Banerjee, Subrata. The RIN Strike. (1981 [1954]). New Delhi: People's Publishing House.

In February and March of 1946, thousands of Indian sailors rallied together, seized ships and shore establishments throughout the subcontinent, and, for a brief moment in time, tried to hand the reins of military power to India's nationalist leaders. The strike failed. Though fighting occurred, most of it took place among civilians and soldiers in the streets of Bombay, rather than on the ships and dockyards of the Indian military. The low-ranking sailors--known as 'ratings' in the parlance of the British military--stumbled into revolutionary action. The Towards Freedom documents and B.C. Dutt's Mutiny of the Innocents show that slow post-war demobilization, lousy military grub, and British racism served as the most proximate causes of the mutiny; these are better antecedents to a strike than to a rebellion. Up to 12,000 naval ratings took part in the strike, and some 20,000 were affected (cf Towards Freedom). Very few British or Indian officers took part, and those that did assumed minor roles. During the mutiny, the striking naval ratings formed a committee, secured communication channels with one another, and then sought help from nationalist leaders. But the nationalist leaders in Congress and Muslim League knew that freedom from Britain was virtually inevitable; only the Communist Party responded to their cries for assistance. The Communists called for a Bombay-wide hartal, or strike. Students and workers responded; they took to the streets, burned government vehicles and stations, and formed barricades against the authorities. Local government forces cleared the streets, but not without hundreds of shootings. Congress and Muslim League leaders, including Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Jinnah condemned the hartal, and its bloody results. Meanwhile, the Communists celebrated the bravery of the students and workers, as well as the absence of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.

The ratings quickly realized their precarious position. Admiral Godfrey, commander of the Royal Indian Navy, warned them that the Indian Army and Air Force would destroy the navy rather than let the mutiny continue. After small bursts of violence at Castle Barracks and the HMIS Hindustan, most of the ratings surrendered in a process negotiated by Congress leader Sadar Vallabhbhai Patel.

The Communist Party had gamely attempted to co-opt the strike into revolutionary action, thereby upsetting India's entrenched political parties. The gambit failed. The subcontinent's final steps towards independence took place within the conference rooms of the elite; true social revolution became an impossibility.

Banerjee's The RIN Strike interprets these events through a Leninist perspective. Unfortunately, Banerjee writes with the relentless energy of a Marxist propagandist, rather than a historian interested in revealing a factual account of the proceedings. In some ways, his book serves as a useful window into revolutionary action as understood from a colonial perspective. Banerjee colorfully evokes the spirit which transformed quiet Indian sailors into revolutionary actors, and then back again; the mutiny was a remarkable instance of uncoordinated collective action, and collective action's sudden collapse. The book also helpfully depicts the violence at Castle Barracks and the HMIS Hindustan, two places where D.C. Butt's The Mutiny of the Innocents (a first-person narrative) could not explore, as he had little first-hand knowledge of these events. Still, unlike Dutt's book, Banerjee's Leninist approach blinds the book to much of what occurred. Individual character completely falls by the wayside. Euphemisms such as the 'brave rating,' the 'victimised rating' and the 'strike leader' stand in for specific individuals; by dropping the names, Banerjee prevents fact-checking, and masks the identity of the participants. The author typically attributes quotes to an anonymous 'someone,' and rarely attempts to specifically identify the speaker. Some of the quoted discussions go on for over a page; the author states at the beginning of the book that he was not present for these discussions, and thus his tone and style combine to produce an historically dubious account of the RIN mutiny.

 I think we must forgive the author for some of his tone, since he wrote the manuscript shortly after the strike; furthermore, he was a staff member of The People's Age, the newspaper sponsored by the Communist Party. Banerjee's book is a document with an active political purpose, not a history book, and the author never intended otherwise (though he notes in the forward that he hopes his book's reissue might spur historians to reassess the strike). But I think it is helpful to point out the book's flaws, because it stands as the most widely disseminated account of the RIN mutiny. If the reissue of Banerjee's manuscript spurred additional studies, those studies never reached wide circulation in the English language.

The RIN Strike stands as the most widely read third-person account of the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946. It is an interesting, but deeply flawed text. 

Dutt, B.C. Mutiny of the Innocents. (1971). Bombay: Sindhu Publications.

B.C. Dutt's Mutiny of the Innocents offers a razor sharp first-person account of a forgotten episode in the history of India's long struggle against foreign rule. In the early months of 1946, low-ranking sailors in the Royal Indian Navy began supporting Indian independence, but only after years of loyal service to the wider empire. Their sudden change of heart bewildered both British military leaders like General Claude Auchinleck and Indian politicians like Mahatma Gandhi.

Dutt's story, however, begins with his entrance into the Royal Indian Navy as a teenager. A radio and signal operator, Dutt and his fellow Indian sailors served loyally throughout the war, but lost enthusiasm for their task as profligate racism sets a clear divide between themselves and white service members. Despite the racism, Dutt worked hard, and took pride in his work. He was a cog in a wheel, but thrived in his own way. At the end of the war, Dutt found himself stationed at the HMIS Talwar, the shore establishment where he first learned his trade as a signalman. For Dutt, and his fellow veterans, the future looked bleak. The post-war navy offered few opportunities for advancement; outside the military, jobs were scarce. And many Indians viewed the sailors and soldiers of the Indian military as mercenaries more interested in lining their pockets with British coin than serving their homeland. Dutt's experiences with racism, and his own questions about his role in the British empire, eventually led him to take action in support of Indian independence. Gathering in the canteen of the Talwar, Dutt and a few like-minded conspirators engaged in well-timed acts of minor sabotage. For the most part, they merely distracted sentries and pasted revolutionary slogans on barrack walls. They timed their subversive activities to maximize the embarrassment of their officers.

In February 1946, the authorities caught Dutt. But he refused to cooperate or name his fellow conspirators. Further, he declared himself a political prisoner, rather than an insubordinate sailor. In a political situation already fraught with tension, this caught his superior officers off guard. They tried to respond with restraint in order to keep the situation quiet. But the opposite happened. Dutt's slight success catapulted him into the spotlight. Other naval ratings used a common complaint--the poor quality of navy chow--to rally other sailors to the cause. The ensuing rebellion more resembled a student protest or worker strike rather than a violent insurrection. What began as small demonstrations of discontent expanded into a brief (but bright) flame of outright rebellion, and came to be known as the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny. It ultimately involved upwards of 12,000 ratings (low-ranking sailors). The ratings seized ships and shore establishments throughout Bombay; ratings in Calcutta, Karachi, and elsewhere also gained control of their vessels. The ratings adopted the language of the nationalist leaders, and formed a strike committee to lead the way. The ratings offered to hand over the navy to nationalist leaders in Congress and Muslim League, but received a cold response from everyone except the Communists Party.  

 Congress leaders, especially Sadar Vallabhbhai Patel, quickly organized a truce between the mutineers and the British authorities. Very few ratings lost their lives, and only a few ships were damaged. But for enthusiastic participants like B.C. Dutt, the short-lived mutiny taught them an indelible lesson on the limits of India's revolutionary politics. The nationalist leaders had struggled for decades to achieve Indian independence. Now the leaders could already see the finish line, and yearned to reach it. The British were clearly on the way out. The mutiny, rather than helping the nationalist leaders achieve their objective, threatened to disrupt the delicate balance of power of domestic politics. Besides, the nationalist leadership consisted of lawyers and industrialists and cloaked themselves in the mores of non-violence; they distrusted military personnel out of habit, and the young naval ratings now asking for their help were no exception. Thus, the complex realities of nationalist politics quickly eclipsed the RIN mutiny.

A year and a half later, India won its independence from imperial rule, but at the cost of an independent Pakistan. Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan, kept an earlier promise and allowed Muslim mutineers to apply for positions in the Pakistan navy. In India, however, newly-minted Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (and the rest of the Congress leadership) opted to keep the mutineers out of the service. The Royal Indian Navy discharged D.C. Butt quickly and quietly; he tried to join Nehru's navy, but without success. He eventually made his way back to Bombay and became a reporter with the Free Press Journal, the newspaper that most closely covered the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny.

We do not often think of mutineers as innocents, but B.C. Dutt's book makes a convincing case that these young men truly did not know what they were getting themselves into. The book begins with a forward from S. Natarajan, the editor of the Free Press Journal at the time of the mutiny. He describes his own interest in the mutiny, and his careful decision to chronicle the efforts of the naval ratings when a few members of their party appeared on his doorstep on 18 February 1946. Though the mutiny ended in meekness, it shared dangerous echoes with rebellions that began elsewhere in the world. When the book transitions to Dutt's voice, the account assumes an uncanny charm. He records the events without malice or resentment. He articulates the views of his enemies with remarkable generosity and restraint.

In particular, Dutt chronicles the motivations of the Indian officers that remained loyal to the navy, and the actions of Commander King, a white officer whose racist language helped the mutiny spiral out of control. In other accounts (including Banerjee's The RIN Strike and Sarkar's Towards Freedom series) King stands a mysterious and foolish monster. But in Dutt's account, Commander King emerges as a complicated and surprisingly sympathetic figure that lacked the political wherewithal and leadership skills to contain the misbegotten mutiny. Like Dutt and King, the ratings and officers initially caught in the strike simply lacked the political sophistication to achieve their objectives.

B.C. Dutt published Mutiny of the Innocents in 1971. Reflecting on his actions of twenty-five years prior, Dutt comes across as an astute observer of human nature. He also has the wisdom to reassess his actions in the rearview mirror, and place them in historical perspective. At times, a sense of humor shines through the book's pages, as when after a late-night attempt at revolutionary graffiti, naval sentries catch Dutt with his hands covered in glue.

Dutt's book stands as a riveting account of political failure in waning shadows of the British raj. Dutt managed, for a short time at least, to rally sailors to take a political stand against the British empire; the rebellion's failure, as Dutt states at the close of the book, was probably inevitable. His revolution failed, but his book succeeds. 

Kenneth R. Koedinger, Julie L. Booth, David Klahr. 'Instructional Complexity and the Science to Constrain It.' Science. Vol 342, 22 Nov 2013, Pg 935-937. <Link: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6161/935.full>

My review of James Lang's On Course emphasized the practical attributes of successful teaching. My review of Mark Edmundson's Why Teach? examined current trends in academic life, and pleads for a more spiritually challenging curriculum. On Course uses some references to empirical data and peer-reviewed studies, but seeks mainly to provide firm guidance to young educators. Why Teach? eschews peer review to trace one intellectual's Walden-like musings on the modern intellectual wilderness. My sympathies lay with Edmundson, but my need for practical guidance brought me closer to Lang. 

As luck would have it, this week's issue of Science included an article on education research. As with most articles in Science, the purpose of the piece is to establish what exactly a particular field can and cannot say based on the data available, and then to suggest new avenues of research. When it comes to human learning, these researchers find the entire field a chaotic mess. The authors attempt to build a few categorical fences to clarify things for both researchers and educators, but also use a little math to show the complexity of the issue. 

Here is the math they use to demonstrate complexity. "If we consider just 15 of the 30 instructional techniques we identified, three alternative dosage levels, and the possibility of different dosage choices for early and late instruction, we compute 3^(15*2) or 205 trillion options... the vast size of this space reveals that simple two-sided debates about improving learning--in the scientific literature, as well as in the public forum--obscure the complexity that a productive science of instruction must address" (936).  

In other words, the potential for research is almost overwhelmingly vast, and conducting it might prove overwhelmingly expensive. To encourage research rather than surrender, the authors suggest a framework within which future studies might operate. You can read their article if you wish to fully understand their suggestions, but I will briefly examine one aspect of their paper.

The authors produced a helpful table that reviews some of the current findings on 'instruction.' Much of the table draws on Koedinger, Corbett, and Perfetti's learning-to-instruction theoretical framework. Below, the authors of the Science article fit thirty nifty principles within three categories the authors call 'the functions of instruction' (936). 

The reason I find this table helpful is that one can interpret its arguments as practical advice. (Aside: While the authors do not explicitly limit the applicability of the graph to teaching mathematics, I suspect that such a limitation might exist for at least some of the principles). To my remembrance, the authors' findings do not greatly vary from the methods suggested in a typical mathematics textbook. That's probably because human educators have been in the business of understanding human learning for a very long time; when an educator fails, it can be because either they or the student do not care whether learning occurs--or perhaps they are not in a position to care due to environmental factors. Anyhow, the chart is comforting, it feels like smoking a cigarette in snowfall. 

Some books should be articles, and some articles should be books. The lead author, Koedinger, has published extensively in his particular field (he earned an MS in Computer Science and PhD in Cognitive Science), but has not written a book on the subject. A book could include practical examples of his work, and show how he stumbles into and out of research problems. It would also give him the room to demonstrate that his research is useful to educators, as opposed to researchers that scientifically examine education. It is common scientific practice to laconically claim one's work has 'policy implications,' and yet have absolutely no significant evidence of one's ability to implicate, change, or effectively argue policy. Scientists should perhaps engage in politics more often than they do. 

God knows I probably could have benefited from some of Professor Koedinger's knowledge when I myself haltingly studied geometry. "To the field, Koedinger, to the field."

                                                                       *****

Clearly, we are far from 'perfecting' college instruction. Human limitations represent a permanent obstacle to ideal outcomes. In the face of those limitation, it is sometimes helpful to step back and use qualitative empirical studies to think through the purpose and effectiveness of college education. In this vein, the books of Ken Bain (president of the Best Teachers Institute) are helpful. Bain wrote a book entitled What the Best College Teachers Do (2004), and another called What the Best College Students Do (2012). The former book reported the findings of a fifteen year study that followed the habits and practices of some of the most successful educators in the United States. Not all together surprisingly, he found that the best instructors combined a deep knowledge of their subject with a belief in student learning. These two principles seem easy, but they are not easy to accomplish. Many (most?) teachers are out of touch with the most challenging questions in their discipline, and many others lack sympathy for the importance of undergraduate education. 

Lang, James M. On Course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching. Harvard, 2008.

I once heard a social scientist remark that no one attempts to scientifically study social behavior unless they are one consultation away from a diagnosis of autism; as a consequence, all professors require assistance when it comes to socializing and empathizing with others. Perhaps the social scientist overstated the situation. But it is true that graduate students and young assistant professors represent a thin slice of academia, and that the skills that make them nascent researchers may interfere with their ability to relate basic aspects of their discipline to college students.

James M. Lang's On Course seeks to elevate first-time attempts at college teaching. The book proceeds with a practical guide to common first-time problems: constructing a syllabus, using technology, planning and delivering lectures, hosting discussions, working in small groups, and much more. At each stage, he offers concrete ways of approaching common problems, and suggests various rationale for making decisions about the predicament at hand. For example, when discussing student learning, Lang argues that understanding Piaget's mental models and William Perry's theory of intellectual development can provide a teacher with ways of listening to a student's troubled reaction to classroom material; theories of learning can also help a teacher take action to improve student learning, depending upon cues students offer. Why are these specific examples helpful? Because in offering the examples, Lang provides a rationale for teacher behavior, and footnotes their attention to additional literature; this is the apt way to convince a researcher that they are operating on solid ground when interacting with college students.

Lang explicitly structures the book so a teacher can read a chapter per week; if the teacher begins reading the book at the start of the semester, the chapters will generally align with problems that often crop up during particular phases of an academic season. Thus, Lang provies intermittent brain food. This is an important feature for time-strapped instructors. Lang writes with friendly confidence--he offers to serve as the angel on the shoulder, guiding instructors towards best practices as understood in the academic literature on teaching. Without sneering at non-tenure track instructors, he offers measured advice on managing a teaching-research balance for those seeking a permanent faculty position.

On Course states up front that it does not provide the final word on 'best practices' in college education, nor does it offer an explicit philosophical argument regarding the purpose of a university education. Instead, the book serves as an academic survival guide. It can improve the first-semester experience for instructors--and more importantly, it can improve the experience of their students. 

Mark Edmundson. Why Teach? In Defense of Real Education. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.


In Why Teach? Mark Edmundson addresses vital issues in modern education in the most exasperating style possible. If you believe that education and training are not synonymous, you will be annoyed that Edmundson writes about it so carelessly. And if you take umbrage with attacks on post-modernism, college athletics, and watery reading lists devoid of enduring texts, then I hope that one day you change your mind. But I will not ask you to read Edmundson's book--he will only harden your heart.

Instead, I would beg you to read (or re-read) Spinoza's Political-Theological Treatise, Plato's Gorgias and Republic, Rousseau's Emile, and Bronte's Villete. These authors do not often agree with one another, but they write well, and care deeply about learning. They not only challenge the modern spirit of the age, but offer a center and a purpose as well. Even if they are not totally correct, one could follow their footsteps and become a more compassionate and interesting human being.

Why Teach? consists of a series of essays that fall under three closely related areas: the shift towards treating students as consumers, the goals of students while at a university, and the goals of teachers at a university. In each essay, Edmundson pushes against the shortcuts often taken in academic teaching. He argues that popular paradigms reduce students from burgeoning thinkers to opaque receptacles; it does not matter whether the paradigms come from Marx, or Derrida, or MTV, because the deliberate use of any prescriptive lens too much distorts the radical freshness of a liberal education. Paradigms fertilize young minds, but too often fail to measure the mind's current chemical balance, or take heed of what storm clouds lurk on the broader horizons of life. A good education is conservative in its suggestions, but radical in its consequences. This is the gist of Edmundson's book. It's pretty important. It suggests that specialists should not to dose their students with a narrow set of arguments, however confidently reasoned. It  suggests that teachers must view their students as potential guardians of philosophical inquiry, and not just prospective customers or doomed malcontents.

The best chapters in the book highlight Edmundson's own journey as he struggled towards a university education. The worst chapters in the book coldly burn with weak verbs and straw-men attacks.

Edmundons' style aggravates more often than his argument enlightens. For those interested in engaging in such debates, I advise turning to older texts. For those that insist on reading newer literature, consider Alan Bloom's curmudgeonly 20th century essay, The Closing of the American Mind. But to hell with modernity: read Plato's Republic. Plato likes you better than Bloom or Edmundson, and yet disagrees with you more.