Education makes one think and helps one to act. Knowledge and skill are the corollaries of thinking and acting. They feed upon each other.
The head and the hand had always worked in symphony to produce food, weave cloth, build structures, sing songs, create music and launch vehicles on land, water and in space — to attain progress and continue on an upward moving spiral, or a downward spiral as some environmentalists would argue. At some point in time, though, the wall between the head and the hand became pronounced by the emergence of guilds for crafts and arts and universities for theology and philosophy. The great divergence in India In India, two great divergences happened.
The first was religious sanction accorded to birth-based occupations, despite the possibility of Jatis moving up and down the varna system. The overall system classified professions on a graded scale of purity and forbade interactions between jatis, resulting in silos that got solidified first and ossified later. The idea of impurity of professions over the millennium is so deep rooted that it is banal now.
The second accelerating factor was the western world’s consistent effort to destabilise and destroy local productive knowledge and patronage networks, as well as the total bypassing of India from the forces of industrial revolution. This has resulted in a system that glorifies rote learning especially in a language that is foreign to a substantial majority of the country. By categorising educati.