Humanizing Homo Sapien

A couple of days ago the finance section of a newspaper talked about a buoyant market as a result of the heavy Christmas-New Year spending. People, we were told, have more to spend and the markets have more to sell and this was a perfect setting for the ‘feel-good factor”.

Today, an ‘end-of-the-year’ new-paper report talks about the dramatic increase in alcoholism, aggression, suicides, rapes, road-rage incidents, et al. The ‘feel-good factor’, clearly, is only in the market place and not in peoples’ hearts and homes.

The confusion is, as it has always been, between ‘consumption’ and ‘satisfaction’. We tend to believe that the more we consume the more satisfied we would be. The truth is just the reverse. Excessive consumption is only an indication of the hollowness within. We seek to fill up our emotional, spiritual, intellectual hollowness with odds and ends purchased from bargain stores. I know people who, whenever they feel ‘low’, go off shopping to get over their gloominess. ‘Buy three for the price of two’ functions as a therapy for overcoming hungers that have their origin elsewhere. It works – but only as a placebo, a painkiller, that addresses the symptom not the problem, and leaves one more desperate than before. So we have people who are given to shopping devoid of requirement, to eating devoid of need, to sex devoid of relationship.

I hear that “Kaun Banega Crorepati” is being revived. The original KBC was a huge success – it filled up the hollowness in so many lives through the vicarious delight of seeing someone like themselves being suddenly catapulted into a state of fiscal nirvana. And that, many believe, is the only nirvana there is. I wonder if anyone has tried to find out what happened to the lives of those who won big money at KBC. Once I did come across a survey of people who had won lotteries and the conclusion generally went on to uphold the adage ‘easy come easy go’.

In some ways this situation is reflective of the failure of education. We have an education that refuses to acknowledge the real world and would live in its own ivory tower. And we have another education that only kow-tows to the ‘real’ world with no eyes to see beyond the dollar signs or ears to hear beyond the cash-register, no vision of the ideal, no concern for the need to constantly and continuously humanize the homo sapien species.

Perhaps it is time we began to bridge the gulf between these two educations.

The Guru

“Guru” is a much abused term and has come to connote a person skilled in the art of trickery of some kind. A “Guru” is also an honorific given to god-men and evangelists of all kinds. However in the traditional sense it was a term used for a teacher and it simply meant ‘one who is so weighty or profound that he cannot be shaken’, one who is so deeply established within himself that nothing can affect the complete dedication he has towards his vocation. The dedication the guru-teacher is not to scholarship or to esoteric intellectual pursuits or to promoting an ideology or to personal advancement of any other kind. It is to the process of self-actualization in his ‘shishya’, his student. “A teacher, if he is wise.” Says Gibran, “does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.” Given this approach real and true scholarship will follow.

Now, everyone who teaches is not a “Guru”. If a sense of personal gain or self-promotion comes in the way of this dedication then one is not a “Guru”; one is only a vendor of the information commodity. Obviously as a vendor his approach is governed by the laws of the market place. If on top of this he happens to be an unethical vendor (and such a breed is not entirely unknown) he sells spurious stuff, he under-weighs, he shortchanges his students. Therefore in the Hindu Scriptures we are, again and again, enjoined to select our Guru very carefully. Just as we cannot be carried away by his personal appearance so we cannot be swayed by his oratory – anyone with a bit of effort can turn a good phrase. We cannot be carried away by his show of scholarship – the hallmark of a true teacher is not the show of scholarship but the ability to absorb and internalize his scholarship in a manner that it functions at the level of his most disadvantaged student. Similarly it cannot be his intellect because unless the intellect is totally focused on the value of the student it can become an instrument to confuse and confound.

So how does one identify the true Guru, the genuine teacher? The significant test is that of ‘authenticity’. Does a teacher’s life accord with what he professes? Is he in the pandering business or the elevating mode? In other words how does he understand and express his function as a teacher. This function is not to enable the student to pass examinations just as it is not to teach him the ways of the world – this the student will learn anyway. The basic function is to ‘sensitize’. Does the study of literature sensitize his student to the importance of human emotions and feelings? Does the study of history sensitize his student to the forces that propel human existence and bring misery of happiness in their wake? Does the study of economics sensitize his student to the importance of material needs required for a meaningful existence? Does the study of science sensitize his student to the rhythms and patterns in nature to so awaken his mind to the need to live in harmony with it and his heart to the great mystery of existence? In short, a teacher becomes a ‘Guru’ if he sensitizes – because in doing so he carries out the most important function of education: to humanize.

And this is what differentiates a teacher who is ‘Guru’ from a teacher who is a vendor of information.

Education and the Fear of Freedom

Education, particularly university education, suffers from fear of freedom. To adapt Francis Bacon (and with apologies to this worthy) academics fear freedom as children fear going into the dark. Or else would we have so many universities where courses of study have remained unchanged for decades?! And experience shows that even Zeus cannot save you from the Furies if you have the temerity to start academic programmes that do not have paternalistic sanction.

They tell us that the ‘knowledge age’ has dawned—and yet education and educators continue to live in the eclipse of the industrial age. Note the sacrosanct division of ‘labour’ between the teacher and the student. Note our fear of originality, our veneration of conformity, our concern for the product and equal disregard for the process. In the ultimate all these are indicators of our fear of freedom. We may cry ourselves hoarse that education is not industry yet we continue to be slaves to the ‘sequential curriculum process’ that is reminiscent of the assembly-line process of the industrial age. And so we continue to be content with a learning that is merely ‘taking in information’ (‘survival learning’) and never graduates to a participation in the creation and re-creation of our world (‘creative learning’).

This fear of freedom is particularly evident in our paternalistic prescriptive approach to pedagogy which is then reflected in the manner in which we confuse teaching with learning, skills with knowledge, information with wisdom, degrees with competence, fluency with the ability to think afresh, and marks with merit.

So where do we begin? Perhaps we could begin by affirming that education is a holistic progressive accumulative continuum. We may divide it into various sections for better understanding but we cannot treat these sections as complete in themselves. A sectional, and therefore truncated, approach to education results in a definition of ‘merit’ that too is truncated and therefore highly unsatisfactory. While ‘classroom’ work has to remain an important concern of education, the activity in co-curricular clubs and societies, as also on the playing field, must find equal space on the ‘merit’ chart. Then perhaps our definition of merit may become a little more pragmatic and real. Francis Bacon (he sure is looming large today) divided books into three kinds: those to be simply tasted, those to be chewed, and those to be swallowed and digested. This description applies as aptly to life in college as to books. Some activities are meant to be savoured and passed over, others to be dissected and analyzed while there are those that are meant to be assimilated and internalized so that they remain with us to be mulled over for years to come. Thus there are aspects of academic life that are of immediate consequence while there are others that may not germinate for years after one graduates. Yet these are the experiences that feed the soul and promote critical thinking, interculture sensitivity and civic responsibility. These in turn promote that degree of perception, discernment and intuition that are the hallmark of a truly ‘educated’ person.

But the point is – how does one factor these into a practical and workable understanding of education?

Perhaps the first move could be liberating education from the fear of freedom. This would involve a rejection of the paternalistic prescriptive apparatus and replacing it with creative responsibility coupled to a generous measure of autonomy. As long as this does not happen our educational processes and programmes will continue to be dogged by issues of relevance, quality, and accountability.

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Obsession with success

I have had occasions to sit through the ‘Annual Day’ programmes of a large number of schools all over the country. The Head’s report is invariably a list of ‘successes’ and ‘achievements’ of various kinds. I too have done the same thing while presenting the annual report of my institution. However on every such occasion I have felt more than a twinge of discomfort. This is because somewhere I feel that the idea of success in the world of education must not be, but unfortunately is, the same as it is elsewhere. This is the kind of success that thrives on institutionalized aggression, what we call competition. It portrays the pursuit of status and power as a desirable and justifiable yearning for the Holy Grail. We are a society obsessed with the idea of success but rarely have we paused to question the nature of the ‘success’ that we make our young hanker after. Very conveniently we forget that someone’s success is also someone else’s failure. Haunted by the specter of failure we produce large numbers of students who suffer from, what a newspaper recently called, obsessive career disorders. No wonder we live in a sick society dominated by aggression, hostility, betrayal and injustice. There is little or no societal space for the passive, the acquiescent, for one who is not a warrior all set to conquer the world. The massive insecurity that such a situation creates is both astonishing and highly destructive for our young. One wonders how one can even begin to address this issue, let alone reverse the trend.

The Confusion That is Education

India is a land of educationists !! From anyone who gets his/her child admitted to the nursery class, through the tiers of babudom that control the levers of education, to those who manage to find places on committees and commissions, there is no shortage of those who feel that they have the necessary expertise to expound of all matters of pedagogy and instruction. In the midst of this cacophony the diffident and hesitant voice of the Educator is drowned out. The present state of our education system can well be likened to a vehicle being driven by one who is half-crazed by the noise of contradictory instructions being shouted by a host of back-seat instructors. To add to the confusion, one detects a new found interest in education driven by market concerns, which has all along been a low priority area in our national scheme of things. There is the desire to rev up the engine to make it go faster, equip it with new gadgets, improve the upholstery – all of which will surely make for a better ride but for the fact that we do not appear to have a clue as to where we are going. If much of our present day education is seen as irrelevant, if it shields students from reality, if it educates for obsolescence, if it does not develop intelligence, if it induces alienation, if it punishes creativity and independence, if the system fails to realize that the one fundamental characteristic of the world we live in is a constant ever accelerating rate of change, then surely it is not too farfetched to say that something needs to be done and done soon.

In a conference of School Principals at Shimla I had suggested that many of our present difficulties arise from the fact that there is a lack of adequate interface between the senior secondary and tertiary levels of education. Therefore very often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, resulting in situations that are detrimental to proper academic functioning. To give an example: one major postgraduate thrust is towards management courses where the IIMs attract the best students. To enter into an IIM one has to qualify the Common Admissions Test, the CAT. The eligibility for sitting for CAT is a mere 50% in graduation. The result is that instead of trying to excel at the graduating examination, good students consider it a waste of time to dwell on their course work in college and would rather spend all the time programming themselves to qualify the CAT. Consequently, not only is course work in colleges gravely compromised and even trivialized, but even those who do make it to the IIMs have serious deficiencies in the basic understanding of their subject. I believe a similar situation exists at the Class 12 level where the skills required for gaining admission into the IITs, and many medical and engineering colleges are quite different from the skills required for doing well in the class 12 examinations. The class 12 examinations, therefore, acquire for such students a more or less cosmetic value. In fact it is commonly felt that the two are in an either/or situation. Either one can do well in the class 12 examination or one can pass the entrance examination for admission to a professional college. Unfortunately there appears to be no forum where such concerns can be voiced.

At a more fundamental level there is no mechanism to address some basic issues about what constitutes good education and what place such constituents could have in our appraisal systems. While there may be indices (however unsatisfactory) to determine the literacy levels that a candidate has attained, there appears to be no mechanism for indicating the educational attainments of a student in terms of the core values that any reasonable educated person is expected to have. Fundamental tools of education like basic problem solving, responsiveness to universal human values, appreciation of responsibility, peer relationships, sense of discrimination and discernment, and other such intangibles, must find some place in our evaluative processes. However we do not appear to have a clue as to how this can be brought about.

It is well-known that public confidence in our evaluative processes is under a strain. Measures like re-checking have been introduced by certain Boards to restore confidence in our processes and to have corrective mechanisms in case of discrepancies. These have not proved adequate enough and a move is afoot to bring in more transparency by showing the answer scripts to the examinees. This may be helpful but somehwere along the line one suspects that such a cure may prove worse than the disease if only because we are not addressing the fundamental issue at stake. The fundamental issue is a lack of confidence in our system and our teachers. It is this issue that needs to be addressed and a mere tinkering with the mechanics of evaluation will not solve he problem. We need to initiate a process to instill a sense of trust and confidence in our pedagogical systems and then our evaluators and our institutions. We do not have any mechanism to deal with such matters other than getting into an oppressive programme of rules and regulations that have the net result of mutilating the very spirit and import of true education.

The issues I have briefly touched upon are merely indicative of the enormity of the task that confronts us and the lack of any viable mechanism to deal with them in a manner that is germane to educational (and not merely bureaucratic or academic) modes of thinking. There are a host of other issues like the rigidity and inflexibility of our academic programmes so that once a student in caught in the straitjacket of one discipline s/he finds it extremely difficult and cumbersome to make a transition to another discipline; the compulsive-obsessive post-school/college admission syndrome that has resulted in a phenomenon where all our pedagogical efforts are concentrated on programming a student to score high marks without relevance to his/her competency in basic literacy skills so that we end up with products who are neither sufficiently literately or adequately educated; the growing sense of dissatisfaction with class 12 marks as being the sole indicators of merit combined with a lack of any acceptable understanding of what constitutes “merit” due to the fact that the wide ranging social and economic disparities in our country militate against any simplistic connotations of the term ‘merit’; the highly unsatisfactory appraisal systems where the effects of twelve years of schooling are tested through an illogical and highly unscientific programme of a hot-house, anxiety-ridden, three-hour examination; the lack of any viable method to level out the disparities in the standards and marking systems of various Boards and examining bodies conducting the same examination; the rights of institutions to have their own space untrammeled by bureaucratic or judicial gymnastics, etc etc..

Viable responses to such issues have to be found by Educators and not left to Academic or Bureaucratic members of the educational establishment. The fact that so far no effective headway has been made in addressing such concerns is because they have been looked at through the bureaucratic lens or the academic eye. Hence there is a surfeit of rules and regulations. Similarly, the disproportionate emphasis on an ‘Academic’ approach has effectively curbed the Educator’s point of view at looking at issues. As the ‘Educator’ has taken a backseat to the ‘Academic’ therefore we have the inordinate emphasis on acquiring skills and information with the corresponding inability to find measures to translate these skills and information into knowledge and wisdom. Whereas an Academic is by definition confined to courses of study and the mechanics of completing the syllabus, the Educator, while being mindful of the same, also seeks to make significant intervention in the lives of his/her students. To put it in another way: the academic’s concern is with covering the syllabus while the educator’s desire is to uncover it.

Thus the point I am trying to make is that issues that plague education today and having been festering for some time now, need the attention of Educators. In order to do this the first requirement is that Educators discover a Voice that will effectively articulate our growing concerns. In the beginning it may well be a voice in the wilderness but with persistence and the genuineness of concern, this voice will, I have no doubt, acquire a resonance of its own.
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Excerpts from the Unpublished Memoirs of an Errant School Boy

At a recent class-reunion, conversation, as is wont on such occasions, turned to the Worthies who had taught us, and finally came to rest on two teachers. One was our Hindi teacher who stood out not only because she was one of the very few lady teachers in a boys school dominated by the austere Irish Brothers but also because she was so petite and charming that it was almost mandatory for every chap in senior school to fall in love with her. Unbeknown to her, this calf love spawned endless verses sighing about the unbearable anguish of unrequited ardour. However, in the case of one chap, distinguished for his boxing skill, matters went beyond respiratory turbulences and literary effluvium, and acquired a proprietorial hue. Through the sheer vigour of his poetic effusions, reinforced no doubt by his record of knock-outs in and out of the ring, he forced the other courtiers to retire to regions of doleful shades. However, our Hero soon encountered competition from an unexpected quarter. The only male teacher who was not in Holy Orders was our art and craft master from Tamil Nadu. In an ill-disguised pretence at patriot fervour, he decided to learn the national language. The resultant proximity with our Lady-on-the-Pedestal was viewed with profound suspicion by all us Courtiers.

Unable to bear it any longer, Our Hero resolved to wage war. During those days the art master was also standing in for the boxing coach who had resigned and left. So Our Hero went up to his unsuspecting opponent, who was oblivious of his Adversary Status, and got him to agree to a regular three round bout on the pretext of preparing for the inter-school tournament. The Courtiers, having sunk all personal rivalries, rallied around Our Hero. War councils were held. Chaps who had to be carried into the ring (because their knees, after sufficient knocking in the dressing room, just gave way when it came to taking the long walk to the ring) came up with ingenious strategies of feints and cuts, while others with their new-found expertise in anatomy, hastened to point out the Adversary’s weak spots which, if judiciously pounded, were certain to reduce him to putty. Great was the excitement: David had taken on Goliath (though in this case there was but little difference in size); True Love had challenged the Pretender. It was expected that in some mysterious way, our Lady-on-the-Pedestal (oblivious of all the fracas she had caused), would recognise the tremendous sacrifice being made for her and hasten to make some appropriate, though undefined, recompense.

On came the Longest Day and the Grand Fight was scheduled for the games period in the afternoon. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade Our Hero rushed into battle. What he lacked in prowess he made up in fury. But the Adversary was far too experienced and most of the young warrior’s salvoes fell on empty air. In the middle of the second round the Adversary decided to stop the fight as True Love was rapidly discovering his feet of clay. For the next two days Our Hero was not seen in school. He returned the third day, having graduated from a pining lover to a confirmed misogynist, a sadder but wiser man. Our misogynist is now a senior level Civil Servant, happily married to a class-mate at the academy. And as for the Adversary, he decided that his lessons in Hindi required a more permanent liaison with the Lady-on-the-Pedestal and so he proposed and she accepted.

The second teacher who was the focus of our attention at the re-union was a gruff Irishman whose ill-humoured demeanour, as it then appeared to us, was reinforced by the long years of rigorous abstinence of a man in holy orders. His piercing steely eyes below rust coloured bushy eyebrows complemented his nasal Irish twang, punctuated with soul-quaking growls tinged with an occasional asthmatic wheeze. Among his many accomplishments was a rock-like wrist supported by strong fore-arm muscles, having been built, no doubt, through the long years of swishing the cane at errant schoolboys. His modus operandi was to give two geometry theorems to be learnt at home. The next day in class two chaps would be asked to go up to the black-board and do them there. While the Quarry worked on the black-board, the Mortal Dread stood at the other end of the class-room, swinging his cane, waiting for the slightest mistake to take him lumbering down the class-room to belabour some geometric sense into the hapless victim.

The two theorems given to the class one fateful day were: “In a triangle if the sides are equal then the angles are also equal” which was a rather simple one and easily memorised. The other one made some queer and fearful sounds like Pythagoras and hypotenuse, and was something about the square on the hypotenuse being equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Only the most intrepid knight-at-arms could take on such monsters through the maze of their geometric habitation. That evening, while pondering over this problem, the law of probability was discovered (not bad for a chap in class seven!).The reasoning was that having prepared one theorem very well, and given the fact that there were nineteen other chaps in the class, the probability of being called upon to do the other theorem were quite negligible.
However, as matters turned out, one’s faith in the new-found law was so complete that one quite failed to recognise one’s name when called out in total contravention to the law. A sharp nudge from the neighbour’s elbow found one plodding unwillingly from the desk to the black-board. No mortal ever walked through the valley of the shadow of death more fearfully than did this Victim that morning. All sense of reality fast slipped away and one’s entire being was concentrated on hearing the sound of lumbering feet that would anon descend upon this Errant Schoolboy. The process at the black-board had barely gone beyond drawing the triangle when, with the roar of an enraged bull, Nemesis rushed upon the hapless Victim. Quaking with fear, having lost both wits and volition and responding only to the primordial instinct of survival, the Victim ducked behind the black-board (it was the tripod variety). But Nemesis was not to be thwarted and soon there was a new version of the traditional ‘round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush’ with the difference that this was no picnic and the mulberry bush was the black-board. The shocked disbelief of the class-mates gave way to a snigger and then turned into a loud roar of encouragement for the Nimble Foot. This roar restored sense into The-Victim-now-turned-Nimble-Foot, who, appalled at having, quite inadvertently, started this not-so-merry-go-round, came to a dead halt. Nemesis had, by now, acquired that ire of the Furies which was spoken of with holy dread by the Greeks; and a wild rain of the cane began whose marks were borne long after the swish was heard no more. Enough was enough and the Victim decided to call it a day. From the next day an hollow tree trunk became an ideal place for hiding the school-bag and the entire day tripped by with so much to explore and discover. Butterflies and bees, travelling salesmen and cowherds, lovers meeting in the quiet of a graveyard, an encounter with a soft-fingered pick-pocket, were part of an exciting adventure – but that, as they say, is another story.

In the fullness of time the pater familias came to know that his First Born (on whose birth a month’s salary had gone into laddoos), had strayed from the straight and the narrow. And Pater was sore oppressed. Though Pater was well familiar with the parable of the Prodigal Son, yet on that day no fatted calf awaited this Prodigal when he pretended to return from a hard day at school. Instead, he (the Pater) proceeded to put into action a thesis he had assiduously worked on throughout his life: “The Salutary Effect on the Cerebrum of Resounding and Repeated Impact on the Fundament”. Having firmly established the veracity of his thesis, as evidenced from the loud and piteous lamentations of the Soul in Purgatory, he marched The Vanquished Wanderer, tail tucked firmly between the legs, eyes fixed on the ground, to the presence of the Dreaded Preceptor. Preceptor in front, Pater behind, one could not but expect the worst. But just then the Guardian Angel who watches over all Errant Schoolboys, but had, so far, been away on Study Leave (with full pay and allowances), returned. A nasal grunt and a gruff expression of grief escaped some chink in the rough exterior of the Preceptor, and all was forgiven. From the next day it was business as usual – theorems and growls and canes and all.

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