The Art of Education, by Sharad Ranjan
“Life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings. If we merely prepare ourselves to earn a livelihood, we shall miss the whole point of life; and to understand life is much more important than merely to prepare for examinations and become very proficient in mathematics, physics, or what you will.”
— J Krishnamurti, Educator and Philosopher
One wonders why we go through years of schooling. Is it just to fill our minds with a great deal of information, teach ourselves to fit snugly with the demands of the society and learn the skills for merely earning a living? One feels that a lot more is possible with right education. Perhaps there can be an education that can wake up the latent creative spirit in our hearts, light the torch of reason in our minds, and sensitize us to passionately feel the beauty as well as the ugliness of the world around us. Perhaps there can be an education that can prepare the young ones for the long adult life which is an enormously complex affair.
The need to revamp the education system
In a world which is becoming increasingly competitive, increasingly organized every passing day, we are fast losing our individuality and authenticity. The society, both in the Eastern world and in the Western world, is bent on making money. It is driving everyone to be ’successful’, to be ‘respectable’, to be ‘entertained’. The propaganda from the mass-media, the daily chore of earning a living and the desire to have a status in society is withering each one’s unique being. Even in the midst of a corrupt society - which tolerates killing and getting killed on the name of religion and nationalism, which glamorizes ambition and competition, which encourages unlimited exploitation of nature - one can still strive to live sanely and intelligently. We desperately need an education that can teach us and the coming generations how to live creatively, passionately, intensely, without losing our uniqueness, without turning into footmen for some ideology. For the sake of our kids and for the sake of the future of this beautiful planet, we must concern ourselves with creating an education system that would neither choke the native intelligence of the human mind nor strangle the softness of the human heart.
Modern Education in India
A vast number of people in India have no access to organized education. The irony is, all the rest are subjected to acute mis-education in our educational institutes. It is difficult to overstate the role of education in shaping a society. It should be a concern for every responsible Indian as to the kind of society we have and what its future will be. Is our society going to be one that will thoughtlessly imitate Western ideas and their ways of living, and thus drown the soul of this ancient land under a deluge of consumerism and commercialism? Or is it going to be one that will harp on the past glories of our civilization, but falter under the heavy burden of tradition and thus fail to bring any radical change in itself? It must be the task of education to teach us that imitation in all its various forms is stupidity, and that the true creative energy is unleashed in the freedom of mind.
Our schools and colleges should not turn us into lame-ducks as it is happening presently but must give us the courage to stand on our own and follow the voice of heart even when it demands from us to forsake the way of tradition and forge our own road.
Our educational institutions were supposed to create a strong foundation for a noble culture. They should have been the training grounds for a resurgent nation, but they turned into vast graveyards where spirits are maimed by following dead traditions and sealed under the leaden covers of useless knowledge. Our formal education does not foster deep understanding of any subject of education. Rather, the student is encouraged into mechanical learning by inundating him with factual data. Thus, in history, we learn the dates of the three wars of Panipat but do not learn about the social and political forces that led to the rise and fall of Mughals. In economics, we memorize all the proposals of first five-year plans but we never bother to understand the inner mechanics of a socialist economy. In physical sciences, we are hardly encouraged to imbue the scientific spirit of objective enquiry. Rather we learn techniques and formulas for problem solving. There is no emphasis in our schools and colleges for training the mind to question established theories, for recognizing the underlying axioms in a proposition, for striving to study nature in all its details.
Conventional education in India, especially the primary and secondary education where the young minds are most impressionable, do not show any consideration to the individual talents and bents of mind. It aims for mass-education in generics, where every one is fed the same soup of cursory knowledge in every possible subject without bothering to foster deep appreciation of any discipline. It leaves vast areas of human life like music, fine arts, aesthetics, yoga and sports largely untouched, and thus denies any opportunity to find a creative vocation for every individual that can draw great passion well beyond the chores of daily living.
Products of Modern Education System
One wonders if the rigid education system of ours has not injured the uniqueness of each of us who have to suffer under it for all our formative years. It should be a matter of great concern that our schools and colleges are producing mostly stereotypical individuals. The typical end product of more than a decade of schooling seems to be, at least in cities, one who relishes the masala movies from Bollywood, loves to watch cricket all day long, finds classical music an obvious bore but rocks with Indie Pop, faithfully marries an Indian girl or boy as the case may be but secretly envies the sexual freedom of the Western world. His mind is crowded by the fashion of the day, by the ideas hanging in the air. His heart is content and his belly has no fire. His conduct is one of thoughtless imitation of others and thus he is hardly fit to be called an authentic individual. Has our society become so frivolous that it lacks any appreciation of art, beauty and order? Have we lost all ties to our beautiful culture and languages that we need to ape everything western? Isn’t it the responsibility of education to bring up a new generation of Indians who can create a noble culture? The colonial educational system in India is the legacy of the long British rule, which was chiefly interested in churning clerks to help them in running the country. This system has far outlived its usefulness and it is high time that we replace it with a holistic system of education which respects every individual and helps him in finding his true vocation in life.
Holistic Education
Conventional education has made teaching a matter of transferring information from the teacher to the student. This is indeed a part that even computers can easily play. In a holistic educational system, a teacher’s role should be infinitely more than that. Verily, teaching should be a loving relationship between the teacher and the student, in which the student learns much more than what the teacher teaches.
Right education cannot happen in an authoritative or rigid environment. The teacher has to be flexible with the student, allowing him to grow in his own pace, firm in correcting him when required, gentle in guiding him to his true interests. The one overriding concern for the teacher should be to see that the student learns the art of learning. That is to say, the student must develop the faculty of observation, the faculty of awareness to the inner and outer world. The teacher should always remember that his job is not to educate the student but to prepare him for self-education. He must show to the pupil the prejudices of his mind, encourage him to question authority in all matters and thus free his mind to continue learning for all his life. It is the educator’s responsibility to protect the native intelligence of the child from the all external influences, to nourish him with rational ideas and healthy passions. He cannot tolerate comparison and competition between two students, he cannot force the student on a fixed path of learning because that will injure their uniqueness. The educator must listen to the child, he must understand his talents, his innate nature and then only he can help the student in flowering his intelligence. He must see that the child matures to a strong individual, that his mind is neither crowded by the latest fashion nor burdened by the ideologies of past and present, that he grows as an authentic person capable of living a sane, whole life without a trace of hypocrisy. Such authenticity can only grow only when our schools of learning have that special atmosphere that do not cow the child into following others but cherishes the individuality of every person.
Merits of Holistic Education
A holistic education would strive for instilling the sense of sacredness of life. Much of human strife results from losing touch with the great nature. It should be a great concern for the educator to see that the student matures spiritually, that he feels the beauty of raw earth and the ugliness of urban ghettos, that he feels the connection to the life around him. The spirit can’t grow through sermons or moral education. Instead it has to flower in the delicate relationship between the teacher and the student. We can’t have a holistic education in factory-style classrooms where the teacher has to teach the same course material to 50 students whose names even he barely knows. Very often the classrooms become little courtrooms for the teacher to judge and pass sentences. Very often they turn into church-halls where the teacher assumes the role of a high-priest and delivers his sermons. Clearly, the sanctuaries of true learning would not have such teachers and such classrooms. Our schools need the vibe of sacredness, of great effort to create something noble, of learning with absolute sincerity. In ancient India, such an atmosphere of holistic education was available in Gurukuls. They were schools run in forests by men of great wisdom. But, those days are well past us now. The modern life presents new problems which must be met by new solutions. However we can still listen to the wisdom of the sages of yore and apply them in the modern settings. Let us not be cynical, let us not be hasty in claiming that it is impossible to create such schools of learning in this age. If both the educator and the parents are sincere in their intentions, it is surely possible to capture the essence of ancient Gurukuls. No doubt that it is a daunting task, as we aspire for a lofty goal, but it is also the one that would be most rewarding for the students, teachers and society at large.
Sharad Ranjan is a software engineer based in Kirkland, Washington. He can be reached at sharad.ranjan@gmail.com
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