Educated: Change the Narrative

पढ़ लिख कर अच्छे नंबर तो ले आया

बस, थोड़ी इंसानियत सीख न पाया।

Topped his class

Became CEO

Beat his wife every night.

Learnt the language

Became a great orator

Led a mob lynching.

Cleared medical school

Became a doctor

Overcharged every patient.

Got the best marks

Became a professor

Raped his student.

Cleared the entrance exam

Got the big house she always wanted

Abused her maid every day.

Education - Back to the Basics (Part 1)

Education's important.  

That's a fact, not an opinion.  

Or so we've all been told. 

And so we take that importance as a given.  

All around,  

there are campaigns  

urging parents  

to send their children to school. 

  

Everywhere you look,  

advertisements of coaching centres  

offer you a glimmer of hope for a bright future,  

Merely 

in exchange for a few years of your life.  

Anyone I meet,  

likes to proudly talk about  

the degrees attached to their name,  

or feels ashamed  

about the lack of them. 

Everywhere I read,  

are stories of parents  

who spend their life working excruciating hours  

just so their children  

can afford a good education  

and have a better life. 

Yet, at the same time: 

Every other day,  

a child commits suicide,  

succumbing to the pressure  

of exams, of marks, 

Of 'education'.  

In almost every classroom,  

scores of children sit quietly  

with glazed eyes,  

silently copying notes from the board. 

Each time 

A family celebrates the top rank of their child 

Is another student 

With shattered confidence 

From the public declaration 

That he stands at the bottom. 

Almost anyone I talk to  

points out that what they studied  

really has nothing to do with  

their work or life afterwards. 

Most importantly,  

anywhere you look,  

there are enough people  

with degrees attached to their names,  

People who we call  

'Educated' 

who don't hesitate  

to hurt,  

to destroy,  

to discriminate, 

to rape,  

to kill. 

And so,  

I continued to wonder:  

what is the point of education?

It’s been six years since I entered the field of education (well, 28 actually, if I were to count my time as a student). I remember when I had joined the Teach for India fellowship, the general response from people around me was pride – pride that I had joined a sector as important as education. What I never said out loud to them, however, was that I wasn’t sure myself if education really is as important as it’s been made out to be.

As someone who had voluntarily chosen to join the education sector, I was expected to believe in its power. When I began my foray into this field through teaching, the thrust for getting all children in the country enrolled into schools was at its peak. I’d constantly come across campaigns talking about the importance of education. I’d pass by families living under flyovers getting their children ready for schools. And the whole time, I’d keep wondering – why?

Why is education so important? How is a lesson on phonics or place value or addition or EVS really going to change this child’s life? Sure, the skill of literacy would open doors to reading more books, but is that it? And numeracy – most kids would pick it up in their daily interactions even without schooling. So really, what was it about learning theorems and rules and formulas and spellings and dates and events and facts and piles and piles of information that would transform a child’s life?

What was the point of education?

I left my two years of teaching with this question reeling in my mind, and enrolled in an MA Education program hoping to find an answer to it. By the end of that program, I wasn’t even sure what we meant by the term ‘education’. Initially, I felt a bit ripped off, having paid for an education looking for some answers, only to be left with many more questions. But as time passed, I realized how important it was to really deconstruct everything that we’ve grown up with, question every single assumption we have, and really just begin from scratch – What. Is. Education.

Seriously, what is education?

• Is it about going to school?
• Is it about learning to read, write, and do maths?
• Is it learning to be obedient and disciplined?
• Is it learning? Period? Does it then need a school?
• Is it about getting jobs? Can I actually do some of these high-end jobs without ever having gone to school?
• Is it a way of preventing children from being forced into labour? Or is it another form of child labour itself, wherein children are forced to spend six hours each day in a confined space and obediently do tasks they have little interest in?
• Is it about learning and remembering information?
• Is it about learning the right ‘moral values’?
• Is it about learning to behave like the so-called upper classes of society?
• Is it about learning the basics of social interaction, and just providing a space for that?
• Is it about learning everything we can to survive as a human? But if that were the case, shouldn’t our priorities be to learn how to grow food, build houses, make clothes, etc.?

I mean, really, think about it. How would you say when somebody is ‘educated’? Every other day, we hear stories of people being berated for not having the right educational qualifications. We look up to people with degrees, and look down at those without. What do we mean when we say someone ‘looks educated’? What are the qualities of someone who looks educated? Or someone who is educated? And is our education system really geared towards those qualities? 

The fact is, we've grown up being told that education is important, and were never really encouraged to ask why. So we joined the race. Of going to school. Of sitting at our desk. Of listening quietly. Of memorizing. Of going for tuitions. Of competing in exams. Of getting degrees. Of getting certified (of what, I'm not quite sure).

And yet, somewhere, there remained an underlying feeling that never quite got squashed - why are we doing all this? Is this really what education is all about? And if yes, why is this important? 

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I don't have answers in this post. But perhaps this is one of those situations where the questions are more important than the answers. 

Nouns versus Verbs: The Great Debate

A: Do you like to write?

B: Absolutely!

A: So you’re a writer?

B: Oh no no no no. *waves hand modestly*. Nothing like that.

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As the title suggests, this post is about the great debate between nouns and verbs. In case you’re racking your head in an attempt to figure out which particular debate this one refers to (given that there are probably so many of them), I’ll mention right here that the one I’m talking about might not exist (at least, it seemed to draw a blank with Google).

So, I’m going to start it.

And while this particular topic might have been inspired by dousing myself in grammar over the last few months, it actually has little to do with it. In fact, it is about something far more important and difficult to grasp: life itself (*cue gasping and cringing*).

Now, without further digression (there’ll be plenty of that later), let me put forward my motion for this debate:

Nouns suck. Verbs are awesome.

There.

For those of you who are not familiar with the technicalities, here’s a quick grammatical overview: nouns are words that, among many other things, show who or what a person is. For example, a child, Peter Parker, female, teacher, etc. On the other hand, a verb is more about the things a person does. For example: walk, talk, run, sit, teach, etc.

On their own, the two seem fairly harmless, but I’ve recently come to realize that the former has destroyed more dreams and lives than one could fathom (okay, maybe the ‘what will others say’ might take the trophy for that, but nouns are a close second).

The first problem with nouns is that they stop people from fully claiming the things they do. A friend of mine really enjoys sketching (and is quite good at it), but when asked if she’s an artist, she’ll shake her head vigorously. Another friend who will dance at the sound of any beat refuses to call himself a dancer. “I like to dance,” he says. “But I’m not a dancer.”

And yes, I get that most of these words – teacher, dancer, cricketer, writer, artist – have a connotation that suggests a level of expertise, and so are kept mostly for the “professionals”. But the result of this professionalization is that the verbs, which are accessible to and enjoyed by every other person, suddenly need an external body to certify them as being good enough to be nouns.

This closely connects with how we view everything we do in our lives, and even more so with that one thing that our lives seem to revolve around: our careers. These nouns have associated themselves with a question that has haunted me (and I’m assuming others) for a large part of their lives:

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

For those of you who’ve had a clear answer to that question from the day you were born, I guess it really isn’t a problem. But for the select few who’ve felt beads of sweat begin to form the moment these words threw themselves at you, the following might be a relatable struggle.

A: What do you want to be when you grow up?

B: Uhh…well….I guess…I dunno….a doctor maybe? I’m not really sure though.

Although I’m known to all as that confused soul who can never quite figure out my career, I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t in my lack of clarity (though the indecisiveness really doesn’t help); there is just a slight chance that the problem is actually in the question: the expected answer is a noun. It’s a bloody noun that will define the rest of your life. How on earth is a high-school student (or anyone, for that matter) expected to seal their entire fate through one noun?

Imagine if the same question were replaced with a verb.

A: What do you want to be when you grow up?

B: Uhh…well….I guess…I dunno….a doctor maybe? I’m not really sure though.

A: Well, what are some things that you would want to do?

B: Oh. Let’s see. I want to write stories, dance, teach, learn filmmaking, study biology in more detail, swim in the sea, travel all over the country, cycle to another city…

A: Okay okay! That’s sounds like an unending list. Which of these do you want to get started on for now?

See the difference? Verbs.

As an individual, there are so many things that I enjoy doing or would want to do, yet somehow, when it comes to careers, it’s always about “becoming someone”. Sure, occasionally the career counsellors would try to simplify things for us by saying, “Why don’t we begin with the things you enjoy doing.” Yet we’ve always been told to choose one thing out of this list to make a career out of, and relegate everything else under the heading ‘hobby’ – something you enjoy doing but will never actually have the time for.

And there’s something really messed up about this, right? There are so many people stuck in careers they don’t want to be in, because at some point in their hormone-crazed years, they (or more likely their parents) decided who they would become, instead of what they would actually want to do. Of course, there are responsibilities, and I’m not trying to diminish their importance. But we read stories of that guy in his mid-forties who left his fancy corporate job to start up a new venture, and we applaud him for his courage, and this reaction only reiterates that what this guy did is not the norm – that actively pursuing things you enjoy doing is not the norm. That change is not the norm. That diversity of interests is not the norm. That the thirst for different kinds of experiences is not the norm. The norm is that we choose who or what we want to be at the age of 18 (or, apparently, even before you hit puberty), and we spend the rest of our lives becoming or being that person, no matter where our interests might want to  take us (I really think that “being” shouldn’t even qualify as a verb).

All this because of nouns.

I mean, sure, society and individual choices might have a little something to do with this, but they’re nothing compared to the nouns. And that is why, we really need to reduce the importance we give to nouns, and began looking much more seriously at verbs.

I’ll end my piece by re-stating my original words of wisdom:

Nouns suck. Verbs are awesome.

(Unless you have to actually teach these things. Then, verbs will make you want to re-evaluate every decision that led to you standing in front of 40 confused 3^rd graders staring at you blankly while you attempt to explain tenses and rules).

On Values and Education

I was in grade 8, sitting in our mandatory “Moral Science” class, which was taught by the teacher who was also known as the ‘Discipline Head’ of our school (the kind that made even the most courageous hearts begin to simper). You know, the kind who would storm into class and demand loudly, “Is there anyone here who does not believe in God?” (I forgot to mention it was a convent) and many of us would sink down into our seats to avoid any eye contact, all the while forcing our mouths to stay shut.

Every week, we’d learn about the importance of kindness, and patience, and respect; and every week, we would struggle to remain awake in the class. Occasionally, to break the monotony, we were divided into groups and asked to come up with a skit to show a particular value – but not even once were we given the option of saying, “But what if…?”

**************

During my four years in college in Canada, I met many people from Pakistan, and got to know so much about the country, that by the time I had to leave, my closest friends were all Pakistanis. When I joined Teach for India immediately after, I wanted to create a classroom where students thought about Pakistan as openly as I did, and yet, seeing that they were in Grade 2, I felt it was too early to engage in such a conversation. Plus, I think a part of me just balked at the idea of trying to infuse values with education, given the damage that my moral science classes had tried to do on me. So, I did nothing about it. And one day, one of my students walked up to me with a drawing he had made and showed it to me proudly, saying, “Yeh India hai. Aur yeh Pakistan hai. Aur yeh India Pakistan par missile daal raha hai.” [This is India, and this is Pakistan. And this is India throwing a missile at Pakistan.]

****************

Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth on my stance on values in education. On one hand, I feel really strongly about the need for education to include (if not entirely focus on) values; on the other, the notion of ‘moral education’ makes me squirm in extreme discomfort and want to run in the opposite direction.

My two years with Teach for India only furthered the tug-of-war. While part of me still resisted the idea of moral education, another part felt that there has to be something more to education that just the learning of facts and the passing of exams. And yet, I didn’t know how to even approach the subject of values.

In my second year as a teacher, that decision was taken out of my hands as the school adopted certain value-based rules that all classrooms had to comply with: something like a moral code of conduct. There were rules like respecting others and taking care of school property and being honest and kind. I think the intent was genuine, and the students actually seemed to love it. They were given incentives to comply with the rules, and would also come up with skits to act out these rules (I’m seeing the pattern only as I’m writing this).

Yet the entire time, I had this nagging feeling that something was off about this. Something wasn’t working. The students still fought as much as before; they showed respect only where they knew it was worth their while; and there was really no evident concern for each other’s well-being. And I kept wondering that if these values could not even get them to care about each other, weren’t concepts like Pakistan, the environment, humanity and the world out of line?

I joined the Fellowship enthused with the idea of completely transforming the lives of my students. I left the Fellowship so disillusioned by the entire education system, such that I couldn’t even say why we even needed education. On one hand, I could see the mess that we called our planet – the wars, the rapes, the hurt, the pain, the suffocation. On the other, there was a hoard of people hailing education as our only savior. And I just could not see the connection between the two.

I thought an MA Education would offer some answers. But by the end of the first year, after having studied the sociology, philosophy, and psychology of education, I couldn’t even say what education was in the first place. There were too many questions, and no solid answers.

The only thing that I knew for sure (though entirely based on intuition) is that there had to be more to education that just academics – whether we call it skills or values; whatever it is, there had to be something more. And so, I found myself subconsciously pushing myself to take on research projects that were about values, such as analyzing the approach to moral education in Krishnamurti schools through a philosophical lens, and studying how children’s literature is used to ‘teach values’. And the more I researched, the more I realized how complex this subject was. But somewhere along the line, I think I began to form a more solid opinion of where I stand on the issue.

So here it is.

Question 1: How does one teach values?

Do you give students a list of values that they must imbibe? Do you guise values in the form of rules? Do you incentivize students with rewards and punishments? Do you instill values using the fear of God approach? Or do you regale with them with old and tested ‘moral of the story’ tales?

For me, I think the answer lies in the question itself.

How does one teach values? You don’t, because values cannot be taught.

At best, you can make students think about values, but you can’t teach them.

At best, you can present students with situations where they are forced to look at all the perspectives in the situations, and understand the conflict that each position holds.

At best, you can encourage students to attempt to reason out their own position on issues through a thorough discussion.

At best, you can let students know that no value is absolute, and that it’s okay to feel confused about your thoughts.

But you still can’t teach values.

At least, not the kind of values we tend to think of. You know: kindness, perseverance, respect, courage, honesty, etc. The stuff that we believe we should force into our students when all around them they can see a world that is clearly going in the opposite direction.

This brings me to the second (and perhaps most important) question: what do I mean by values anyway?

Clearly, my idea of morality is not the imbibing of the list of values society generally tends to propagate. It’s something much more abstract, and because I can't explain it, I’m going to hand it over to an expert.

Krishnamurti said that morality is “an awareness of and sensitivity to an individual’s relationship with everything around – to people, to nature, to property, etc.”

That’s it.

Think about it. Could this definition work? Could the development of a social consciousness and awareness of self actually encompass the kind of students we want to see in our classrooms?

If yes, then perhaps an approach that encourages thinking and discussion and reflection doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all.

*********** Original End of Post *************

A friend messaged me saying that this post ended too abruptly. And that's true, but I think I stopped writing because I thought it was becoming too long already. But as a result, I skimmed over what was probably the most important part of this post. So, for those of you who have the patience to continue reading, here it goes.

Assuming you've thought about the definition of morality (yes yes, I'm being presumptuous about the interactivity of this medium), let me try to hash it out myself.

When we say awareness, it's not just an awareness of your surroundings, but an awareness of your relationship with the surroundings. This means, an understanding of how your actions affect the people and the nature around you, and vice-versa. For instance, an awareness that throwing out that wrapper on to the street because you can't find a dustbin would mean that it would either lie there forever and add to the garbage on the ground, or that another person would have to come and pick up after you. An awareness that when you brandish your victory in a competition, you're possibly taking away a notch of your opponent's self-confidence. An awareness that when you chain up that dog to prevent it from biting your child, you're probably causing the dog a considerable amount of discomfort and pain.

This list could go on. But I'm hoping that you can begin to see the kind of consciousness that emerge from this kind of awareness. 

Notice, however, that these statements do not suggest a simplistic right or wrong. In each of these situations, there is a clash of beliefs: personal convenience versus public cleanliness; the joy of victory versus the disappointment of defeat; concern for your child's safety versus concern for the dog's pain. There really isn't one simple way of making a choice here that could be applied universally.

[On a side note, I think this is where most of our attempts at teaching values gets sidelined. We assume that there is a universal right thing that everyone can agree upon. We approach values with a kind of simplicity that completely neglects the complexity with which they work in our lives; sometimes, against each other. We teach honesty. We teach loyalty. Yet we never consider difficulty of the situation where my honesty could lead to a friend getting in trouble. Or a situation where kindness to one means unfairness to another. Or countless other situations that represent life far more accurately than the fairy tale black and white versions.*]

Yet an approach to morality that emphasizes awareness presumes that value-based decisions are difficult, and might lead to different conclusions for different people. It will push people to approach any given situation with an openness and eagerness to understand the situation from all possible angles, and then leave the individual to make their choice.

And really, that's all we can ask of people. Consideration of different perspectives. Thinking about the impact of their actions (or inactions). Such that going forward, whatever decision they make, it stems from an understanding of its merits and demerits. Imagine a world where people made decisions with the humility to accept its limitations, instead of the conviction that it's the best decision and should appeal equally to every other person as well. Well, it might be confused world, I suppose. But it might just be a world willing to listen to and learn from each other.

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*Thought for the day: If we were teaching a lesson in class that emphasized forgiveness, do you think it would be worthwhile to get students to think about why it doesn't apply to the legal criminal justice system?


Disclaimer: This post may not be representative of Krishnamurti's beliefs. I've used his definition of morality and interpreted it in my own way.