abstract, widening vision and developing powers of generalisation; it cannot directly train for a profession, and a special committee is already considering relaxing the degree requirement for many Government posts. Second, position and power increasingly depend on education, so equality before the law demands that educational opportunity follow aptitude and ability rather than the accident of birth. Because schooling beyond the elementary stage is not free, many children drop out at secondary level who could have become national assets, and the handicap bites harder at college and university. The loss is double: the community is denied potentially high-quality leaders, and standards sink as pupils of comparatively inferior quality enter, so even the few who reach the top do not develop fully, leaving inferior leadership behind. The remedy is scholarships, stipends, bursaries and free places. In the United Kingdom over eighty per cent of Oxford students and more than two-thirds of all university students receive State support; in India only about twenty-five per cent receive comparable help. India is poorer, so the need is greater, and a beginning must be made so that merit becomes the sole criterion at higher levels.
Physical Amenities and the Scientific Temper
The third measure concerns physical amenities in schools, colleges and residences. Most colleges are poorly housed, equipped and staffed; in the metropolitan cities living conditions are sometimes wretched beyond description. Congested classrooms, absent libraries and common rooms, miserable quarters and poor teaching make many a college a mere apology for an institution. Without room for serious study or healthy co-curricular activity, young men and women turn discontented and rebellious. Improve teacher quality, govern admissions by merit and aptitude, provide minimum facilities, and student indiscipline will soon shrink to manageable proportions. These three measures are the essential conditions for reorienting Indian education and deserve the highest priority. Adopted, they can create in the young the scientific temper: an attitude of search for truth regardless of consequences, a critical and inquiring spirit that takes nothing for granted and rejects nothing till disproved, an experimental questing unafraid of new or old, accepting whatever stands the test of reason, respecting others’ opinions and tolerating differences. This temper is also the spirit of philosophy, where intellectual humility flourishes beside intellectual daring, and it is the ground on which democracy—equal regard for all individuals—can flourish. Indian education must create this spirit of democracy, scientific enquiry and philosophic toleration, so Indians can inherit their past traditions and share the modern heritage assembled from peoples across the world. Modern India is a crucible where old and new values are transmuted and fused; education is the catalytic agent making the fusion possible without violent upheaval, and educators are the chief agents of that synthesis.
Folk Education and the Disruption of the West
The Indian people, Kabir argues, have always sensed education’s role in community life.
The Materialist Creed and the Restless Young
The book turns first to the mood of the modern world, where a materialistic philosophy of life has spread through the advance of science and its attempt to explain human conduct by natural law. Marxism, in its dialectical form, pressed this furthest. Marx earned real credit for showing how economic laws drive large social changes, yet the theory was stretched well beyond what the facts support. Economic forces matter, but they are not the only forces shaping a person’s life or a nation’s history; fixating on them inflates the material side of existence. The result is odd: convinced anti-Marxists chase material considerations as eagerly as those who accept the creed. Multiplying and satisfying wants became the reigning philosophy of the United States and the Soviet Union alike, while the old religious ideal of voluntarily limiting one’s wants fell out of court. Since wants cannot be satisfied, this outlook cannot produce peace; possessions grow, but so does the gap between desire and attainment, and the young grow restless.
The Guilt of the Elders and the Loss of Guidance
A second source of youth unrest lies with adults. Many sensitive minds feel that world affairs have been so badly mismanaged over the past fifty years that the older generations have scarcely any right to preach. Earlier fathers were sure of their moorings and could demand attention; today’s fathers have lost that assurance, and a man unsure of his goal or path cannot lead. The young sense the uncertainty instinctively and stop listening, forfeiting the benefit of advice while lacking the knowledge and experience to chart their own course. Without guidance or inner conviction, they take the line of least resistance and settle for momentary sensory pleasure. Teachers have lost their leadership too; the author points to his own earlier essays on student indiscipline and unrest rather than repeat the argument, and notes that responses from Sweden and Australia suggest the analysis, though drawn from Indian experience, travels well.
Insecurity, Individualism, and the Weakening Family
Growing insecurity in social relations compounds the trouble. Individualism in industrial society has loosened social bonds, so shared purposes and ideals no longer command allegiance and a hedonistic outlook takes hold. The family is the first casualty: parental and sibling affection once helped the young grow into loyal members of society despite competing pulls, and with family ties weakening, a powerful ingredient of social cement is lost. Confusing heterogeneity of beliefs, customs and ideals deepens the uncertainty. Security and support are essential to normal development, above all in youth; the family no longer supplies enough of it, and society has not evolved a substitute. The mechanistic conception of life—Marxism being only one manifestation—has invaded the very citadel of life, and the author sets this challenge aside for separate treatment after surveying remedies for the other factors.
Remedies: Teachers, Equality, and Cooperation
Improving the status, efficiency and dedication of teachers is essential if indiscipline and anti-social behaviour are to be eradicated, and the effort must be global, joined to conscious work at reducing differences among peoples. Gross physical inequalities must go, and better knowledge of other cultural and religious traditions must be fostered. Unrest will persist until customs, standards and ideals draw closer together; that approximation is already under way but painfully slow, and it can be hastened by narrowing disparities within and between societies, beginning on the material plane. So long as glaring disparities exist and a privileged minority enjoys surfeit while the majority suffers dire necessity, youth cannot grow healthily and creatively. This is no call for regimentation abolishing all distinction—only for removing glaring gaps and widening equality of opportunity, so that societies may approach one another with hope of mutual understanding and respect.
Guilt among the older generations can be softened by a proper historical approach. Man’s story is one of mistakes and crimes, but also of shining heroism, endeavour and self-sacrifice. Chauvinism flourishes when a country’s or a class’s history is studied in isolation; studying man’s march from barbarism to civilisation shows that progress rested on cooperation rather than competition, with every section contributing according to its capacity. The Islamic tradition holds that God sent prophets to each nation preaching in its own mother tongue, bringing truth within reach of all. Emphasising culture as cooperative growth would draw civilisations nearer and prove that man has advanced through trial and error. Cooperation also eases the young’s insecurity, for good relations ripen into friendliness and friendliness into affection, giving the young the emotional support recent developments have impaired. It makes voluntary limitation of wants easier too: where goods are scarce, conflict follows if each claims his due, but one who seeks to share will curb his demand and let another share what he might legitimately claim. It is a paradox that knowledge of physical nature has grown astonishingly while knowledge of man’s inner nature remains uncertain and groping; enormous power over natural forces demands a matching increase in self-control, possible only through far greater knowledge of the motives and impulses governing action. Problems of individual and social conduct have not received their due, and technology and the natural sciences have lately been emphasised at the cost of the humanities.
Sir Syed Ahmed and the Unfinished Synthesis
The argument then turns to Indian Muslims, whose ancestors were once Hindus, yet many draw inspiration solely from Islamic traditions outside India, leaving a dichotomy between what they are and what they try to be. Under Muslim hegemony this division caused little trouble, since rulers recognised the political necessity of stressing affinities with their subjects; the earlier Pathan rulers increasingly saw it, and Babar recognised it from the founding of his power. As Muslim political power dwindled, accepting Indian life became more urgent and more difficult. Deprived of prestige, many withdrew into their shells, dreamed of an unreal past, minimised affinity with fellow countrymen, and claimed closer kinship with Muslim peoples abroad who retained a semblance of liberty. Other communities reacted in kind: because Muslims did not wholeheartedly accept pre-Muslim India’s heritage, non-Muslim Indians declined to incorporate the extra-Indian elements of Muslim heritage. Isolation curdled into hostility. Hindus and Muslims lived side by side but not with one another; educated Hindus knew more about the heroes of Greece and Rome than about the heroes of their Muslim countrymen. Sir Syed Ahmed, among India’s most important leaders, pointed the way to recovery through social, religious and educational reform, attempting a rational re-interpretation of Islam against orthodox opposition and pioneering the study of modern Western knowledge—Maulana Azad recorded that Sir Syed’s writings opened his eyes to Western political thought, philosophy and science, and this University embodies his vision. Yet he failed in one respect: he never came to terms with Indian history. Had he seen the importance of an intellectual synthesis of the diverse strands in the Muslim heritage and brought about a fusion of cultural traditions, India’s recent history might have run differently.
Partition, the Constitution, and Equality Before the Law
The author declines to narrate the thirty years leading to partition and accepts it as fact. Partition only made the emotional integration of Indian Muslims into common nationhood more urgent. The past decade vindicated those who held that Muslims’ interests were best served by a democratic, secular, modern, forward-looking State in India—achieved in India, though Pakistan has not achieved a stable, democratic, secular, modern State.
Christianity, Islam, and the Shifting Aims of Education
The book turns to Europe, where the coming of Christianity recast the purpose of learning. Perfection as a soldier or citizen gave way to qualification as a citizen of the kingdom of God, and education became centred on religion. That centring narrowed as it hardened: casuistry crowded out simple faith, and schooling shrank into an exercise of the intellect alone. The body was neglected, and the scholastic regimen of medieval Europe, which demeaned the body and ignored man’s economic needs, provoked the almost pagan exaltation of the body in the early Renaissance.
India’s systems moved with its ideals in the same way. The ancient pattern drew on the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and both orthodox and heterodox schools; the Buddha and the Mahavira inherited the prevailing culture and reshaped it. No single monolithic structure of Indian educational philosophy exists, but a coherent system of ideas can be assembled from the discussions of sages and philosophers. Islam brought fresh elements in the middle ages: its religious democracy gave new impetus to spiritual life, yet little attempt was made at synthesis on the plane of conscious thought, so medieval India produced no comparable efflorescence in philosophy despite real achievements in art, letters, politics, and religion. Europe’s impact since the nineteenth century has cut deeper and brought an Indian renaissance, but fusion at the level of thought remains unfinished. The philosophy of education the book sets out is therefore drawn primarily from ancient Indian thought.
Comprehensiveness, Samsara, and Karma
The most significant feature of the ancient outlook was comprehensiveness—the effort to hold every level of life in one common unity. The world as movement, as Samsara, appears in almost all schools. Belief in the continuity of life runs so deep that hardly anyone bothers to prove it. Modern thinkers struggle with the idea that souls migrate after death into new bodies, animal or even plant, but to the Hindu mind transmigration was simply the obverse of belief in immortality: the soul is indestructible, and so it must always manifest itself in some form of life. Belief in the indestructibility of actions found expression in Karma—all work, good or bad, must and does bear fruit. Immortality rules out not only a final end but a new beginning; a soul cannot come into existence only with its present birth, so it must have existed in other forms before.
This synoptic view, in which experience has neither beginning nor end and invariably involves suffering, has led some to call Indian philosophy pessimistic—a description that fits some schools but not all. The same word describes the real and the good; a people who identified the real with the good could hardly be accused of lacking faith in life. Every philosopher sought to explain evil and suffering. No school accepted evil as ultimate reality, so none could posit a duality of good and evil; none could deny suffering either. They attributed both to the cycle of experience, which will be transcended in realisation of the Absolute. Education was the instrument by which the individual rises above Appearance and attains the Absolute—the true, the beautiful, and the good.
The Sheaths of the Personality
Education was thus the key to self-fulfilment, serving its purpose only if it took due account of the different elements and levels of the human personality. Almost all schools recognise man’s many-sided nature. Samkhya Yoga analyses the personality into three elements: the soul or spirit (Atman or Purusha), the core; the subtle body of senses, mind, intellect, and motor organs; and the gross body of material elements. The Upanishadic conception differs little, but here the Atman is pictured as surrounded by five sheaths, the Panchakosha, descending from subtlety to grossness—Anandamaya, Vijnanamaya, Manamaya, Pranamaya, and Annamaya. For Samkhya Yoga, education develops the physical and subtle body so the soul can express itself unhampered. For the Upanishads, it trains and exercises the five Koshas into fit instruments for the good life, whose essential characteristic is to generate action and enjoyment free from attachment. Once that state of non-attached activity—Nishkama Karma—is reached, the soul gradually frees itself from the Koshas and is ready for ultimate liberation, ending the cycle of experience. Almost all schools make liberation from birth and death, and unity with the Absolute, the aim of education. Contrary to popular ideas, this did not mean turning away from the world; ancient India recognised social obligations in a way rarely surpassed. Personality could develop only through integrated training of all elements of human nature, so it was laid down that there must be proper food (Anna) to sustain the physical frame and daily physical work to strengthen it; training of the vital principle (Prana) through Asana and Pranayama, helping to control the five senses and motor organs; training of manas, the lower sensuous mind; and training of Buddhi, the intellect—intellectual education proper. The process did not stop with the Vijnanamaya Kosha; it culminated in Ananda.
Workshops, Akbar, and Aurangzeb’s Reproof
With the Sultanate established at Delhi, old arrangements proved inadequate; the king maintained workshops, kharkhanas, for the royal household and government departments. Under Firoz Tuglak, who ruled from 1351 to 1388, some of these became vocational-training institutions. Whether the trade schools were open to all is unknown, but most pupils were probably Muslims; their establishment outside the maktab and madrasa pattern broadened educational practice and may partly explain why for centuries most skilled craftsmen and artisans in India have been Muslims.
Akbar introduced significant reforms. Commonly held almost illiterate, he was a genius of a high order who educated himself through discussions with men of many vocations and faiths. Interested in children’s education, he proposed changes in the method and curriculum of elementary schools, holding that the time spent learning the alphabet was inordinately long and wasteful and that traditional education carried an unduly heavy burden of books. He devised easier ways of teaching letters and wanted the child to learn through his own efforts, directing that care be taken to see the child understands everything himself, with the teacher helping only a little. He brought in practical subjects—agriculture, accountancy, public administration—alongside arithmetic, geometry, and logic. Perhaps his greatest contribution was shifting education’s bias from theological to secular interests and extending facilities equally to all communities; many Hindu students began studying in maktabs and madrasas, and some were appointed to teaching posts even in madrasas.
The section closes with Emperor Aurangzeb, who ruled from 1658 to 1707, reproving the teacher who had congratulated him on his accession. The teacher should have acquainted him with the features, resources, warfare, manners, religions, and dogma of nations; with historical reading on the origin, progress, and decline of States and the causes of social change and revolution; with philosophy inclining the mind to reason, elevating the soul, producing fortitude and equanimity, teaching the nature of man and first principles and the nature of the universe—then he would have been more indebted to him than Alexander to Aristotle.
The Teacher, the Student, and the Uses of Knowledge
Kabir’s thinking about education keeps circling back to the people in the room. He is severe about the conditions in which most Indian students studied—congested classrooms, absent libraries, living quarters he calls wretched beyond description—and he treats these not as unfortunate details but as causes of the unrest and indiscipline that others blamed on the young. Improve the teacher, admit by merit, provide the minimum of decent facilities, and the problem shrinks to manageable size. That sequence is his whole reform programme in miniature.
His view of teachers is demanding in both directions. Teaching is a vocation and a way of life, not merely a career, and he will not have it treated as a fallback for the unambitious. Yet he is equally insistent that a society which expects teachers to live on idealism alone will get the teachers it deserves; the fact that a teacher’s pay rarely exceeds an unskilled worker’s tells the young exactly how much the community values the work. He proposes the unconventional remedy of paying somewhat better while asking teachers to handle more pupils, arguing that one good teacher with fifty students beats two poor ones with thirty each. And he wants teachers drawn into community development—not as a distraction from teaching but as a way of raising their standing and closing the gap between school and village life.
Students, in his account, are capable of far more than the system asks of them. He blames lowered standards for the frivolity he sees on campuses: when a student can neglect his books all year and pass by cramming for a month, there is little to hold his attention. He admires the British and Soviet practice of giving a student two chances at a degree and then sending him down regardless of whose son he is, and he notes with approval the college that restricted union elections to students with real academic or cultural distinction—a change the students themselves accepted once it was explained. The young, he believes, rise to difficulty and are spoiled by ease.
A Mind Shaped by Many Traditions
The intellectual centre of the book is Kabir’s account of what an educated Indian inherits. He refuses the idea that India must choose between its past and the modern world. The ancient ideal of knowledge pursued for its own sake—Brahmavidya, knowledge of the Absolute as the highest value—is not a relic to him but a corrective to a society that had begun to judge education by the salary it commands. At the same time he is scathing about the caste-bound narrowing that made knowledge the preserve of a small minority and left Indian society, in his image, an inverted pyramid resting on its apex. The remedy for that old failure is not a return but a widening: knowledge from every corner of the globe, Western science and technology accepted without embarrassment.
His reading of Indian history serves this argument. He notes that India was rarely conquered by outside force alone; there were always elements within that cooperated, and the deeper damage came from the mental isolation caste imposed and from the fatalism it bred. The Muslims of India, he argues, faced a parallel dilemma—descended from Indians yet drawing inspiration only from traditions outside the subcontinent—and Sir Syed Ahmed, for all his achievements, failed to bring about the intellectual fusion of India’s diverse strands that might have changed the country’s course. The Constitution of 1950, with its promise of equality before the law for the first time in Indian history, creates the conditions for that fusion; the universities are where it must be thought through.
What the Book Leaves Behind
Kabir writes as a man with a brief. He is not a theorist proposing a system so much as an advocate pressing a case on a generation that will decide whether India’s expansion of schooling becomes an education. His insistence that the humanities and theoretical science are not luxuries—that every great technological advance has rested on theoretical insight—was aimed at planners who saw only engineers and doctors as useful. His claim that India’s diversity must be accommodated rather than flattened, that a majority which identifies the national interest with its own way of life breeds the very separatism it fears, speaks to arguments that have not gone away.
The book’s final measure of the man is its confidence in the young. Kabir tells his audiences that every failure of the young is ultimately a failure of their elders, and that where teachers are real teachers—bringing knowledge, scholarship, affection, and care—their charges cannot go astray. It is a generous note to end on, and a demanding one, since it leaves the responsibility squarely with those who teach.
