In his inimitable style, Mahatma Gandhi had nailed the British for wrecking our education by saying: “They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.” Yet, post-independence, we have not learnt any lessons that education rooted in civilisation is a prerequisite for durable prosperity.
Empirically speaking, despite hard work and entrepreneurial qualities of its people, no country that was not rooted in its civilisation ever prospered on sustainable basis. Europe was propelled by its Christian civilisation, and its current decline is due to withering of those civilisational roots. US is largely Christian conservative. Japan is deeply civilisational, which helped it recover in no time from the devastation of atomic bombing. The erstwhile super power Communist USSR, having destroyed its own civilisational glue of the Eastern Orthodoxy, imploded in less than 70 years. Having realized the necessity of civilisational anchor for becoming a super power, the Communist China is promoting Mandarin and Confucianism in a big way.