[Krishna Kumar is the Director of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). He writes on knowledge, learning and education, and is one of the few academics who actually thinks about these issues. - ZESTAlternative Desk]
Democracy, modernity, and the Indian child By Krishna Kumar [The Hindu | 26 December 2005] http://www.hindu.com/2005/12/26/stories/2005122601451200.htm At present, our schools act like factories, forcing children into a fixed, preconceived mould. They stifle natural curiosity and creativity. The fruits of democracy and modernity will remain elusive if education is not structurally adjusted to the needs of the rural poor. Rosa Parks, who died at 92 a few weeks ago, belonged to a tradition that runs through modern history but is seldom celebrated as an aspect of modernism. In India, we associate it with Gandhi whose refusal to swallow humiliation in a South African train shaped the history of the British Empire. In a remarkably similar event, Rosa Parks gave the civil rights movement in the United States a sharpened edge when she defied an Alabama bus driver who asked her to vacate her seat because she was black. That happened on the evening of December 1, 1955, in a town called Montgomery. The driver threatened her with arrest, and she asked him to go ahead with his plans. Four days later, after her arrest, a young preacher called Martin Luther King said at a gathering of thousands of black people that Rosa was "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery." The bus boycott ensuing from that assembly lasted 381 days. It led to 100 arrests and a Supreme Court judgment a year later outlawing segregation in buses. Parks, King, and Gandhi had a common intellectual ancestor in the American philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. His 1859 essay, Civil Disobedience, presents a political theory justifying his refusal to pay tax in order to protest America's war against Mexico. Thoreau's essay inspired Gandhi to invent and apply Satyagraha: a non-violent weapon against institutionalised subjugation. The same essay elicited Martin Luther's King famous remark that "non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good." Gandhi's legacy, both as a mass leader and as a political thinker, continues to challenge our analytical abilities and imagination. It is obviously convenient to enclose Gandhi in a colonial context and leave him there. The lifeless listing of his salient traits and achievements given in school texts transforms Gandhi into an exam byte. The question of what Gandhi means for citizenship today is simply not attempted. To the mill of cramming and regurgitation, marks and merit lists, Gandhi supplies indistinct fodder. In a system of education that ignores the child's part in the construction of knowledge, Gandhi loses meaning. But then, Gandhi is no exception. The concept of curriculum entrenched in our system overlooks the child's role in constructing knowledge; hence, no topic transcends the status of information. Certain topics and questions acquire importance for the final examination, but nothing gains significance or inspirational value. Tools of analysis, such as classification of ideas and information, and the steps involved in judging evidence are ignored. Syllabus and textbook designers assume that it is the teacher's job to impart interactive life to the long, continuous narratives given in the text. Why shouldn't the text writer share this responsibility? This question is one of those we seldom ask in curricular deliberations. Any discussion of the numerous ills of our system of education inevitably slips into a versatile blame game. Teachers say the syllabus is too long to cover with progressive pedagogic methods, that the textbooks are too fat and dull, and that the examination system is too rigid. Syllabus designers and textbook writers blame the teacher for not working hard. Principals blame the parents for arousing unrealistic expectations in children, and parents blame the government for not paying sufficient attention to education. Social activists blame the state for succumbing to commercial forces and globalisation. And finally, the media awaken everyone to blame whoever can be found to blame before sunset. The education of Rosa Parks led her to becoming a seamstress. She was married to a barber. In India, such details about a great life surprise us, accustomed as we are to dissociating manual work and dexterity from school and college education. Linking education and work, especially manual work, was Gandhi's favourite idea. The National Curriculum Framework (NCF), which was approved by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) in September, shows renewed interest in this linkage. The recommended strategies given in the NCF are spelt out in the report of the National Focus Group on this subject. Its report treats work as a nucleus of creative engagement with knowledge, social values, and personal fulfilment. As you read the report, you realise that the idea of enlightened citizenship is incompatible with bookish education, howsoever great a success it may bring to someone individually. Work implies an activity that fulfils a genuine need. It also implies the development of an attitude capable of sustaining self-reliance, initiative, and a questioning spirit. Opportunities to infuse work into routine school life constantly arise but are seldom utilised in our sedentary system. Many private schools, for instance, prevent children from looking after plants by assigning this task exclusively to salaried gardeners. That is why their lawns look so beautiful, signalling the school's status and high fees. How easy it is to mistake modernity with convenience became apparent to me at a recent discussion on a mathematics text. We were debating the merits of perforating a page with stickers that children might use to learn about different shapes. The logistics involved in perforation suddenly reminded us that it would mean a lot more activity if children were asked to cut the page with scissors or trace the shapes given on it, and then cut and paste them on cardboard. This kind of work covers a wide range of skills and desirable behaviours, including pleasant readiness to help with cleaning up the room after the lesson is over. Such training would form the right ethos to imbibe the qualities of citizenship Gandhi might have approved. It would also enable children to produce knowledge out of experience rather than simply receive it as information. Teaching as relational activity The legacy of pedagogic modernism symbolised by Gandhi and Tagore implies the cultivation of a questioning spirit and tolerance for differences. Neither goal can be achieved without viewing teaching as a relational, rather than a transmission, activity. It is only when the teacher engages with the child with love and patience, and the textbook encourages interaction, that values like originality, self-reliance, and tolerance take shape. The idea that the teacher should build on the knowledge that the child brings to school, enabling the child to critically examine this knowledge wherever necessary, poses a significant challenge to entrenched pedagogic concepts and practices. A similar challenge comes from the idea that the curriculum should address children's concerns and anxieties about the world they live in, rather than bypass them in the name of academic distance. Children, who are otherwise inarticulate at school, open up when they are asked to talk about things they know. Village girls start talking and taking an active interest in the curriculum if the textbook and the teacher touch upon their everyday life issues. True, many such issues offer no immediate or clear answers, but that hardly matters. The role of education is to make the child reflective and articulate, and to achieve this goal education does not have to start from scratch. Children are endowed to think: our job is to build on their innate capacity by giving it an opportunity to flourish. This view continues to invite criticism in our society where negative assumptions about the child's nature are still popular and any plea for children being given the opportunity to think for themselves is perceived with suspicion. At the inauguration of Delhi University's Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, Salman Akhtar cited the acceptance of uncertainty as one of the key symptoms of mental health. Other symptoms are the realisation that the world is a complex place in which a number of decisions are made without the predictability of outcomes. Dr. Akhtar said the appeal of fundamentalism comes from its promise of certainty. His speech indicates the role of education in strengthening a rational and liberal outlook that implies acceptance of differences. To realise any such vision of society, we must give children's education a high priority and regard no expenditure as being excessive for enriching the school. Not only must every child go to school, but the school too should have the capacity to receive every child, irrespective of background, gender or ability. At present, our schools act like factories, forcing children into a fixed, preconceived mould. Drastic reforms are needed to provide room for creativity and independent thought. Present-day schooling stifles the natural curiosity and creativity children possess. The system is especially cruel to rural children. Village children belonging to the lower socio-economic strata fall prey to the system's predisposition favouring the upwardly mobile sections of urban India. Our democratic order urgently needs the support of a universally accessible and sensibly organised system of education. The fruits of democracy and modernity will remain elusive if education is not structurally adjusted to the needs of the rural poor. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Great things are happening at Yahoo! Groups. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/TISQkA/hOaOAA/yQLSAA/PMYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥««¤»¥«¤»§«¤» This is ZESTAlternative, whose members circulate an article every alternate day on alternative modes to dominant ways of thinking in the modern world. Members are allowed to respond to an article but not initiate new discussions. If you got this mail as a forward, join ZESTAlternative by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or, if you have a Yahoo! 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