Is It Wrong?

Q. Is the present system of education wrong ?

A. I do say that it is wrong. The medium of instruction being English, the burden on the students' brains has doubled. I feel very deeply about this question. Men like Prof. Jadunath Sarkar support the view that those who have received their education through this foreign medium, have lost their intellectual vigour. It has destroyed our power of imagination—the power to create and to invent. The whole of our time is taken up in learning the pronunciation and the idiom of a foreign tongue. It is useless toil forced on us from without, with the result that we have become blind imitators of European civilization—mere blotting papers. Instead of learning and adopting their good points, we have merely copied them. As a result, a wide gulf has been created between us and the common people. We cannot explain to them in the language which they understand even such simple subjects as the laws of health and other things conducive to social good, not to speak of politics. We have now become as degenerate as the Brahmins of the older generation or even more degenerate than they because their hearts were not unclean; they were like the trustees of the civilization of the nation. We are not even that. We are misusing our education and yet behaving as though we were the saviours of the common people.

— Navajivan : Nov. 15, 1920