What do we need to change? A response.

Ten years ago, in April, I started writing this blog really to explore certain interests, and work on the quality of writing with the sense of a possible audience.  In that time it appears that I have written 70 blogs which neatly corresponds to the age I reached at the beginning of this month. The posts have been seen, not necessarily read, 25,500 times, and there have been a few comments. 

So I am beginning this year with the first in a series of essays on learning. This one is in response to question I received from a friend who lives in Udaipur, India.

The role of the guru (teacher) in the old Indian system of teaching in modern day parlance. Is there a difference, what were the views of people like Krishnamurti, Bohm and Tagore? If it is there what serves learning better? As we come from a system that was created to run factories and businesses to one which caters to services, or one that needs more thinkers, what do we need to change?

 

I think it is quite helpful to have a view of where education is now. It seems to me that modern education in terms of schools, colleges and universities is based on teaching rather than learning. Essentially the process is one where content, curriculum, is delivered to the learners by teachers. The prime manner of delivery is formal and increasingly authoritarian, requiring students to produce mostly prescribed outcomes. The overwhelming mode of learning is passive, and is measured through short-term performance, usually written. Consequently, good academic achievement is based on having a sound memory and the ability to write quickly and effectively, which leads to a somewhat limited learning process.

 

It seems to me worth considering the role of the guru in pre-British approach to learning in India as it highlights the effects of the industrialised and utilitarian worldview of the colonising power and gives the opportunity to reflect on the present context from a different background.

 

Here is a piece from Krishnamurti’s book ‘Unconditioning and Education’ published by Krishnamurti Foundation of America in 2015. The book is a collection of dialogues with parents and teachers at the Oak grove School in California.

 

‘The ancients, both Egypt and India, and China, of course, thought of education not in terms of society, nor in terms of merely conforming to the edicts of society; they were concerned with the culture of the mind, with the culture of the mind that is capable of intelligent action in society, not merely performing to the pattern of society.’

 

This indicates a fundamental difference in viewing the question of, what is education for. And, therefore, offers the opportunity of exploring learning. If, as the case is now, education is dictated by society in the form of political and economic expediency, then learning is all about acquiring knowledge, about content. 

 

However, if we are concerned with the culture of the mind, then the limits that society has put on education are broken and it is possible to experience learning as an inquiry into the whole of life, free of the external and internal shackles created by generations of assumptions and conditioning. This is, I feel, particularly relevant in our time of instant communication, information and opinion dressed up as fact. A mind ‘that is capable of intelligent action’ is unlikely to be prey to misinformation, having the ability to see what is false and what is true; whilst being wary of conclusions.

 

There is a book titled ‘Changing Consciousness: exploring the hidden source of the social, political and environmental crisis facing our world’ which is a result of dialogues between David Bohm and Mark Edwards in 1991. In this Bohm asks the question –

 

‘Can we learn to become more learning-orientated individually and collectively, rather than ‘I know’ oriented?’

 

So that the processes of learning are held to be of intrinsic value that are not solely determined by outcome, by result. Again, I see this as having the potential of contributing to a profound shift in approach to education away from the military/factory base in which we find ourselves.

 

If I can take this further through some comments from a book by Kathleen M O’Connell entitled ‘Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet as Educator’ published in 2002, which look at the qualities of the teacher.

 

‘He (Tagore) felt that a teacher’s ability to recognise the unique personality of each child and guide each accordingly to his/her capacities was far more important than facility for a particular teaching method.’

 

‘A born teacher is the man in whom the primal child responds readily to the call of children…

 

…the ideal teacher realises that to teach is to learn.’

 

 

There are I would say, echoes of the ancient view of the role of the guru in education in what Krishnamurti, Bohm and Tagore are saying here, and that the relevance to where we are now is that relationship between the guru as the teacher and the students forms the foundation of education. Presently, most conversations concerning education and learning seem to be around policy, improvement of standards and examination of data: shifting change on a superficial level without questioning the status quo. 

 

What particularly interests me arising from my experience, conversations and reading, is this extraordinary significance of that relationship between educator and the learner; and that we should be examining that relationship and holding this exploration as a major step in making the changes needed to our approach to learning.