Education in the Medieval Tamil Desham: The Lessons it Teaches us
In the concluding part, we get a superb picture of the profound lessons that the educational system of the medieval Tamil Desham teaches us
THE WORST TYPE OF PUPIL quickly forgets his lessons and resembles the jar with a big hole in its bottom which can never be filled with water. The sheep wanders from one tree or shrub to another and never manages to get its full feed anywhere. Likewise, the bad pupil goes on changing his teachers and never gets the full benefit of the instruction of any single teacher. Just as the buffalo muddies the water in the pond before it starts drinking it, the bad pupil causes a lot of mental anguish to the teacher before deriving any good from him. The filter lets through the essential parts of the liquids like ghee or honey, and retains the impurities, so also the bad pupil misses the essentials of a lesson and fastens on the useless parts of it.
Pavanandi then proceeds to analyse the types of people that should never be accepted as pupils. Next, he lays down the rules to be observed by the pupil during a lesson, the methods to be followed by him to improve and extend the range of his knowledge and the firmness of his hold on what he learns, and the manner in which a pupil should win the grace of his guru.
These clear-cut sutras of Pavanandi neatly summarize the ideals of education cherished in the Tamil country in his day. We are astonished how universally relevant and timeless they are. But the real question is this: how far these text-book maxims were observed in practice? Epigraphy and literature furnish sufficient data for us to claim that the conditions under which education was carried on in those days were quite favourable to the attainment of reasonably good results.
Large colleges or classes were unknown, and the proportion of the number of teachers to that of pupils in organized centres of higher education like Ennayiram and Tribhuvani compares very favourably with what it is in many colleges today. Distractions were few, and learning was highly respected.
Let us also remember this. However much the textbooks may idealize the prevailing conditions, they could not have been framed without any reference to such conditions existing in real life. The language of Pavanandi’s sutras, the analogies employed in them, and the types of teacher and pupil described, betray evidence of much continuous and shrewd observation of real life in schools. The schools generally centred round temples and mathas in relatively later times. Inscriptions tell us more of Sanskrit schools and colleges, even in the Tamil country, than of the other type of school devoted to the cultivation of Tamil which existed side by side.
Education in the arts and crafts was largely a matter of caste and family tradition and training. But even to such a training, the instructive analysis of Pavanandi was not altogether inapplicable.
Concluded
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