After India became independent, one angry citizen asked Nehru as to what the difference was between the regime they had overthrown and the one they had ushered in. That he was able to speak to the prime minister of the nation in this manner was the difference between the two regimes, Nehru replied, politely.
What Nehru said was the essence of democracy. In a democracy, one should be able to voice one’s concern on any matter without fear or favor. As long as this element is present, there is no danger to democracy.
After over half a century if we are able to give an affirmative answer to this question, we may claim to be on the right track. If not, something is definitely amiss. But mere expression of it is not enough unless it seems to have been heard where it was intended to be heard in the first place; and is not merely heard, but necessary remedial action is taken wherever and whenever feasible and desirable. In other words, in a democracy public opinion should matter without exception.
A kind of ennui appears to have gripped everyone. Lack of governance during the past six decades and the growing unconcern displayed by those at the helm and the failings of the various pillars of democracy have added to this ennui. Ordinary citizens are not just victims of neglect and unconcern, even the judiciary has been suffering from the same kind of neglect and unconcern.
We are a nation of hypocrites. On one hand, we make a demonstration of our allegiance to the constitution, while on the other we keep trampling over it whenever it suits us. We have more than 400 Articles in our constitution (it began with 395 Articles and has steadily been growing in number). One thought that since all articles are the product of the same constitution, all of them would carry equal weight, or would at least have the same degree of importance. But no, that is not the position. Some articles continue to be treated with complete disregard. For instance, most of the articles under Part IV, especially 44, 45, 46, 47 and 49 remain as mere embellishments. Talk of the Uniform Civil Code for citizens, many politicians will be up in arms as if it was blasphemous to talk about it; as if it was not a part of the constitution they seemingly VENERATE.
When will the time be ripe? With the kind of politicians lurking around, it is anybody’s guess if the time will ever be ripe. Indeed many politicians in private admit that reservation has done a great deal of harm to the nation in as much as it kept merit from surfacing in full bloom. I do not know if reservation on the basis of caste is allowed in any part of the world. I also do not know if considerations other than merit (nepotism excepted) are of any consequence in any part of the world. Is it not self-condemnation of those who led the country this long and failed to meet the basic requirements of the people and the nation? These people have much to answer for the present ills.
None of Darwin’s writings from the voyage to Galápagos even make mention of the famous group of passerine species (“Darwin’s finches”) whose beaks and other variations would bolster his later theory of evolution. Indeed, his diary contains only one (passing) reference to any sort of Galápagos finch. But if Darwin didn’t write about the finches while in the Galápagos, he did collect them there, shooting and preparing specimens that he sent to England. In the process, he commingled the birds, failing to record on their labels the specific island on which each had been killed. Not until 1837 in London, after the birds’ inspection by zoologist John Gould, did Darwin come to recognize the variations among them.
Similarly, although Darwin noted and recorded the behavior of the massive tortoises on the islands, their differences didn’t strike him until the governor of the Galápagos brought them to his attention. Late in life, Darwin was asked directly whether he had been an evolutionist during his Beagle travels: “I believed in the permanence of Species,” he answered, “but, as far as I can remember, vague doubts occasionally flitted across my mind. … But I did not become convinced that species were mutable until, I think, two or three years had elapsed.”
The Galápagos was never his sole focus. In the opening sentence of On the Origin of Species, Darwin doesn’t credit the Galápagos with a special role in his thinking. Instead, it’s the natural phenomena of the whole of the South American continent that Darwin claims as inspiration.
Two hundred years after Darwin set sail on the Beagle, the notion that the Galápagos is, literally, the birthplace of the theory of evolution is commonplace. So how did the islands become synonymous with Darwin’s theoretical leap? The truth is that among scientists and other intellectual pioneers such breakthroughs rarely arrive as blinding revelations; they are more often the product of plodding, cumulative, laborious work, trial-and-error, even happenstance. And thus, for Darwin, there was no revelation in the Galápagos—no epiphany among the tortoises and finches there. The scientist and the science had to evolve.
Most people bask in the glory of the assessment of themselves that they have spent their whole lives longing to hear. They happily think of people having different political or religious views, or a different kind of education, as ignorant and clueless. They are eager to claim the status of knowledge for everything they themselves think.
Socrates saw that he and Most People were a match made in heaven. Most People put forward claims, and Socrates refutes them. Most people see the need to possess truths. Socrates saw the danger of acquiring falsehoods. Without Most People, Socrates wouldn’t have anything to think about. Socrates’ neediness did not escape his own notice. He saw himself as a midwife – engaged in “delivering” the wisdom-babies of Most People.
To pursue knowledge, Socrates saw two very different roles – one of making a bold claim, the other of questioning it. Even today, we naturally try to understand one another by objection and the simple fact of inability to take what someone has said as knowledge. The scope of his influence is as remarkable as the means by which it was achieved—nothing at all.
Still many of our ways are far from Socratic. If you view knowledge as an essentially collaborative project, you don’t go into a conversation expecting to persuade any more than you expect to be persuaded. Socrates’ politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, such that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politics is deeply uninquisitive.
Absence of evidence is not, as the saying goes, the same thing as evidence of absence. But if you continue looking for something intently, and keep failing to find it, you can be forgiven for starting to worry. And so it is with the vexed subject of explicit grammar teaching in schools, and its link or otherwise with improved writing ability.
A large randomized controlled trial has recently been added to the expansive literature on the subject. Like nearly all its predecessors, it found that teaching kids how to label the bits and pieces in a sentence does not make them better writers. It was novel in that it tested six- and seven-year-olds who used a digital platform called Englicious to take grammar lessons, alongside the rote classroom teaching of grammatical particulars and their functions. The Englicious group did no better than those receiving ordinary instruction when it came to writing narrative passages.
In retrospect it scarcely seems surprising that learning to underline a modal verb, such as “can”, “should” and “may”, does little to help students use them effectively in their own writing. These words are anyway grasped by tiny children without the need to know what they are called. This may tempt the conclusion that the teaching of grammar should be shelved altogether. But there are reasons to reform it rather than scrap it.
Understanding of language is part of a wider education in what makes human beings human. How concepts are turned into sounds, and how those sounds combine to form propositions, commands or questions, are issues that have occupied many linguists in philosophy departments. What they reveal about the mind has exercised psychologists and cognitive scientists.
There are practical reasons to ask children to grapple with grammar, too. One is that an explicit knowledge of it will make learning a foreign language easier. Even if you did intuit how to make subordinate clauses in your native languages as a toddler—just without instruction—getting to grips with them in German or Russian in later years is simpler if you know how to define and spot them.
