Walking down the road in a small city I came across a few school kids in a smart uniform wondering aloud if any of them could move large stone that was apparently too heavy for any one of them to lift.
‘This can’t be done even by a body-builder,’ said one.
‘Cranes can do it,’ said another.
The third said, ‘Our seniors can do it because they have read a lot of books.’
This was when I noticed a small kid carrying a small pile of firewood staring at that stone and smiling. I asked him, ‘Can you move this stone?’
That kid nodded, kept his firewood on one side and selected two sturdy branches of which one had a larger diameter. He went round and identified a niche where he inserted one stick and placed the larger one between it and the stone. A little tug and the stone rolled over.
The kids draped in education applauded and when I asked the young uneducated lad how he knew this trick, he replied, ‘Aise dekha hai karte hue.’ (I’ve seen people do this.) He had spent his years watching and grasping how others DO things and then when the time came, his mind created the right solution to a problem.
This is not to say that education is useless. All I am trying to say is that our education is mostly about transferring a load of theory without letting young minds question their validity. Our education system tells a lot and shows too little. As Ivan Illich once wrote that ‘an individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.’ Our education system is all about packages that are thrown around that end up being caught by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. And thus we have writers who know nothing about creative writing, doctors who hate patients with diseases, engineers who keep wondering why their bridges and walls keep collapsing, teachers who can do nothing better than dictate notes in a boring drone, and scientists who spend their lives thinking why they are wherever they are. They are all victims of an education system with a career focus which should ideally have been about skill focus.
Wrong choices by students and wrong choices being imposed on students are not the only pitfalls with a faulty education system. There are other aspects that convert education into a meaningless meandering path that seems to go all over without achieving anything productive. If we have teachers who are disinterested and applaud only when text-book sentences are reproduced, we have parents who carry the school bags of their kids, do their homework, and impose their thought process even when it is the kid who needs to explore a topic and find out information for, let’s say, an essay. There are examples of teachers who spend weeks attending courses that are not connected to their subject simply because they need these hours for their next promotion. We have too many boards in India with varying policies of evaluation giving us hordes of incompetent students grabbing seats in universities and colleges. We have the continuing menace of management quotas that is any day worse than the reservation quotas. We have ‘non-going’ schools in our country where students are encouraged to pay twice the fee and attend only the tutorials during school hours with an assurance that they will never face non-attendance issues later. We are producing generations of citizen who think that they need to read a book on ‘GK’ for general awareness! These are the sort of people who will never question nonsense thrust at them through television debates, newspaper columns, and by politicians. This is because their minds have been trained not to think. John Holt knew the truth about education when he wrote that ‘learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.’ Education in India is going in all the wrong directions because the only activity that learners do today is to hop from one set of notes to another. Our schools and colleges are more like factories bent upon producing people comfortable to follow commands and applaud at all the right pauses. Creativity and independent judgement isn’t a part of our system any more.
You possibly know that fishes swim, monkeys are adept at scampering up trees, and elephants have the power to trudge along with power swaying with them… but if they were to attend our schools we’d have elephants trying to balance on branches high above the ground, monkeys wanting to swim across rivers, and fishes dreaming of power-lifting massive trees. They would all soon be classified as dolts, wouldn’t they? This is another pitfall of the sort of education that we have in our country… the wrong people in jobs that they don’t like.
Right education isn’t just about connecting the right students to the right subjects but is also about connecting them to all that matters in life. We need to have a generation that grows up knowing how not to elect the wrong ones to legislate, how to identify intuitively all those who are out to con them, and understand what it means to move ahead together. We need to have a population that rejects ideas that stoke the fires of social animosity, knows how to respect women, cares for the elderly, doesn’t violate traffic rules, finds truth in every religion, and protects public property. We need to have an education system that encourages minds to think independently, to know how to earn money without resorting to corrupt practices, how not to confuse creativity with plagiarism, how to love books, how to appreciate art, and how to promote harmony. We have unfortunately been led to believe that all these things are beyond the scope of formal education. This is why I believe that our education isn’t smart anymore. This is the sort of diversity that is needed today.
Education isn’t just information that you pull out, regurgitate, and then expect applause but must be the elation that results when you find a solution to a problem that seems insurmountable. The right education makes us problem solvers.
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The teacher and his notes are not problem solvers
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Arvind Passey
23 August 2018
