Shikshantar – The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development

The idea of school has always perplexed me. Sure, it seems well-intentioned. Sometimes I even like it. How can I complain? Every once in a while I get a decent instructor and subject matter that can hold my attention for the full ninety minutes. But when I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last weekend, my eyes were opened up to more than just the paintings and sculptures that surrounded me.

Remind me again why I go to school for an Art History class that costs $270 (not including the textbook, which the professor reads from verbatim anyway) when I could spend 25 cents to go and see the real things?

Drilling an ‘artist’s vocabulary’ into our heads becomes utterly unnecessary when you walk through the exhibits; the words come as naturally as the works are striking. The contemplative restraint and repose of medieval art is plainly demonstrated by a man that seems to sigh while getting his eyes gouged out in an intricate relief altarpiece by Embriachi, while Jean Cornu’s Renaissance-era Venus Giving Arms to Aeneas’ sweeping melodrama pulls you in so closely, that if you’re not careful you might set off an alarm.

Oops.

(To be fair, I don’t think that even Jesus, or the Buddha, or whoever, could have resisted touching these sculptures. Maybe for a little while, sure – even I could do that. But lock them up, alone, in the museum for ten days, and you see what happens. They’re like hot stoves to children – burning with energy and simply begging to be touched. I swear, if you step close enough, these things defy the first law of thermodynamics.)

Someone please explain, exactly, why I need somebody else to evaluate, on a scale of 0-100, whether or not I am sufficiently appreciating art (as if that’s a valid thing to judge anyone for in the first place), but especially when that ‘art’ is just two-dimensional pictures in a book? Since when can x-number of credit hours honestly and accurately determined how much worthwhile knowledge I have gained?

And I’m not the only one to feel this way.

“There is so much pressure on engineering here,” says Sagar, an engineering student in Bangalore. “It’s considered by most to be ‘the best thing’ to do. If someone were to take up the pure sciences, or architecture, or the arts (God forbid), then people begin to think he has done so only because he isn’t meritorious enough for engineering. And in engineering again, there are these ridiculous notions. Computer or Electronics Engineering is considered to be the most prestigious. Almost everyone wants to do it, without the slightest idea as to what it really is, or what it means for them. And people inwardly sigh if you tell them you’re doing Chemical Engineering, or Metallurgy.

There are so many people here who are so unimaginably narrow-minded that think if they do well at college, or get some rank, they are successful in life. Outside school, they don’t exist. They have no hobbies; they are indifferent to so many issues. Here, in India, if you can learn the textbook by heart, you can secure a one hundred percent in your exams. And that’s the ‘successful’ everybody wants to see. It’s pathetic.”

In a country that desperately needs the creativity of its citizens to come together and craft solutions to its infinitely complex problems, it seems a crime to standardize education and the definition of ‘success’.

So when fourteen friends got together and decided to take a cycling yaatra (यात्रा - journey) around the city of Udaipur, Rajasthan for one week in order to reclaim the freedom of their education, it was a revolutionary gesture. How could these students, mostly from middle-class homes, be rebelling against a ‘privilege’ that is such a precious commodity to lower-class Indians?

The first tenet of the Shikshantar movement addresses the question bluntly: rather than being an escape from impoverishment, the formal education system is a means of stratification between the educated and the uneducated; it perpetuates inequality by labeling, sorting, and ranking human beings. It propagates the viewpoint that diversity is an obstacle, which must be removed rather than utilized if society wishes to progress. Schooling confines the motivation for learning to a superficial reward system, and disconnects knowledge from practical wisdom and living experiences.

Formal education privileges literacy in a few elite languages and degrades human expression and creation in other tongues. It causes people to distrust their native languages while relying upon newspapers, TV and radio for reliable information. It not only limits the scope of knowledge, then, but also reduces the sphere of opportunities for learning through abstract barriers (such as culture and language) but also physically (by institutionalizing education.) It invalidates learning experiences outside the four walls of the schoolhouse and of the English language. It degrades the dignity of labor; the learning that takes place through day-to-day experience and physical work.

It artificially separates human rationality and human emotion, inhibiting the sensitivity and aesthetic sensibility needed for creative output. Feelings are eschewed as inappropriate at times when they could actually be used as motivation and valuable tools for progress. Arguably the worst effect, it disintegrates the intergenerational bonds of families and communities, causing people to increasingly rely upon the government, science and technology, and the global market for their sense of identity, livelihood and self-worth. It exploits people, nature, and knowledge on a market of buy-sell relationships.

The students combated this by using the world as their classroom a week. They carried no money and refused to engage in monetary transactions; they didn’t eat without an honest day’s worth of physical labor. They approached the surrounding farming villages as learners seeking to change their own urban lives, not as ‘teachers’ trying to change others. And, most importantly, they offered of themselves freely and received from others with gratitude and humility.

Most learning is experiential anyway, isn’t it? We hardly get to pick and choose the lessons life teaches us.

The formal education system we have today was historically designed for the industrial economy. The public schools – which serve the university elite – emerged in the 1800s and reached their zenith in the 1950s. In the old days, education was one-size-fits-all. Schools have since been steeped in history and static knowledge; they fail to capture the here-and-now and to prepare us for contemporary society and the emerging issues of our time.

The Venezuelan Ministry for the Development of Human Intelligence enacted a series of programs and projects in the 1970s and ‘80s to improve its educational system and expound upon each person’s individual strengths and talents. These programs were offered for people of all ages – from birth to elderly age. By employing every available resource and reaching out to people across the nation, from the farms and rural areas to urban communities, the Venezuelan government promoted life-long learning for people of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds. Our nation is now slowly awakening to the educational needs of our times as we slip further behind on the global scale. President Obama is urging all Americans to seek higher education. But we must also take into account the radical changes that need to be made for college degrees to actually be considered valuable, and also to ensure that the disadvantaged peoples of the United States receive equal opportunities and ease of access to tools that can change their communities and their lives. Encouraging creativity through government programs, such as Venezuela has done, may be a starting point.

We also need to get honest about what ‘education’ really means. We either need educational reform in order to promote individual freedoms and the pursuit of happiness, or admit that school is designed to produce faithful, obedient citizens for jobs that require little more than technical skill and de-emphasize originality in the workplace. (I’m guessing the latter won’t be too popular.)

If you’re interested in learning more about the Shikshantar movements, check out their website at www.swaraj.org/shikshantar. The site has a huge database of alternative schooling-related articles that go into much more detail and propose a variety of future frameworks for societal learning.