Caste System and Religion

As a die hard believer of "Hindutva" (as a way of life and not religion) people continuously ask me about one major vice of our society called "caste system". How could a mature society like ours create the caste system.

My belief is that the caste system owes its roots to the destruction of education system in India and I will be grateful if informed people discuss this on this blog.

India had a great education system in the first millennium. Wikipedia chronicles 14 ancient universities in India during the period and I think there must have been many more gurukuls (equivalent of present day schools and colleges). One of the first things that Muslim invaders of India did was to destroy the education system of the country. Bakhtiyar Khalji's, who is otherwise an unknown figure, destruction of Nalanda University, other Arab raiders destruction of Valabhi in Gujarat have been documented while we don't have any trace of several others. My belief is that this systemic destruction caused more harm to the country than any other event in history.

Post the destruction of education system only way for people to learn was to learn from the parents. Only teacher for a son was his father and for a daughter was his mother. Father and mother could teach only what they knew and that means son of a sweeper could only learn sweeping and son of a trader could only learn trading. This automatically defined that one could only be as good as his/her father or mother and do what they did.

Like we say in an operations line that throughput is dependent on the bottleneck, under this setup generation of people were as good as the worst person born in the full family line. this systematically destroyed the society in India over 2nd millennium. People talk about lost decades we have had a "lost millennium".