it begins in the forests. the ancient gurukul system was a complete dissolution of the ego. you lived with the teacher, cleaned the cowshed, begged for food (bhiksha) to shed your pride. students memorized entire vedas with perfect intonation because writing them down would corrupt the sound. this was a lifestyle designed to produce a dvija (twice-born): first by birth, second by knowledge.
while the rest of the world was learning basic literacy, india was running massive, centralized university campuses. takshashila and nalanda were intellectual fortresses. nalanda had dorms for 10,000 students and a library, dharmaganja, that consisted of three massive multi-story buildings. the entrance exam was brutal. the gatekeepers (scholars manning the gates) rejected about 70 to 80 percent of applicants on the spot. if you got in, you were studying everything from logic (hetuvidya) to medicine (chikitsavidya) at the highest level recorded in antiquity.
this era ended with fire. in the 12th century, bakhtiyar khilji, a turkic general, sacked nalanda. the story goes that he was insulted when an indian ayurvedic doctor cured him while his own court physicians failed. in retaliation, he torched the university. the library was so vast, packed with millions of palm-leaf manuscripts, that it reportedly burned for three months. that smoke choked off centuries of indigenous knowledge systems, forcing education to retreat from these grand centers into smaller, scattered pockets.
there is a lazy narrative that india was illiterate before the british arrived. this is false. in the 1830s, a scottish missionary named william adam surveyed bengal and bihar and found a staggering reality: there were over 100,000 village schools (pathshalas). basically, one school for every 400 people. literacy was decentralized and supported by the community. teachers were paid in grain or land. it was a messy, organic system, but it worked for the agrarian economy of the time.
then came thomas babington macaulay in 1835. he wanted a buffer class of indians who were "english in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." his infamous "minute on education" dismissed the entire literary heritage of india and arabia as worth less than "a single shelf of a good european library." he pushed the "downward filtration theory": educate the upper crust in english, and let them deal with the masses. it was an arrogant, surgical strike that delegitimized vernacular education overnight.
by 1854, the british formalized this with wood's despatch, often called the "magna carta of english education in india." it sounded noble, but the goal was utilitarian: the east india company needed cheap clerks to run the administration. they set up the universities of calcutta, bombay, and madras in 1857, modeled strictly on the university of london. the curriculum was standardized, exams became the god, and the link between learning and local life was severed. you were learning to file instead of learning to build.
gandhi opposed this. he called the british system a "foreign culture" that made indian students strangers in their own land. in 1937, he proposed the wardha scheme, or nai talim (new education). his idea was radical: education should be self-supporting and craft-based. you would spin cotton instead of just reading about it. if the school produced cloth, it could pay the teacher's salary. it was an attempt to restore dignity to labor, but the elites, already hooked on the british degree system, mostly ignored it.
1947 brought independence and a strange paradox. the new government embraced the western model but scaled it up for nation-building. the most poetic moment happened in 1950 at the hijli detention camp in kharagpur. this was a brutal british prison where freedom fighters had been shot. the government took this symbol of oppression and turned it into the first indian institute of technology (iit). they turned a jail into a temple of technology. it was a bold statement: we will use modern science to build a new india.
despite the flashy iits, the core system rotted. the kothari commission (1964 to 66) wrote a brilliant report recommending a "neighborhood school" system where the rich and poor would study together to build social cohesion. it was never implemented. instead, we got a fractured system: expensive private schools for the few and crumbling government schools for the many. diverse curriculums were replaced by a rigid obsession with rote memorization. the goal was passing the board exam instead of learning.
by the 1990s and 2000s, this obsession mutated into the "kota factory." as the population exploded and good college seats stayed scarce, education stopped being about knowledge and became a gladiator fight. middle-class families started spending their life savings on coaching centers that taught students how to hack multiple-choice questions. the school became a dummy attendance center. the real "education" happened in cramped coaching halls. it created a generation of excellent test-takers with often questionable critical thinking skills.
covid-19 ripped the band-aid off. overnight, 1.5 million schools shut down. we saw the brutal "digital divide" in real-time: kids in cities attending zoom classes on ipads while kids in villages climbed trees to catch a 2g signal for a whatsapp assignment. it forced the government to finally wake up. the sheer chaos of the pandemic made it clear that the old chalk-and-talk model was dead. it was about resilience instead of just access anymore.
enter the national education policy (nep) 2020. it's the first big update in 34 years and it tries to fix the rigid structures. it scraps the old 10+2 format for a 5+3+3+4 model that recognizes a 3-year-old needs different teaching than an 8-year-old. it talks about vocational training, coding in middle school, and allowing students to mix physics with fashion design. it looks great on paper, but in a country of 1.4 billion, execution is the only thing that matters. we are currently in the messy middle of this transition, trying to figure out if we can actually pull it off.
