This workshop was organised by EKF – Existential Knowledge Foundation (http://existentialknowledgefoundation.org) at BAIF, Warje, Pune. They were about 20 participants. We started with introductions. What I liked about the training program was the absence of chairs. And the presence of young children. On the mattresses, you could sleep through the sessions, and it was perfectly Ok. The question with we started with: Who taught you swimming, cycling, chapatti making? It wasn’t the coach; it wasn’t the friend; it wasn’t the mother. The actual learning happened because of the water, the cycle, and the atta. Objects are teachers.
Our schools operate on the premise that children need to be taught. In reality what we must be doing is observe how children learn on their own. Schools have become centres of conditioning. Emotions are conditioned. Aesthetic senses are conditioned. History is conditioned. We teach the people of Odisha, that Ashoka was a great king. But we also teach that he was the mastermind of the Kalinga slaughter. Who should the Odia support: Ashoka or Kalinga?
Thinking is given importance, not observation. You are thinking all the time. You are doing something all the time. Fukouka says: For 50 years I kept on searching for how much less I need to do. Beauty is something that has no unwanted elements. It’s something that has consumed the least energy to build.
A misconception that has been foisted on us: we have to learn something, to do something. Yet even with a powerful knowledge of words, we are often at a loss for words. Earlier shlokas were memorized, but you were not told what they meant. You understood when events took place. The word is about the known, the world about the unknown. The word is about the past, the world is about the present.
We need to relook schools as spaces for awakening, not conditioning. The real definition of learning should be understanding through experience. Openness is the key to good observation. Thanks to printing, we conduct our lives in the reductionist word. What matters is not the word: the theory, not philosophy, not contradiction, but the world: observation. Words always signify the abstract. Experiences, the particular. Given a choice, we should prefer experiences to discussions.
Jinan KB
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Jinan (https://www.jinankb.in/) has been both a student and a teacher at NID Ahmedabad. In the first 2 months at NID, it is the Delhi and Mumbai students who shine. Because they can communicate. But by the time the course ends, it is the rural children who shine, because they are the ones who are more experienced. Jinan has found something similar also in architecture schools. Village children have a master-apprenticeship relationship going on between themselves. There is coordinated cooperation. Children work together naturally. Urban boys find it very difficult to handle small children. Rural ones don’t. The illiterate person trusts your zubaan. The literate, the written word. People who have not gone to school have still got their learning systems intact. A rickshaw driver in Bangalore typically speaks 4 languages.
From 2011 to 2014, Jinan was part of a group that ran Sadhna, an experimental village school in Mulshi, near Pune. They started by deciding that they did not know how to run a school. Sadhana School had a hundred and twenty kids. The numbers started going down because parents didn’t understand the experiments in self learning that the team was doing. There should have been more PTA meets where the teacher should have complained to parents ‘Your kid doesn’t pay attention!’ The experiment ended when the original trustees felt that they needed to go back to being a conventional English medium school.
Jinan’s lament is that our parenting role models seem to be dogs. Come home, Deliver the milk, Disappear. Kids are now remonstrating. As soon as they enter the house, their room doors get shut. Their anger stems from making them do things they don’t want to do. They are being force fed by mothers who are making decisions of how much hunger their kids should have. Not that the adults are faring too well at home. Most heart attacks in the US happen on weekends; when you are at home. So what should the parent do? Make kids experience love. If someone is unwell at home, the child should spend time with the ill person not the school. Children should be given responsibility. It is the body that learns. Having breakable utensils at home is a better idea than Melmoware.
Jinan has adopted a kid in his village. He decided to follow three rules in parenting:
- Never say no.
- Never lead.
- Never lie.
I asked Jinan about Rule 1: Never say no. His reply: In villages, nobody asks for permission. Children are carefree. Parents have a deep innate trust in life. Kids there don’t require adult approval. Because freedom is existential. It’s a spontaneous exploration of the senses. The moment you put a framework to it, you lose it. Jinan: ‘Whenever my father gets into an auto, he fights. His default position is distrust. In contrast my wife gets swindled at gold shops but still remains calm. Her default position is trust.’ His wife has retained the child in her with its innocence.
We are looking at a very allopathic mind set in education. Cure by symptom, without knowing the cause. In schools, we first started with writing. Finding something missing, we added art. Then we still found kids running around doing crazy things, so we at last added Value Education – more as an afterthought. The Sadhna school did very little of reading and writing – and more of experiments and play.
Jinan has been documenting children at play. One insight that he shared was that similar contexts lead to similar responses. Put a kid on a sofa and she has to bounce. For a child, there is nothing called a toy and there is nothing called play. The moment a child knows it’s playing, it’s no longer playing. A school in China is trying to imitate the practice of playing with real things. But the bricks are made of rubber. Adults don’t understand the importance of the real world for the child. Every act of a child is playful. Every object that a child touches is a toy. Is school just another man made toy?
Play is designed by nature to develop abilities. The first use kids make of books is to make houses. The more interesting games are internally motivated: Close eyes and walk; Walk backwards; Replace one sound with another while talking. These games increase alertness and break habits. Adults also indulge in play, preferring to call it Jugaad. What is dangerous though is adults playing with kids. The latest profession that the West has added is the play-worker!
Do you ever wonder in your struggles to think out of the box, how did we get inside the box? Real potential lies outside the classroom, children can explore, imitate, experiment. They can develop patience. And patience is correlated with attention, involvement and interest. Kids always compete with their own selves. They want to better themselves. In this process each one will learn differently As Jinan asks in jest – Do we have digestion styles? Then why do we have learning styles?
What kids need to do is to imitate ideas, not forms. Not a ka kaa, ki kee, Ku Koo. It is objects that suggest what should be done with them. It is their imagination that helps them best. Stones can become babies. Which can be played with. Give them a doll and you kill their imagination!
Jinan believes that your story and life is the product of the books you read. Where is the experience? The cognition is absent. Jinan had quit reading completely for a few years and found as a result his senses began to function again. What a child learns is what a child experiences. Learning = experience. His belief is that people should do their PhDs only after the age of 50. After you are experienced enough!
There are three universal questions that we face in education: The why, which deals with ethics; the what, which deals with knowledge; the how which with action. And two contextual questions: when and where. Answering these lead us to:
Structure: is the way things are constructed.
Process: is the way things happen.
Quality: is the way things are felt.
Has literacy been good for us? The West loves text. But that has not always been the case. Socrates was part of a very oral tradition; by the time Aristotle came it had become a textual tradition. The child’s experience of life is denied in a classroom. Most traditions have had a ban on reading, probably because it impacts your being and living. In our traditions, words are something that have to be given, but more importantly also taken back. The word is not allowed to reside in the world.
We think that reasoning is the highest order of learning, but it’s nothing but enhanced storage. Words are something that give us an Illusion of understanding. This is an interesting book referencing this ‘Alphabet and the borders’ by Schlein. Our basic communication problem is that you can say whatever you want, I will only listen to what I want. We always expect answers from others. But the answers have to come from within.
With a lot more access to objects and spaces, learning is always effortless in rural environments. The urban have forgotten the process of creating knowledge, because urban schools do not need your senses. They operate instead by conditioning. What is conditioning? If a child does not see anyone walking, it will never walk. It will always crawl. The operating principle in schools is imitation and instruction. But children need autonomy. Their qualities are innate, it is the context that brings them out. By helping someone we are denying them the possibility of helping themselves.
The biggest tragedy in education is an absence of curiosity, especially in teachers. Learning for learning’s sake is important. The first thing a child must learn is to love. What they learn is authority and command as they end up imitating teachers. And they come home and play the same games the teachers play in class. Students will become good learners when teachers start learning in school.
Take the example of a question: What is the colour of the sky? If you think it’s blue, go outside and check. A good student would ask his teacher, what time of the day are you referring to? What’s the colour of the leaf? If you think it’s green, go out and find me one with at least 8 colours.
In terms of language, we all speak the language of an imposed father tongue. What we need to be speaking is our experiential mother tongue. Words are given by adults, but meaning is something that kids decide on their own. Let’s leave them free and learn from them. Let’s break down the compartments that have come to define learning today. An enthusiastic mother put her kid into an English Medium School. When the child came home, the mother took up her homework. ‘Beta Ye Gulab hai. Is ko English mein Rose bolte hain. To this, the innocent question that the child had” ‘Math main Gulab ko kya bolte hain?’
It’s our mind that loves language, not the body. Our body is our best teacher. Our senses don’t access the written word. Jinan narrated an incident involving his mother. A news channel was just showing some breaking news. And it was accompanied by drum rolls. As his mother watched intently, her body resonated with the drum rolls. The body heard the drums, the mind the language.
Rural language has more verbs; urban language more nouns. Even then, most nouns are actually pronouns, since they don’t stand for the particular. Many tribal languages don’t have too many adjectives. The village folks are more concerned with experiencing, in the urban folks with possessions. To a city dweller learning is about comparing and differentiating. Dialects are always feminine; language masculine. It’s Bhasha vs Boli. A dialect is not written, so she doesn’t have the power. A Bastar village had a medicine man, who claimed he was 160 years old. And everybody believed him. Because he told this in his dialect. Language believes in objective truths. Language asserts. Dialect suggests. Interestingly, there are no proverbs in languages but only in dialects. Dialects are dying because of our obsession with certainty, because of a fear of the unknown. But creativity is always in the realm of the unknown. It’s ok not to know.
Some of us thought that Jinan was romanticizing the concept of the village. So we had a discussion on poverty and prosperity. He believes poverty is a politically constructed idea. Wealth is actually not measured by possessions, but by the amount of love, care and compassion. Village folks have no shortage of that. Every day of their lives, village children have access to multiple generations. In contrast, urban children only socialize with two age groups: their own and their parents. Rural kids see births and deaths every month in the village. Urban kids see that a few times in their lifetime.
Jinan: To know the world, draw the world.
Doodling is the blabbering of drawing. When we use minimum lines it’s a kind of abstraction.
The kid starts with drawing single objects. But later on progresses to multiple objects and stories. Examples. A snake charmer on Nag Panchami. Drawing leads to comprehension, which is about abstraction, analysis, imagination and deflection. When most people are asked to draw human beings, most often they draw faces. For the rest of the objects, it is always the sides. This is because of the way we always look. We interact with other people face to face. A young girl in Jinan’s class drew a buffalo with a face. He realized it’s because her task at home was to feed the buffalo every day. This was her point of view. Interestingly, most animals are drawn facing left.
Warli paintings were originally sculpting. Using rice paste. Hence the triangles. A kid once had a 200 page book full of windshield and wipers. The interest shows. A kid from Kerala went for a vacation to Srinagar. She came back and made a drawing with two Suns in there. She said it’s very cold in Srinagar, they need more suns. What is important is the process not the product in drawing.
Once at NID, students were asked to draw a model who posed for them. Although all students drew the same model, the teacher came to know who drew what, just by looking at the drawing. Gandhi statues in Bengal looks very Bengali and in Tamil Nadu looks Tamil. A Chinese Ganesha looks Chinese. We tend to draw ourselves.
At NID, one hour is spent every day in the first semester, drawing circles and lines. A potter does the same without requiring any training. An experiment was done in a school. Children had to collect leaves and paint replicate their shades. A pack of 6 poster colours was given. Village children had no problems in this exercise, they could mix and match. This exercise was again repeated in an urban school as part of a staff training program. The drivers and maids could match shades, the teachers could not!
Drawing is a cognitive process to understand three dimensional world in two dimensional space. Only in architecture and design do we connect three dimensions to two dimensions. The tragedy with education is that it is rooted in two dimensional space. Drawing is effortless compared to writing. It is used for selfless expression. Senses are the basis for all art forms. They tell us that objects have: colour, texture, smile, functionality, shape, material.
Interesting random ideas for craft: A paper Chashma. A mud mobile phone. A leaf rangoli. A two wheeler made out of two tires joint by coconut frond. Paying leapfrog on a rolling tire. Model making. Making a scenery with dry leaves. Students even created palettes out of leaves. Collages were made with leaves, with scissors and without scissors. A cloth and thread is given to kids and they are just asked to stitch. In craft we always need to give the bare minimum resources to children. 4 kids drawing together on one page. Themes are given to groups to draw: food, farming, festivals. Drawing with both hands. Old newspapers are given to kids to make a stand which can support of one litre bottle. One of the workshop participants from Nagpur, Karishma, discussed Maker’s Adda – a workshop which can be used by hobbyists for making stuff. A great idea for trying in our school. Not only will our students benefit, but also our community.
Narendra: Living and learning.
Narendra has spent 30 years of his life living with his tribal friends in Chhattisgarh. Once Narendra was asked to do a project on Biodiversity in his village. The researchers wanted him to get all the data, which he did. But he was uncomfortable. He talked to his village elders and discussed this. It is then he realised that biodiversity is not just about data. It’s not about resources. It’s not about the number of bodies. It is about the stories and cultures around plants and trees. Anthropology is actually a living dialogue between humans and the word that Narendra loves to use – the landscape.
Narendra is a college drop-out, and happy to be one. He does not get lost in the world of words. Our lives are based on words. Is it possible for us to look at something and not give a word to it? What is a word? It is a link. It’s used to convey an idea. It’s a generalisation. It’s an abstraction, which captures infinity. Makes our life easier. It does not exist in nature. It is crafted.
Tribals have only 300 to 500 words in their vocabulary. And most of these words are not even used daily. Shame and Justice are words that are not there in the vocabulary of Bastar.
Can we say that the number of words defines the complexity of life? Cut back to urban life. Parents want kids to learn new words every day. Shabdo ka bojh lagta hain baccho pe. The problem is not of communication, it is of comprehension.
Language is oppressive. All that is needed to destroy a landscape is a language. Itna Bole Phir Bhi Keh Nahi Paye. We have words, but can’t speak. Life Meri, agenda aapka. It is because of words that we don’t live our life. You define who you are, by your careers, by your possessions. How are you? is vocabulary that tribals don’t have, because they always happy, always connected to reality. When someone asks Narendra what does he do, he finds it difficult to give an answer. He has never done a job in his life.
And how has the meaning of words changed? There is a phrase in English, to feel at home. Take the example of Delhi. 40 lakh people use Delhi Metro everyday. Add another Modes of transport, and you’ll find that most of Delhi is moving everyday. So if everyone is travelling, who stays at home? The latest work offered by some modern companies is offering beds for employees to stay the night in. So how can we feel at home? Home has now just become the world. What is left of living?
The village that Narendra used to stay in Bastar, was 70 km away from the nearest road. The question Narendra asked us, how long do you think it would have taken him to reach the road? Some of us did the math. 20 km a day in a forest. So it should take between three and four days. Narendra had reasons to walk: to receive letters, to eat jalebis. Others did not. People are not so much in the habit of visiting other villages. But, the rule in the Bastar forest is that you are not supposed to walk alone. And nobody is in a hurry to go anywhere. So reality was, it could take anywhere between three weeks to three months to reach the road.
One day Narendra was walking to a new village. He came across a stream where an old man was spreading his net, trying to catch fish. Narendra asked the old man how far away was the village he wanted to visit. The old man did not reply even when asked thrice. Narendra told himself, that probably the old man was hard on hearing, so he started walking again. Immediately, he got his answer. 10 beedis. In Bastar, distance is measured not in terms of hours, but in terms of number of bidis smoked on the way. He looked back at the old man and told:
‘I asked you three times, yet you didn’t answer. Why?’
‘How can I answer you, when you were standing? I need to see you walking.’
In the West, we are more the doers. In India, things happen to us. Meri Shadi Ho Gayi. Mere bacche Ho Gaye. In Bastar The child happens to us. It is not mine. It’s a free spirit. It’s a visitor who has happened to me. So I treat her like a guest, with respect, not ownership. It is the landscape’s responsibility to bring up a child.
In Bastar, the hunting-gathering is not drudgery. It’s actually a festival, a carnival, a mela. Once in three days the village, men, women, animals – all go to the jungle for this mela. For three months the mother stays behind to breastfeed her kid. After that the mother joins the mela. Vikrant one of the parents, shared his own ideas about food, which were interesting for an urban setting: Don’t keep a fridge at home; Don’t eat anything that is packaged; Fast food should be the last food.
By the time, the kid is three months old, it is left behind on a mat of bamboo, along with the small ones of the animals that stay in the village. On a cold winter morning, all the young ones of all the species lie on the mat and have a good time together. The upbringing is in the togetherness.
In 8 feet by 8 feet room you will find at night more than 30 creatures at night. Narendra once asked a village elder, why couldn’t you have made larger homes. ‘But,’ he said ‘Our homes are big. The room is not the home. Home is outside.’ A room is a place you stay the night in. Everything else happens outside. The food gets cooked outside. The family eats outside. Even childbirth happens outside! And that is also the tradition of the Indian village. A small covered area, and a big verandah or ahata.
And outside is for everybody, common property. Interestingly, nowadays, the ‘commons’ are also owned. Pond are owned by individuals. Grazing Grounds by the panchayat. Temples by the trusts. In Bastar, home is the commons – the jungle. Nature does not have any concept of economy. The concept of economy starts because of wants and shortages. Where there is plenty, there is no concept of economy. You can never live with nature, you should live like nature.
Bastar villages have lots of Gods. God are not sky Gods, but ancestors. There is a god for health, a god for peace, there is even one for the village boundary. When fights happen in the village, prayers are made to the appropriate God to rectify the situation. The first level of appeasement to a god is a sacrifice. It could be poultry, it would be a goat. If the situation is still not remedied, then the god is taken and beaten up, of course in presence of the superior god. Things become alright after that!
We discussed Naxalism and Bastar. Violence is always fomented by outsiders, according to Narendra. In my village, near Baghpat, 40% of the population is Muslim. We have never had violence. Narendra has been going to Bastar since 1980. The Naxalite Movement reached Bastar only 1985. The Dallams have instant justice. If anyone escapes their courts and is caught, they are maimed.
Ranjana and Saurabh: Village Life
Ranjana chatted about her stay in the village of Kurunji, about 70 km from Pune in Bhor taluka. Ranjana stayed in a rented house and would spend two to three days a week in the village. Kurunji is a small community of 70 houses. In small communities, child rearing is collective. Any kid could walk into any house and get anything from there. The community has living houses, where architecture changes as per season. She was doing work with some illiterate women self help groups. The group leader knew who owed how much, with interest, without an education!
The mind’s power comes when we start quantifying. In a village, there is no concept of exact age and numbers. For them, approximations are good enough. There are no clocks in their houses. Kids wake up, have breakfast and go to school. If they are early, they play; if they are not, they attend class. The only clock they refer to is the morning milk collection van.
One day, Ranjana asked an old lady, who was putting in her hen and chicks into a basket for the night. Did you count whether all the chicks are in? ‘I don’t need to’ she replied. ‘The hen will keep on clucking till the time that all the chicks are in.’ Even the animals in the village can count! There is a cow in the village that can operate a hand pump! A psychologist wanted to get a companion for his young kid. A young chimpanzee was got for that purpose. After 6 months, the human kid became more like a chimpanzee, not the vice versa.
Plastic in this village is not wasted. Fertilizer bags are converted to ropes. Plastic bags into scarecrows. There is no full time cobbler or barber. One visits every 15 days. Barber and cobbler shops are out in the open, under the tree. Nothing is outsourced in the village. Kids get involved in house work right from the start. Children don’t do play-acting in a village with children. That’s because kids work with adults from a very early age. They also develop parenting skills early – caring comes naturally to them.
Ranjana talked about an interesting experiment in a pre Primary School in Thane. A teacher decided to adopt the ‘senses’ method to give students 1.5 hours of free play. She told kids ‘I am doing my work you do yours.’ The kids ended up creating interesting play situations. Some of them used grass to replicate a rice transplanting process. Played with chairs.
Saurabh, a film maker, was one of the teachers in the program. He had spent a few months in a village near the Satpura Hills on the MP Maharashtra border. The village speaks a dialect Hareli, with about 2000 speakers. When he first went to stay for 2 months, he stayed 4 km away from the village. And he made 2 films. Later on, when he came back he started staying in the village.
He talked of village life. Kids make boats from leaves. They collect mahua-like seeds from the forest. You can’t eat more than 5 of those seeds, unless you want to be carried back to the village. When he asked the kids about how they could roam around the jungle barefoot, their answer was: Only if you are afraid do snakes bite you. If not, nothing will happen.
When house reconstruction happens in the village, it’s the woman who builds. The man only gets the material. There is a blind girl in the village, who walks normally all around the village. Probably because she considers the whole village her home. Kids play seven or eight types of games. Most of them are concerned only with aim. Kids drawing has a lot of repetition. He showed us a clip of some interesting Chapatti making. Dough is put in between Palash leaves into a fire. It is left there for some time, and comes out with an interesting flavor.
Amol and Zoe: Parenting
Zoe and Amol were teachers at the Sadhana school experiment, which was carried out by Ranjana and the team. Their philosophy was let the kids be. When the kids conversed with kids who knew English like Joey, they picked up the language. Same was for Hindi with Jinan. Their advice to parents: don’t help your kids too much. When parents watch children there are “expectations”
Zoe and Amol have a son, Harnav. As an experiment, they stayed in a mud house in village Kechari, Mulshi for a few years. Harnav is 4 years old today, and has still not gone to any formal teaching place. Interestingly, he speaks English with his American mother and Marathi with his father. Every time Harnav comes to a new environment, he explores to test the limits. He knows that parents trust him, so he will not take undue risks. Zoe believes the absence of toys and television is best for the child. I asked her why did she not stay in the village in so that Harnav could have company. Being an American, she needs her private space. The family is right now planning to take a gap year in this parenting style. Zoe is expecting and so the family has gone to stay at her in-law’s place in Baner. She believes that grandparents tend to look at grand-children as entertainers.