Redefine Learning As We Know It

Context: Visiting Tagore and Jiddu Krishnamurti for getting inspiration in helping redefine learning.

Issues with Indian education

• Oppressive Schooling: With its regimentation and techniques of discipline and surveillance, schooling has done more harm than good.
  • It has created artificial armours, restrained spontaneity and creative flow of life energy, and denaturalised their existence.
  • Huge walls, CCTV cameras, the tyranny of the clock time with the dissemination of discrete and fragmented knowledge capsules (time tables) and continual pressure to perform have transformed schools into prisons.
• Utilitarian in nature: This has killed the spirit of being a wanderer or a seeker continually transcending the boundaries of the conditioned mind.
  • These days, we want our children to be smart strategists, exam warriors, or potential toppers.
  • Their schooled consciousness is conditioned to believe that knowledge is nothing but the official curriculum is a product to be consumed.
• Makes us one-dimensional: A conditioned mind of this kind is always fearful. It can’t take risks; it can’t see beyond the established pattern.
  • It cannot walk through what Robert Frost would have regarded as ‘the path less travelled’.
  • As the ritualisation of examinations is based on the comparison, it activates the fear of failure.
• Hyper-competitiveness and spiritual dumbness: It has resulted in a world where –
  • Religion is a dogma; nationalism is some sort of hyper-masculine aggression;
  • ‘Good living’ is centred on the pleasure principle that seductive consumerism cultivates.
  • Nature is an obstacle to be conquered through technoscience.
  • Social Darwinism is the cherished mantra, and success is the thrill of defeating others, further reproducing the culture of violence.
• Challenges during the pandemic:
  • The academic bureaucracy refuses to be reflexive; it cannot imagine anything beyond ‘online teaching’,
  • Even during the pandemic (a psychic and existential crisis), it wants the teachers to be just data providers, supplying the required information to the higher authorities: students’ attendance etc.

Rabindranath’s poetic vision on education:

• Critic of regimentation: He urged to dismantle prison-like structures, create a modern ‘tapovan’, and nurture a learning community in which children and their mentors evolve together.
  • For e.g. It is not like reading Keats (‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever ) in a closed classroom within the stipulated time period; it is like becoming a poem itself.
  • In other words, it creates the ground for the creation of an aesthetically enriched and ecologically sensitive relational self.

Jiddu Krishnamurti’s vision of learning:

• Critic of forced conditioning (rote learning): For Krishnamurti, this conditioning limits the growth of consciousness;
  • He reminded us of a ‘pathless land’, urging us to see the worth of education as awakened intelligence, self-discovery, sensitivity to life, or a quest.

Conclusion: Both reimagine a kind of education that teaches us to live and die intensely, gracefully and meaningfully.