The ISE initiative of the HE Cell has begun work by taking a close look at the separation of the human sciences and natural sciences in India. We have tried to understand how did we come to the HE sector in terms of 2 isolated of spheres of pedagogy - the human sciences and the natural sciences. Did we inherit this through colonial education? Did the West, in this instance British education, bring the separation to us through colonialism or did we already have in our understanding of knowledge and education the possibility of such a separation, such that British education coming through colonialism found in us a nursery bed? Alternately did British education, through the conduit of colonialism, encounter an innocent soil that thought about and lived through pedagogic structures in a different way such that the British system and the separation it brought erased and recreated a pedagogic apparatus?
However one cannot deny, whichever be the case, we now have this separation of the human sciences and natural sciences in the higher education sector and any alternative imagination, including those of integration, before colonialism or alongside it or after it are marginal propositions. Hence ISE felt that one needed to examine the separation, look for its origin and see if such separations is a problem, how one could make one's way towards a bridging of the rift (this is of course not an easy task, given the years of inculcation and habit as well as the interruptive nature of existing nature of the human sciences and natural sciences). The initiative will also like to take into account along with the origin of the separation possible critiques of such separation in the West before or around the origin. We call these, that are located within the womb of the West, internal critiques of separation. The initiative cannot discount the fact that some Western scholars (and non-Western ones too) have before seen the problem of separation and have attempted course correction.
The other problem we cannot wish away is the question of whether the landmass now called India had imaginations of knowledge and education different from the one that took shape in the West. Would such imaginations bereft of the problem of separation that haunts the West, be a critical resource for integration attempts or would throwing off the hold/envelope of Western education be the ground for the liberation of Indian education?
This class focussed on origin and it tried to see where one could locate the origin of Western Science. J P S Uberoi (2002)locates it in a particular moment in the Protestant turn within Christianity. "The system of the categories, relations and attitudes of life and thought that we call modern western civilization was fully manifested first, not so much in early capitalism and the Renaissance in Italy, but in the sphere of religion during the Reformation at Marburg and the counter-Reformation at Trent, 1529 to 1545."
This took the class to consider a set of questions:
1. while hitherto it has been customary to see a divide and separation and schism and wedge between science and religion, one could also phrase a surreptitious train of continuity, at times with the entire Christian tradition. At other times with Zwingly as critique of the Catholic trend within the Christian tradition. We felt that we needed to search this area and get the historical facts continuity-discontinuity right.
2. whether Christianity could be the exclusive attribute of the West or would the extent and span of the Christian multi-nodal? Even parts of India could be the node. Would it then be better to split our examination not in terms of Christian and non-Christian but in terms of theological and paganism?
No comments:
Post a Comment