Krishna's+College

=What do I need to know about ... Krishna's College?=

Brief Description
☺ Based on the British system of education - it shows how the British has control over the education in India. ☺ Students and teachers "mug up" for examinations. ☺ No independent learning ☺ No passion for learning or teaching (compared to the Headmaster's school) ☺ Very routine and mechanical learning system ☺ Teachers are not committed ☺ It's method of teaching is controlling and browbeating ☺ Students are treated harshly and with little respect - Krishna uses authority to make the students obey him. ☺ When poems are analysed, they remove the feeling/joy to decipher meaning out of it ☺ No student-teacher relationship "what tie was there between me and them" [p.8]

Key Quotations
☺//"I hate my work" [p.144]// - Krishna shows his obvious dissatisfaction with his job, as earlier in the novel, he also states that //"if they paid [him] the same 100 rupees for string and beads"// //[p.8]// he would be doing it with //"equal fervor."// ☺//"Sighed with relief when the bell rang"// - Krishna is not committed into his job ☺ //"I'll mark you all absent"// //[p.8]// - Krishna uses authority in order to make students obey. ☺ //"Attendance takes up most of our hours, sir." [p.8]// - This shows that Krishna regularly delays having to actually teach by taking the attendance, reemphasising how unwilling he is to actually teach, in stark contrast to the Headmaster ☺ //"Engage their young minds with tittle tattle for an hour"// - This shows that Krishna has little interest in teaching, and the use of the words //"tittle tattle"// help show that. ☺ //"I was merely a man who had mugged sooner then them"// - You don't need anything special to become a teacher in Krishna's college. ☺ //"The annotator's desperate effort to convey the meaning...the essence of an experience lost in all this handling" [p.6]// - Poems are dissected and reduced, robbed of their emotion and feeling, in the same way that the college strips its students and teachers of feeling. As soon as Krishna leaves the college, he slowly moves on from his previous, materialistic self. It shows how the college acts as a jail. ☺ //" The study of Pride & Prejudice was a ‘non-detailed study" // ☺ //"This education had reduced us to a nation of morons"// //[p.173] -// Krishna going against the British educational system, claiming that it has made them //"strangers to [their] own culture"//, as they follow another culture to 'feed' on //"leavings and garbage."//

Its role in the novel
☺ To make up "sturdy idiots" ☺ Contrast to the Headmaster's school ☺ Orderly and routine ☺ As Krishna is exposed to the college's way of education and the contrast this creates with the Headmaster's school, he develops spiritually

The role of Krishna's college is to show the first stage of Krishna's character and how it will contrast later on in the novel, based on his break of routine and passion with the approach to different things and situations.

The college is used to symbolise the closed-minded kind of education being offered to students, and eventually this is the kind of character they are to become later on, resembling the way that Krishna's was portrayed at the beginning of the novel. As a student, Krishna learns from teachers namely, Ranggapa, Gajapathy and Brown, and how they reinforce the "literary garbage" of the school because of their teaching methods are very mechanical. The school focuses on irrelevant imperfections for example, spelling "honors" without a "u", while failng to appreciate the truly valuable elements of education.

Additionally, the school creates an impression that putting emotion into work and study is not important and that the only important reason to study literature is to pass the examinations and continue doing so the rest of the time. This further portrays how materialistic the environment Krishna is exposed to, which has resulted in his mechanical character.

Furthermore, Krishna's college is completely the opposite environment to that of the Headmaster's school. In the college, the teaching style used is very mechanical and seems to be only one way; the teacher teaches the student. However, with the Headmaster, both the students and the Headmaster himself learn from the experience.

Narayan creates the impression that Krishna realises the situation is very routine and that he is tired of it. He tries to break this routine within the campus by going to the river, but this is not the solution. Krishna's school shows the imperfections of the Western education system which only produces "sturdy idiots" who are worried about passing examinations and possibly even being part of the faculty later on, just as Krishna did.