British education

Today’s book not being donated is: A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. I made the educated decision to read the beginning before deciding whether to donate it to the Little Free Library. I still walked a couple blocks to the box, and a longer route back home, reading the whole way. There’s a two-page blurb at the beginning, outlining the life of George Orwell. I knew he was the author of “Shooting an Elephant” and 1984, as well as Animal Farm. I enjoyed two of those and was intensely bothered by 1984, in a sort of horrified can’t-look-away well-written clearly emotional rollercoaster.

I did not know he had been born in 1903 in India to an English family. The first essay discusses his school experience: an expensive boarding school in Britain from the age of 8 onward, as a poor boy sent on scholarship and drilled relentlessly so as to earn a scholarship to a highly ranked British public school. I love learning about other people’s experiences from their perspectives; he’s telling it as an adult, from memory, in a clear interesting style. I got partway in and didn’t want to stop, so I put a different book in the box and brought Orwell back home.

I wonder, how much of India’s education systems are built on British examples? I’m sure there were lots of parents who chose not to send their children back to Britain. I’m just as certain there were lots of well-meaning educators who chose to open schools for India’s own people. Based on Orwell’s experience, related in spirit to Charles Dickens’ own experience but with less starvation, I can’t imagine wanting to go to these schools. Surely there are better places, better ways to educate, more loving examples, more light and less heated discipline?