The Purpose of Educational Institutions

At a time when utilitarian views dominate the sphere of education, Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, says a college is not just meant for the education of students. And I agree.

He says in an op-ed piece in the New York Times: “… the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically. In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding. When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.”

“Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline. But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching. Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.”

But what is the reality?

Banishing the Thinking, Questioning Mind from Classrooms

Information is static. It is thinking that transforms information into something worth pursuing. So in this information age, are we equipping our students to think or are we just directing them to more and more information? To more facts, more opinions, more nonsense.

And how about the need to understand questions. As R. G. Collingwood argued, we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer. In a sense, the text gives us "possible" answers to only those questions that have been asked. And the same text will vary based on the angles from which questions are posed.

However, a majority of our classrooms are not at all capable of infusing this spirit of enquiry. Despite all technological advances we still seem to be pathetically conservative in our understanding of education. It is still all about exams, professional courses, career and survival. Yes, survival. How to survive the competition and how to focus on self-centered growth. And for this we need measurable outcomes--outcomes that are already determined. And if outcomes are already determined and education is just about measuring where the student stands in relation to the expected outcomes, then what is the role of thinking and questioning (despite all this talk about higher-order thinking). If you already know what someone's higher order thinking will result in, it's not higher order thinking. Let's modestly call it problem-solving.

Education is not just about gathering knowledge. It is not even just about learning to apply this knowledge in some practical context. It is also about learning to question knowledge, methods and accepted wisdom. This sense of questioning and thinking is not to be mistaken with some corporate terms like "out-of-the-box" thinking--which is just another nicer term for problem-solving. Yes, education is not just about problem-solving. It's also about learning to pose new problems which may not have a neat solution. It's not just about learning to reason or accepting truth based on evidence. It's also about about being compassionate to fellow human beings and being open to other ways of thinking, other ways of living and other faiths and beliefs. It's about coming face to face with the ephemeral nature of human life. It's about asking stupid questions like "What is the meaning of life?"

Use of Multimedia in Indian Classrooms

Here is an ad that has been playing on TV for the last few months: The ad opens with a traditional classroom, with a teacher talking and students sitting looking bored out of their skull. Cut to an interactive whiteboard with multimedia visuals. Pan to students who are suddenly energised and eager to learn.

What does one read from this? That a teacher’s monotonous voice will put the class to sleep while a multimedia demonstration with its colourful illustrations, sound effects and voiceover will keep the students awake? However, both the lecture and the multimedia mode seem to share the same assumption—that education is nothing but the transfer of information. That it is a one-way traffic: it either flows from the teacher to the students or from the smart-board to the students. The student remains a passive body whose only responsibility is to assimilate information and answer questions during tests.

If this is the way ICT is going to be adopted in schools, then there is nothing much in it for students. Except that they now get to see a few concepts in visual form. First we used chalk and talk; now we move to observe and listen. Follow this up with drill and test, and we think we have done our duty. While it is a practical necessity for students to score good grades in exams, most of us would agree that it is not the only purpose of education. We still seem to be stuck in the old behaviourist approach of teaching to achieve predictable learning outcomes. If the aim of education is to equip students to set goals for themselves (not just to pursue given goals), then this approach to education is regressive.

Children are natural learners. They learn through experiences and by tinkering with things. They learn by observing things and asking questions. They learn in ways we can’t even imagine. Technology alone will be able to do precious little, if it is introduced without concern for the way children learn and make meanings. We need an adoption model that integrates technology with effective teaching-learning practices and provide scaffolding and space for students to learn on their own.

As a start, classrooms should promote an environment of inquiry, experimentation and dialogue. We should lay bare the porous borders that compartmentalise different subjects. We should acknowledge the differences in aptitude and provide room for each child to build on his or her strengths.

Education and Politics

When I was in school, Civics was considered the most boring subject. Full of constitutional and legal details, all effort was made to make this subject as dry as possible! So, I was delighted when I read this bit in the National Curriculum Framework:

“It is suggested that instead of Civics, the term Political Science be used. Civics appeared in the Indian school curriculum in the colonial period against the background of increasing 'disloyalty' among Indians towards the Raj. Emphasis on obedience and loyalty were the key features of Civics. Political Science treats civil society as the sphere that produces sensitive, interrogative, deliberative, and transformative citizens.”

Layers of Learning

A Counterview on Preservation

Adoor Gopalakrishnan, an award winning Malayalam film director, in one of his interviews talks about improvisation and contextualisation of performances in the context of Kerala's art forms. According to him no performance is a repetition of an earlier performance regardless of the sameness of its theme. He adds that the modern obsession with preservation (recording, documenting, etc.) is a western import.

This can be rubbished as the romantic view of an artist steeped in nostalgia. But there is some merit in this argument even in the context of education. At a time when one section of the e-learning fraternity is constantly arguing against the repetition of live lectures and replacing them with recorded ones, we tend to forget the fact that a great lecturer is also a great performer. She improvises and works on her argument each time she talks about the same concepts. Being a great fan of the TED lectures, I'm obviously in favour of recording, too; it's just that recording is not a replacement for a live lecture.

Excerpts from the Adoor interview:

“The problem with recording is that it would be taken for the norm. One of the great qualities of our culture is that nothing is staged or performed with a view to be preserved. Every performance is for that evening. Tomorrow it will be created again.

Once I went to Kadammanitta to watch Padayani. In the late evening they were all busy painting makeshift masks and making the costumes and those huge and spectacular headgears. All that is done on fresh arecanut sheaths and tender coconut leaves lending the make-up a certain ethnic authenticity. They take on a special glow in the light of the oil torches. Once the performance is over, those headgears and perishables are simply discarded. That night, when I came away I brought some of the masks with me. But after a day or two, they just withered and shrank. A Padayani performer doesn't have to create anything for preservation. He is confident that he can always create it anew, anytime, and always afresh. It is a great concept. Take our 'kalamezhuthu' for instance. We draw this colourful and wonderfully intricate Kalam only to erase it at the end of the ritual. This obsession with preservation is totally western--this idea of plucking something from its natural context and keeping it. For us it is part of a continuum. Our climate is not quite kind to the idea of preservation either. These torrential rains and sultry summers don't allow any kind of preservation. It destroys and in turn replenishes too. A summer would dry up everything. But rains would give everything a rebirth.”

Knowing

Knowing is the act of appropriating knowledge as one’s own. It’s a more nuanced term than learning. If educational environments start paying more attention to the nature of knowing, we would probably see some drastic changes in the way we approach teaching and learning.

For one, knowledge is presented as hard, concrete, and incorruptible by individual minds. And the way to reach this hard substance and acquire it is often laid out on a unidirectional map. On the other hand, imagine knowledge as malleable, clay… and knowing as the act of playing with it, making models of it.

Look at what happened to computers and why there has been an explosion of ideas in the field of computing. From intimidating codes and scary looking interfaces, the computer evolved as a friendly plaything for the average user. Playing (not necessarily in the sense of playing games) leads to experimentation and new ways of using things.

What is missing in educational curriculum is this sense of play, this sense of tinkering.