‘Let Children Make Their Own Discovery’

Despite deeply skewed standards of education in schools and colleges, we still believe education can only be obtained within a formal system. But scientist & innovator Sonam Wangchuk, who has created his own creative schools to produce genius, doesn’t think so.  In a chat with Waqar Ahmed Fahad, the education reformist says we re going against the nature by putting our children in closed classrooms instead of letting them out in the open and helping them make their own discoveries.

What is your take on the current one-size-fits-all method of education that a majority of our institutions follow? How can a change be brought about?
I think education cannot be “one size fits all” because people are different. No two people are similar. Their ways of learning are different and their lives in future will be different. So it has to be more flexible than what we have. What we have today is more like industrial schools, all mechanically organised into boxes then you put the products into different boxes and put a blanket solution to all. Children can be so different and they are good at very different things. Some are very good at intellectual things, others at physical things, and both are important. As they say, you cannot judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. So you can’t tell someone “you are a failure” just because you are judging them on things that are not their strength. Therefore it (the system) needs to be more flexible. I understand that we are dealing with a large population and therefore will not be as Gurukuls used to be, but still, even in the current system, we stress on science and mathematics as if nothing else was important.

Knowledge creation is more significant than knowledge dissemination. What is your opinion?
I am saying for a country like India, we need to help children create their own knowledge and take ownership of it.  And that happens when they do their own experiments and discoveries, rather than just basing everything from reading somebody else’s writing, and making some standard answer. Reproduction of that (is seen) as success of education — that’s one of the saddest things in our system. All our exams are based on reproducing standardised answers. And where you can’t have any creativity, any flexibility, you can’t have innovation. It will be somebody else’s knowledge disseminated through transacted, administered, doctored, but it won’t be your own experiential learning. So what we need to do in this country is let people create their own discoveries and take ownership of their own learning.

How do you ensure that the misfits and failures in the present education system are successful through your institution?
First of all, I wouldn’t call them failures. You have to look at our school system which is totally not how nature wants young people to learn. You have schools that trap you in a dark, dingy classroom for eight hours which is not our nature. We are outgoing by nature and cannot be held in a room. Putting children in a room, and then lecturing them all day, making them scribble things, cannot be called education. So, in a system like this that is at fault, somebody who fails is maybe actually better than others. As the system itself is so much at fault, I would consider those who are not doing well to be more normal than those who are doing very well in the present system. I think, like the young ones of any species of animals, human offsprings too by nature are designed to learn by doing things out in the nature, in the wild, amidst dangers even. And we have never learnt like this ever. As hunters, our children were always out in the wild nature, tackling dangers together with the grownups and learning. As settled farmers, our children were again for the last 10,000 years out with the adults in the field, doing things and learning. It’s only in the last 300 years, since the industrial revolution, that we have put them in these factories and made them do uniform things.

A question that troubles most students and parents is what makes a successful future-engineering, MBA or both? 
In my opinion success is a happy person. And a happy person can be with or without engineering or MBA. A very unhappy person with the best of MBA or engineering degree is not someone you would call a success. Someone who is depressed and wants to jump off a cliff with top scores in MBA is hardly a success. In our country we are somewhat obsessed with achievements of this kind — degrees, marks, ranks. And then, once you have finished education, your turnover becomes your ranking. I think, this is an unfortunate copying of the West. The West, I feel, is at a very primitive stage of making life into a journey of fulfilling desires. So we have become like bottomless buckets where you put anything, your computer, your mobile, your car, but it doesn’t fill because it is bottomless. What Buddha said was basically to put a bottom to your bucket and the few things you have will fill it and you will be content. So contentment is success for me. So today when we see all these people talking about startups and ventures and entrepreneurship, while it’s great that people start new things, innovation is great, entrepreneurship is great, I don’t like this thing about the desire to become a multi-billionaire, a multinational. You shouldn’t, you needn’t. You could just be a small entrepreneur in your own village but be happy, and that’s beautiful. This is what will make this planet a beautiful, peaceful planet. It is this thing about going multinational and multi-billion is what has caused the planet to almost die. The climate change, global warming, melting glaciers,  rising sea levels are all thanks to this multi-billion, multinational desire-satisfying trend that we are following. We should actually lead the way for the West rather than following their unsuccessful ways.