Another Ramble

I have often tried to reflect on my schooling experience and attempted to deconstruct its effects in shaping my overall personality, outlook and character. These were merely contemplative exercises but nonetheless I think they helped me form some strong opinions about how primary and pre-college instruction ought to be in a general sense. When I try to gauge the ten odd years I spent in schools in terms of learning, I look back with a lot of disappointment at a good deal of 'lost time'. That there was an absence of direction towards life's broader goals does not bother as much as the pestilential presence of rigid constraints that conspire to limit you to much narrower, pettier goals - passing exams and beating your peers at grades for instance. I recently read an interview of Noam Chomsky (incidentally, I also had the good fortune of hearing him speak on the Gaza intervention in a recent public lecture at MIT) where the interviewer asked Chomsky on his schooling. Chomsky attended an experimental progressive school until he was twelve when he was transferred to a "college-oriented school" in the city. He says:

"...it wasn't until I was in high school that I knew I was a good student. The question had never arisen. I was very surprised when I got into high school and discovered that I was getting all A's and that was supposed to be a big deal.

In fact, every student in the school I had previously attended was regarded as somehow being a very successful student. There was no sense of competition, no ranking of students..... Well, anyway, at this particular school, judging from my experience, there was a tremendous premium on individual creativity, not in the sense of slapping paints on paper, but doing the kind of work and thinking that you were interested in. Interests were encouraged and children were encouraged to pursue their interests. They worked jointly with others or by themselves. It was a lively atmosphere, and the sense was that everybody was doing something important."

- taken from The Chomsky Reader

Such 'progressive schools' do exist in India in a small number. But I am quite certain most of them are prohibitively expensive and accessible to only rich families. Most of the other supposedly 'good schools' which include the ones I went to are primarily concerned with populating 'merit lists'- a term that I have come to regard with utmost disdain over the years. The unfortunate consequence is that most students who out happen to be outliers; those who do well in spite of the system, not because of it. I was no outlier as a schoolboy. I did well in my exams and lived in a world of my own delusion thinking that was all there was to learning. My parents and teachers were happy with me and the sum total of this status quo was that I learned absolutely nothing in my school beyond mechanically chewing and regurgitating the regimented syllabus.

The unfortunate thing, in the words of a Brazilian educator, is that most schools are "more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with the creation, among other values, of a critical spirit. From the social point of view, the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social order and economic structures instead of transforming them".

There is certainly a lot of truth in the above statement even if one were to refrain from sourcing these political accusations to an active agency in the system. But even then, this is a much more charitable position if we notice that even transmission of knowledge degenerates to rote learning in our schools- the pedantic recitation of facts as opposed to the assimilation of a principle and exploring its consequences thereon. To quote Richard Feynman from 'The Pleasure of finding things out', an inseparable part of robust learning is to realize the difference between 'knowing the name of something and knowing something'. The following is one of his famous anecdotes involving his early childhood experiences with his father:

‘See that bird?’ he says. ‘It’s a Spencer’s warbler. Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese it’s a Katano Takeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing - that’s what counts!