Dear Mr Pitroda,
It was nice to meet and interact with you again during the AIMA meet. I’m glad that you respect my fundamental disagreement regarding the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) and have agreed to place it on the NKC website.
Let me summarise my disagreement.
The key mistake made by the NKC is this: you have shopped for knowledge by brand names.
Taking the specific example of trigonometry, you recommended that we should follow the MIT open course content. You said that our teachers should change into mentors, who only convey this content to students.
Entirely to the contrary, I teach students that the first step towards knowledge is to re-create and test it oneself. Otherwise, it is not knowledge, but unreliable guesswork. A good teacher is needed to demonstrate this process in the classroom.
This applies even to an elementary subject like trigonometry. The big brands, like Cambridge, have told us for centuries that trigonometry originated among Greeks. This is repeated by all encyclopedias today. By your process of implicitly trusting brands, this is what a teacher should uncritically teach. However, on my process of “check, check, cross-check”, I found this branded “knowledge” to be seriously defective. I found that the Almagest, the purported “Greek” source of trigonometry, is an accretive text. Its purported author Claudius Ptolemy never existed, and was concocted like Euclid, during the religious fanaticism of the Crusades. This history was later pushed by racists as a means of soft power. (This is argued in detail in my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, Pearson Longman 2007, PHISPC, vol X.4. For the layperson, there is a forthcoming booklet, “The myth of the Western origin of science”.)
So, big brands can also cheat big. Unlike your process of relying on brands, my process of cross-checking safeguards against this possibility.
A corrected history of trigonometry would of course change the way trigonometry is taught.
Trigonometry developed in India where the length of curved lines was measured using a flexible string. This process makes trigonometry very easy. However, that is not how MIT teaches it, and they would disallow it. Descartes even declared in his Geometry that measuring the length of curved lines was beyond the capacity of the human mind! Galileo concurred. Why? Because, like Newton, they saw the straight line as the “natural” figure, and tried to reduce curved lines to straight lines. That is like using a foot-rule to measure a curved line—a more foolish process than a carpenter hammering a screw in the wall. (See, further, “Towards Equity in Mathematics Education II: The Indian Rope Trick” at http://ckraju.net/papers/MathEducation2RopeTrick.pdf; details of the alternative course are at http://ckraju.net/calculus.html.)
MIT, Descartes, Galileo, Newton are all big names. But if a branded carpenter hammers a screw into the wall, should we do the same? For how can social acceptance or rejection change the physics of the screw? Unfortunately, your process gives no clue whether or when brands go wrong.
Reliance on brands, even in the domain of knowledge is, to my mind, a recipe for mimicry far worse than Macaulay’s. Instead of bringing about a “generational change”, it will only perpetuate generations of bondage through soft power. A nation dependent for knowledge on foreign brands loses all autonomy.
My proposed alternative is to go by demonstrable practical value, and not rely on brands, especially in a foundational subject like mathematics. (As explained in my previous note, “practical value” should not be confounded with just “applied math”; it is intended to eliminate fundamental cultural biases in both pure and applied math.)
When, at C-DAC, I needed some mathematicians who could work on actual practical applications of national importance, I could find none in the country. Something has clearly gone wrong with math education in this country.
This state of affairs cannot be corrected by the same people who engineered it to suit their interests.
So, while I welcome the NKC focus on math education, more thought is needed on the kind of mathematics that ought to be taught. But who will decide this?
The TIFR math school could not create any demonstrable practical value, in the past fifty years. (This was publicly pointed out in my last mail. There has been no response.) Therefore, they are the last people who should advice the government or NKC about what sort of math to teach. But your math expert in NKC is drawn from that school! It is easy enough to eliminate dissenters and persuade decision-makers who do not know enough math. That is how they could be funded so long on the false pretence that they somehow contribute to atomic energy.
I am sorry if I have been excessively frank. It is not my intention to run you down as an individual, for I greatly admire your contribution to the development of C-DOT. However, I cannot allow that admiration to override the future of my children or of millions of other children in this country.
Science and technology management in post-independence India failed for this reason: our government agencies routinely selected the wrong experts, and then made the second mistake of avoiding correction through public debate. (For example, my public objections to racist images of Euclid etc. in our school texts have gone unanswered either by the authors (Narlikar et al.), who put this racist propaganda into our school texts, or by the concerned government agencies responsible for those texts.) In this way, even when well-intentioned, our decision-makers took decisions detrimental to public interest.
My aim is to try and ensure that the NKC (and the nation) avoids repeating these past mistakes, to help achieve the objective of building a knowledge society in the true sense.
With regards,
Yours sincerely,
C. K. Raju