Comment by rhuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhuru | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Dharampal a student of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wrote a book called "A beautiful tree" which documented at great lengths how British administration destroyed the local schooling system in India which at that time had managed to produce higher literacy rate (even among working low status masses) than England.

Among many things that British got wrong, one was the refusal to call a place school if it did not have a permanent building neatly separated into classrooms and such. More than the learning outcomes, the infra that mattered more for British to recognize anything as a school and they went about closing down the informal "under the tree" schools in this manner. Of course as you go deeper you realize this policy was driven more by the corruption in the East India Company and British government where missionaries wanted funding from government to build "infra" in the same of schools.

Much later in 2005 or so James Tooley another British Economist in charge of World Bank aid to school system in India discovered similar trends and quit his job to promote low cost high quality private schools.

Indian government around that time brought an evil law called Right to Education and permanently killed this concept. Running an open air school in India might get you jailed today.

That literacy rate claim is questionable. By 1830, the literacy rate among English men was 60%. Dharampal’s book is based on British surveys of India during that same period, and don’t show anything approaching those rates: https://www.indica.today/long-reads/remembering-dharampals-s... (“Campbell’s report reveals that there were 533 schools in the Zillah of Bellary, in which 6338 boys received instruction, out of a total male population of 438,673.”).

There’s a lot of pretty dubious claims these days about precolonial India due to BJP. E.g. the statistic that India was 20% of world’s GDP before Britain and 5% after. (The endpoint of 1947 just happens to coincide with the US and Russia becoming absolutely massive economies.)

How did they measure literacy without a nationalised curriculum? Did the British system also introduce English?

And on top of that, they introduced architecture that is currently exacerbating heat island effect. The native architecture was designed for the local climate and didn't do that.

I hope India can wash some of this off and get to a better place.

The British have messed up a lot in India. Their aim was to break the backbone of Indian cultural thought and values, and unfortunately, they have succeeded in doing that, to the detriment of whole of India. Fortunately, the likes of Swami Vivekananda were instrumental in reviving the national consciousness of India, paving the way for Freedom.

On a societal level, the most important thing for Indians was "Truth" and "Promise". Truth was the ultimate red line at an individual / group / societal level. So was "Promise". People adhered to both, without the need for any documentation or witnesses.

Today, the reason we see so much suffering in society, at so many levels, is because truth is missing. One never knows who is lying, twisting facts or misrepresenting.

One of the most revered figures in India, Lord Rama, is worshipped, not because he is skillful in capturing kingdoms or occupying lands, but because he is the epitome of absolute truth and adherence to a promise.

Hopefully, in the times to come, India, and the world goes back to these concepts. A society cannot be happy if it is not based on Truth and adherence to promise.

It’s funny how the concept of rights have been twisted from things the government can’t do to you to things they must do to you.

It sounds like you're talking about the distinction between positive versus negative liberties as defined by Isaiah Berlin. I'm not sure the original concept of rights was ever limited to just negative liberties, i.e. freedom from government.

There's a nice Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative...

I am not OP but what you are discussing is much higher level stuff. Problems of "rights" in India are totally twisted and far more primal that a typical western mind wont be able to grasp at all.

Imagine a "right to education" law that mandates that a school can not fill up empty classrooms even if it has capacity and even if it offering it to needy students for free. It is a complete looney beans land.

I’m talking about the “Bill of Rights” which is a description of government limitations. It was a completely novel concept in terms of rule. And now we talk more about what you’re entitled to for existing.

You aren’t owed shit regardless of what some communist at Stanford wants to word salad about.

> I’m talking about the “Bill of Rights” which is a description of government limitations. It was a completely novel concept in terms of rule.

Are you referring to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, or the later US package of Constitutional amendments which takes its name from the first and provisions from both the first and the second?

Because if you are referring to the last of those, you are so very, very wrong!

[1] https://www.aclu.org/documents/bill-rights-brief-history

Bill of rights is/was not a novel concept. It has roots in many older systems in Europe.

> It was a completely novel concept in terms of rule.

The Bill of Rights was largely inspired by the Magna Carta...

Great, precedence!

Let’s keep it up by defining rights as things that government is limited by. Not empowered by.

I wasn't making a claim about what government owes people, and ironically that Stanford article was primarily citing classical liberals who did not bear much resemblance to the communists you have in mind.

I had assumed you were referencing the American Bill of Rights, being a great example of negative liberties ("Congress shall make no law..."). I just found that confusing since the comment you responded to was talking about the British and Indian governments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com