National Education – A Rethinking

Seminar on National Education – A Rethinking
HÄRATEEYA SHIKSHAÑ MAÑDAL, ORISSA
Feb. 09, 2005
Text of Vyôm Akhil’s Speech
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Friends,

Proclaimed by the NDA government to commemorate Mahätmä Gändhi’s return to India - by annually recognizing and celebrating the contributions of People of Indian Origin who are, or, were residing in distant lands abroad - this Day, January 09, chosen by the Orissa Chapter of the Bhärateeya Shikshañ Mañdal for its first seminar this year, is of personal significance to me, too.

The mass communication people in the media and the government now speak of the ninth day of January as ‘NRI Divas’. While some of you may have traveled abroad as students or tutors, I may be the only one in this room to have had the quite fortuitous and exalted status of a ‘retired’ NRI. Consequently, your invitation to participate in this seminar (as an amateur educator-at-large), and present a paper here (as a part-time voluntary academic) – for which, I thank you very much - has a special and privileged meaning for me, for it offers me some relief from the sense of indebtedness to which each Hindû is – or ought to be - born. Sadly, this sense is now seldom inculcated in India’s youth. In my opinion, that alone ought be enough urgent grounds for seriously rethinking national education.

Friends, no record in human history has come to light, save that of India’s, showing a saint spearheading a mass-movement for independence. And India’s irrefutable record is beyond dispute because the event occurred during the lives of those who are still here in our midst. Many, many individuals bore witness to this miracle in the domain of politics and statecraft. And for scholars and historians - there is a mountain of documentation confirming this! But unlike many of our other saints who, far removed from the physical world and its travails, are perceived to be cocooned up in their spirituality, Mahätmä Gändhi had ideas and projects that transcended the issues related to the freedom from foreign subjugation. His efforts in the field of education are so well documented and readily available that I shall limit myself to two of his observations, saving the second one for the conclusion of this speech.

Gändhi-ji once said, “No real reform in India is possible unless…the educated voluntarily accept the status of the poor.” But before him, Svämi Vivékänanda had uttered stronger words. He laid the serious charge of ‘treachery against the nation’ , at the door of those who are educated, but have little inclination to think of the welfare of the less advantaged, to whom they owe their fortunate status. Friends, a voluntary acceptance of a spartan lifestyle, and a resolve to serve the downtrodden cannot be sustained if that Hindu sense of indebtedness I just mentioned, is missing.

As an NRI who initially went abroad, like many, for gathering more skills and know-how, there was always a little bit of shame, a feeling of having been let down by our system of education. Why should a son of India – the world-teaching Jagadgûrû, the land whose universities once brought students here from as far as China at a time when there was feudal barbarism in Europe and the Americas were unknown to its inhabitants – have to go away from it to learn anything?

In the seventies, I had visited France to understand how a ski-resort is planned and organized. Why was this expertise not available here in the land of Himalaya – the Abode of Snow? In the eighties, I was in the U S to specialize in polyhedral space-frame geometries. Why were these subjects not available to me in this land of exalted and divine wisdom that embraced the micro and macro domains of Universe?

Unlike many of my contemporaries who were smitten by the siren songs of the West - by Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne; by Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT - I cared little for the cultures and civilization of the Lands of Put-But. Rising many decades ago - as silent and unhappy complaints in the heart of a young man - these questions are even more valid today. When all the information of the world is now available to them via the Internet , we still make our young dream of ‘higher education’ in distant lands - far away from those who raised them with love, affection and support! Many go not to learn but to earn status at home. The opportunities of career advancement there tempt some to settle down there with spectacular success. The few that have that sense of indebtedness I alluded to earlier are helpless because they conclude there is little here to attract them back. Today, these questions are an old man’s inquiry that might lead to remedial action: How should we teach so that our youngsters do not have to leave us to learn anything they need in their lives?

Friends, just as the genetic code determines biology, education sets down the cognitive code of the mind. More than others, a nation’s educators guide and determine how succeeding generations will cope and prevail upon Life’s challenges; whether they live it as contributing citizens to the common good, or whether they end up as self-victimized burdens on themselves and on the land. Education thus impacts crucially upon all the aspirations, directions, and activities of a nation.

Stated without the intent to judge, much of how we as a nation are today, is more the consequence of commissions and omissions of yesterday’s educators, than those at whom our media usually point their fingers. If there is an unconscientious clerk in an office; if there is a bribe-taking policeman in the neighborhood; if the local politician has an unsavory background; if a neighborhood stinks with garbage piling upon the street; if criminals are having a good time in the jails; if the power supply is erratic; if project-money goes back unused; if our temples are becoming gambling dens; if our young are turning to drugs and crime; if those bureaucrats who interpret rules and implement programs in a manner that is harassing the citizen, continue to be unresponsive unaccountable and often unavailable; and if justice is delayed when it is not completely denied – a measure of responsibility does, indeed, lie with the educator who may not have applied himself to the demands of his vocation.

Though trite, it is but necessary to restate the obvious: Educators make or break a nation and contribute to whether a people will respond constructively to injustice, inequality, superstition, exploitation, disparity and disease or whether they will turn away from them - accepting, depressed and helpless! In case you have not, I would urge you to acquaint yourself with the ideas of Paulo Freire, one of the most significant thinkers on the problems of education in the 20th century. After appropriate modifications, these nuggets from his wisdom could be useful to us in our rethinking:

uInterrogation of the nature of one’s social and historical situation or the critical examination of social construction… is the single most important task for a student in whom the critical faculties are allowed to develop freely.
vExcessive education involves unilateralism or “banking” — the teacher making “deposits” in the taught.
wInformed action becomes the ultimate relevant aim of all teaching and learning processes… This aim develops a consciousness that is understood to have the power to transform reality.

Among the many things that have persistently undermined the basic tenets of our civilization, one stands out as not having been adequately addressed by education in our country: Barring exceptions, teachers – and this includes parents - expect their students to be ‘successful’ in their lives. To me, this is at once tragically wrong – as well as at the root of many of our nation’s ills. Permit me to sequence the connections: To be successful one needs to stand apart from the crowd. Barring heinous criminals, the extravagantly rich, the excessively corrupt and the extremely unfortunate, only heroic and martyred lives are perceived as exemplarily successful. But heroes and martyrs need the fertile ground of dramatic crises for their social recognition and applause. When no crises are handy, hero/martyr-aspirants are pushed to subliminally catalyze one. A survey of children in the United States showed that getting on the ‘Most Wanted’ list was their next best goal in life! Are crises to be a nation’s norm? Should education aid and abet their manufacture?

What is success? What is the social context of its parameters? Who measures it? Is one declared successful by a majority vote from the mass media and its consumers? How does it affect the future of the local communities and their large conglomerate we call the nation? As I have no valid and satisfactory answers I revert to our cultural benchmark of relevance and ask: Is the present content and method of educating our young relevant? If not, what re-thinking must be done to make it so? How to develop, make acceptable, and disseminate the methodology that imparts relevant education? Is the reflected glory of a successful Amartya Sen here, a Sam Pitroda there enough for a teacher? Few of us value those who are - dhanyänäm ûttamamdäkshyam - relevant to all that is within and surrounds their lives.

The perceived goal of education today in India is not to facilitate and guide their wards towards a good, harmonious life, a life that is caring and sharing even as it is relevant, content and inspired. Current Indian education, by and large, even fails to ignite the innate inquisitiveness of the young mind, or, foster the determination and discipline to search for answers; to make, innovate and invent the tools for the inquiry; to speculate, conjecture and hypothesize; to adventure into the unknown. Lest you perceive in these comments inane generalizations, four specific and very recent examples are cited as A, B, C and D in the numbered endnote to this paper.

My friends, our culture denies the inflexibility of destiny because it knows that it is the cumulative repository of our actions ; but unsavory influences in this regard still persist, nearly sixty years after our millennium-long subjugation by the Destiny believers ended. Let alone rid our nation of its superstitions, we excel in producing not proactive but reactive citizens who accept delay, corruption, inefficiency and incompetence - impotent, defensive people who believe there is little they can do with their lives except become unhappy participants and accomplices! If reform lay in fact-finding committees, investigating agencies, adjudicating tribunals, and Acts of parliamentary legislation, India has had so many of them since 1947 that, had any of these been even superficially effective, we would, by now, be in the no-rethinking paradise. For those who take the media hype and the political propaganda at face value, I have two sobering data: India does not figure in the recently published Technology Pioneers -2005 World Economic Forum list of 29 and a 13-parameter recent comparison of India and China.

Friends, remedies lie in the roots. And civilizational roots go deeper than recorded histories; into ancient heritages and oral traditions. Our re-thinking will remain an ululation as long as we teach World History but our young remain unaware of their own national heritage. We know we are here today on this planet, not as the dominant minds that mould the affairs of the world, but as perhaps the only ones to have the sustainable potential to do so in this and the subsequent centuries. I am quite aware of this potential because we have had this amazingly ancient and unique heritage that is denied to others. But, thanks to our recent history of subservience - and the even more recent and current political, judicial and administrative dispensation thereafter - while we do teach what is alleged to be our history in nearly all our educational institutions, few, if any, have any worthwhile programs of Heritage Studies that could be administered with the same ‘broadband’ élan.

One of the unique methods of teaching we have nearly lost is the Vächik Paddhati that had necessitated the wondrous invention of the educational tool – the Sanskrit language. On the one hand, while it generated the rich and enduring Shrûti-Smriti tradition of learning it simultaneously also awakened a repertoire of unique capabilities in the young minds. I do not think there is time here - or the need even - to identify them in the vocabulary they are available. In Aiterayôpanishad 3/1/2 they are identified as 16 in number. Anyone interested in human psychology - in the understanding of what goes on inside the minds and hearts of children - needs to refer to an exposition of these rather than try to interpret MRI brain scans.

Friends, I have been told that the English word ‘character’ has its roots in the Sanskrit word ‘Charitra.’ However, while the OCD speculates that it may have Middle English, old French, Latin and Greek etymologies that mean a ‘stamp’, or an ‘impress’, it offers no phonemic connections with other words. In Sanskrit, you get many resonating words that have to do with the root ‘Chara’ or to ‘move’. On good authority, I also understand that the words for ‘ethics’ and ‘education’ are also connected to ‘movement’. So, those who wish to re-think national education have to decide whether they will be impressing and stamping our young with information that is likely to be dated, useless and irrelevant, or, teach them the appropriate mental-movement skills that allow the learner to acquire character and moral values?
Teaching this movement begins in the mind and manifests in behavior. It is for this reason that our word for a behavior-teacher, abused more often these days for ‘a learned man’, is actually rooted in ‘Chara’ : The definition of Ächärya is ‘Ächäranam grihanäti iti ächärya’. So, teachers unfocused into this skill of facilitating appropriate and uplifting behavior and movement in the young will have to feel ashamed that their wards indulge in prurient drug-abuse and SMS-out pornographic material!

The educational effort so far does not offer credible evidence that it imparts even the basic skills of using a public place – the park, the pond, the river, or, the road. There is defacement and defecation all around; and the educated young think nothing of stopping their two-wheelers to take cell-phone calls, drive around on the wrong side of a one-way road, or, stand around to gossip in the middle of the road, or, indulge in eve-teasing. We think it is the parents’ job to teach them appropriate behavior. The parents think it is our job. As society actually pays us to provide model citizens, the least we can do is create an equal partnership with parents. But pedagogues are proud, oh, so proud! They believe that the rest of the world is beneath their notice. It makes me think they might have missed being demagogues.

My rethinking on national education is more a soul-searching; it has been eclectic and academically informal. I am wondering what I shall say if a young man or woman should come up and ask me: “Sir, will what you teach me give me the character to face the world and its temptations - and the confidence to meet the challenges I may have to face in my life? Will I be able to find work in this world where job opportunities are diminishing rapidly , and discharge my duties there without fear or a sense of insecurity? Who will employ me with the skills and knowledge that you impart and how relevant and useful would they be to me and my community?” Will stories of Äryabhatta and Einstein, Rämänujam and Copernicus, Hargôbind Khuränä and Bill Gates, Newton and C. V. Raman help the large mass of students who have been made to shed what nature and life would have taught them had they not been forced into our educational factories and sweatshops? After retiring from his job as chief engineer at a hydro-electric dam a friend of mine chose to become an educator because he felt national education was producing anti-socials!

I am sad when I see our youngsters ‘outsourced’; trained to think and speak with a call-center foreign accent - change their names even! It breaks my heart when I see parents hustling their tiny tots, not quite potty-trained yet, into English-medium play-schools. I recall Mahätmä Gändhi’s words: “It has always been my conviction that Indian parents who train their children to think and talk in English from their infancy betray their children and their country.” Minutely and extensively, he has recorded his experiences in education at the Tolstoy farm in his book, My Experiments with Truth. Regarding textbooks and teachers he said, “Of text-books, about which we hear so much, I never felt the want….The true text-book for the pupil is teacher”. A year ago, almost to the day, a nationally circulated weekly chose two students to interview our President for its readers. To their question on corruption, his unequivocal and comprehensive answer brought education, its role and responsibility, to sharp focus. It is included in its entirety in the number-matched endnote to this text.

To conclude my speech, I reach out to the great modern thinker, Alvin Toffler. He once said that the illiterates of the 21st century will not be those that cannot read and write, but those that cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. I think, as educators gathered here to rethink National Education, we need to ask ourselves, “Are we producing 21st century literates or illiterates?” If the latter, it is, perhaps, we, who need to re-educate ourselves first.

Thank you.