New Delhi, Aug. 5 -- In the past weeks, I have written about two school-education insights that ended up as orthodoxies-'constructivism' and the 'whole language' approach to reading and writing. Both followed the same arc: a useful partial explanation was declared as the whole and sole truth, with children bearing the brunt of the consequent misguided approach to education.

Beneath these two arcs lay a substratum on which both rested and from which both drew their moral authority. This was the dogma of 'joyful learning'-of learning without burden.

Let me first state emphatically and without qualification what is true. School education in India became-and in most places remains-a burden on children.

The grind of it is joyless: the crush...