Tarini felt deep, deep sadness. There, before her, the newspaper talked about a young 15-year-old girl who was raped by an 18-year-old friend and neighbour. It was always that, wasn’t it, she thought sadly. The boy had then gone on to set the child on fire. How does an 18-year-old harbour such violent thoughts?
Eighteen was so young! As young as Idris, her office boy who she was training in English. Idris was like a child, playing the prank, vaulting himself over the table, doing a Michael Jackson every time the phone rang... Could the ‘accused’ 18-year-old be any different?
Just then, Mahi Iyer poked her head in and said, “Four students today working on your training videos library. I will pick them up at 12.” Mahi Iyer, the counsellor from Wisdom Park, brought her students for community service to Tarini’s Empower, an NGO that strived to deliver employability to the underprivileged.
Tarini nodded in acknowledgement and tapping on the newspaper, asked, “How did sensuality enter the mind of an 18-year-old?” While Mahi caught on, as the news had shaken everyone, Tarini continued, “Isn’t that the behaviour of animals?”
Mahi: So it is. But the human being does have the ability to discriminate between good and not good. Right and not right. Because humans have intellect. Animals don’t. They respond only to senses. See bone, must eat. Hear doorbell, must bark.”
Tarini: Then what happened to the discrimination of this 18-year-old?
Mahi: Not trained to be used. I have an iPod, which does not play music for me because I have not trained myself to use it. If we are not taught to filter our thoughts through our intellect, then what you get is behaviour sans intellect, that is, animalistic.
Tarini: So, who do we blame for his untrained or unused intellect?
Mahi: The system that does not educate towards wisdom. The intellect is an equipment that works with the mind — and this, only education can show us. My Master talks of tendencies in the mind, which convert to desire, which translates to thought; thought to action must interface with the intellect, which is the internal auditor, showing us right from wrong.
This Tarini thought was wisdom. This, she felt was the role of education. But where was education? Teachers laboured over market equilibrium and Bayes’ Theorem, but did education talk about how the mind gets inflamed and contaminated? Why didn’t schools talk about understanding one’s body and helping the mind manage the irrational feelings of the body? Gone was Moral Science; in had come intolerance and ‘your religion and my religion.’ And with the bathwater, out went the baby too.
Tarini felt rotten for the 18-year-old accused. He too was likely studying algebra and isosceles triangles but knew nothing about managing complex visuals that the internet and mobile phone delivered to him as amusement. Hence his body’s responses. What value was this economic development if it could not ensure a high standard of life? Nobody had ever thought for him or students like him. Finally this was an era of laissez faire and profit. Bitterly she said to Mahi, “I have maintained this view that the age groups of 0-23 and 65-100 are not considered productive or profitable for the country and hence not invested in. The productive investible, profitable age for the country is 24 to 60.”
Mahi: Improve on that, please?
Tarini: Why would I invest in quality education in free schools and government schools, when I have nothing to gain? I would rather invest in a cricket team or in telecom.
And just then, Idris came and announced that her class was ready. Tarini told Mahi to join in. “Always valuable to have a trained teacher in the class!” she said to Mahi. “No, don’t worry it is just ‘Watch and Learn’ day. They have been for observation to a kirana store. One of them will present and the others will discuss.”
Tarini was joined by Bishnu Das, a retail specialist who trained her students. “We know the jobs you are doing currently is not a job you are going to stick with for life,” said Tarini to the 17 young boys and girls. “ You are going to experience new things, apply that in work and grow — to become a manager, one who manages as against one who has been doing. And carry more responsibility.
What ‘carry more responsibility’ means, we will see when Deepak presents today’s interaction between customer and shopkeeper at Family Stores. Come, Deepak….”
Deepak (gave a preamble to what they had observed and went on): So, the lady was saying this glass has a crack. Shopkeeper told her, it was not cracked when we sold it. Lady said, are you saying I am lying. Shopkeeper’s boss came and said, 'Let it be, give her a new glass’. So, I feel, shopkeeper was unhappy about replacing the glass. He felt lady was lying. He felt insulted. Lady also felt insulted. Actually both were insulting each other. Then discussions began.
Student 1: Customer should check what she is buying.
Student 2: Customers usually check.
Student 3: Shopkeepers are grouchy.
Student 4: Haanh, they don’t seem to like their work.
Student 5: Shop boss handled it well.
Student 6: These things happen.
Basu: Deepak, please summarise!
Deepak: The salesperson must make sure customer checks what she is buying. While showing a product, one must take it out of the box and make sure what she sees is what is packed.
Basu: Very good observation. Any good things in this interaction?
Deepak: Shop boss. He settled correctly. Some shop owners argue.
Tarini: So?
Deepak: Settle the problem. We want customer back. So, be friendly. Don’t be suspicious…
Tarini: And anything that you did not feel good about?
Student 6: Shopkeeper was not looking at lady while talking. He was busy tidying up and he did not look at her. But we saw that he was muttering under his breath.
Student 3: So, no full attention to solution and no respect also. When the class broke after 25 minutes, Mahi smiled. “You are getting them to look at the good aspects, so they are not only criticising! To learn you need both. Can I get my students to come and watch one day? In your methodology, you bring about learning through observation. Not through the words of others. You see, you experience, you learn.”
Basu: And discuss and upgrade your knowledge yourself. Standard courseware uses text books. But education is not merely following a text book and completing a syllabus. That model restricts your learning to the boundaries laid out by a text book. And worse, when Rasesbhai is unable to implement my Kotlerian ideas, we call Rasesbhai ‘backward’, failing to see that Indian retail is different and needs a cultural understanding.
Mahi: I know. Schools compress Indian history into 1,500 pages and feed all this to the student who gulps every piece of information from emergence of humans and domestication of animals and plants pre 1 BCE to the Treaty of Rarotonga in 1986.
Students ask, ‘Why did Army X battle army Y and what did they feel threatened about? What kind weaknesses were there which caused nations to be taken over by other nations?’ Don’t forget, today with TV and podcasts, you are watching history in realtime; hence minds are bursting with questions. But in our rush to ‘complete syllabus’, we shush them and herd them with ‘you focus on what you have to study, we can come to all this later.’
There is no later, Tarini! This is that later! One student asked me, “Did freedom do for us what we thought it would do for us?” You see, there lies real learning and I see your model of teaching very intriguing! There is a book called The Guilt of Nations, which talks about the reparation that invading attacking nations owe to the invaded and attacked. Hence Germany to the Jews and so on. Elazar Barkan, the author, makes a statement, ‘As long as we are denied our rights, liberation remains incomplete’. Fabulous?
I had an over-samosas talk with the History class on “incomplete liberation” and ‘Do we think about the damage our supercilious domination in any situation, causes to the people?’ The discussions were brilliant!
Basu: Knowledge must talk to our ignorance. You really don’t need 1,500 printed pages of textbook. You need to churn the mind… that in itself brings about learning. People try to redefine education, and over time, have made education a monster!
Mahi: So then, why is our conventional education not working?
Tarini: Because we are expecting it to do various things other than what the original intention was. I am seeing these boys and girls. They have been to small, vernacular medium schools. They say, ‘we want to speak English then we can start earning.’ I ask them, ‘Assume you can speak English; What work can you do?’ Education is about building ‘ability’, helping you to recognise the problem, identify it, articulate it, to look at the entire picture and know how to use information. Today, we passionately stuff them with knowledge. Education actually should lead to enabling you to applying that knowledge in the work situation or life situation as well.
Basu: Oh, you will like this. Tarini and I had a meeting of the industry associations with the teachers and principals of colleges on the employability of students. The colleges were finding that not all their students were getting employed. And industry was saying you are churning out so many students; how come we are still short of manpower. Suddenly colleges said you tell us what industry needs and we will prepare students. Prepare? Shaped, moulded, fitted with, like a made-to-order piece? So, their attitude was — ‘This is the knowledge I will download on the class. And if you have failed to understand the concept that is your failure!
Tarini: Do you see what education has come to mean? Today what I see is the teacher is more petrified of the exams than the student. And she rushes and frets and chases and creates the panic. It’s like, ‘there is a huge monster behind that door, and you have to go open it. You better be strong…’ Asking the student to ‘be strong’ without building the strengths!
Mahi: Schools today are required to ‘teach’ values as part of the curriculum. Can you teach values like this? Values have to be felt and owned as an ideology.
You tell students be honest, be truthful. What does it mean? Being honest does not mean not telling lies. It stands for much, much more. If the whole environment is not based on values, what does the student pick up? Only simple word meaning.
But I tell them, values go beyond and encompasses much more than their immediacy. When the moment to apply the values comes, the word meaning won’t help. The mind and the residual feelings it throws up; the fear, the anxiety, the failure, disappointment — managing to deal with these in the context of values, is teaching values.
Tarini: Meaning?
Mahi: Say, you are rushing for work, break a signal, get caught... your mind is saying, damn it, give him Rs 100 and let’s go! But if you choose to stand by your values, then the following will happen: Boss will glare, client will be annoyed, somebody else will make the presentation and could take it in the wrong direction, appraisal is coming up... sticking to values means losing out on all these and not regretting.
Can you deal with all the consequences with equanimity? Or will you fear for your appraisals and bribe the cop? This is what education has to do, no textbook can do that. Who said it has to teach you quantum physics?
Tarini: You worry about students who have opportunity in life. These 39 young boys and girls trust me to make them employable. What do they have? Also a school degree. Their parents are farmers, vendors, drivers, peons, masons... that section of society without whom you and I cannot survive. But their parents will not have their children do their kind of labour. They want them to be educated and successful.
Ours is a 50-day programme.
These are all kids who have flunked school, or have not had the exposure or are from backgrounds that makes it hard for them to relate to society. So, our curriculum is based on practicals. So, what do you need to sell a thing? But we would put it in the context of the overall business, the supply chain and so forth to help them see what their role is in the overall scheme of things. And so, give it the fullest attention so that the next tier in the belt receives a perfect input to work with.
Basu: We cannot keep them here for a whole year; they cannot afford that. In a short time, we have to teach students to apply knowledge. What do I do with knowledge if I do not know what to do with it?
Skills means carpentry, mobile phone repair, laptop repair and so on. So, what I teach them has to do a lot lot more than what your school students expect from say schooling. They have time and money to go up in stages. These students here have neither time nor money. Therefore what we teach them here cannot merely teach them to repair ‘a’ phone; but tomorrow mobile phones will evolve into another level of technology; the student must learn to adapt to the new level and learn to move on, still be able to make a living, be able to self-educate, know where to now move, in what direction to move to make this new knowledge relevant to himself.
Hence what we teach must help them one, to state problems, recognise the problem, be able to define it clearly; not enumerate the symptoms. Two, the ability to say, things are changing in the environ, I need to teach myself, need to change the way I am thinking currently and in line with changes in technology; so I should devise a new paradigm for thinking itself. Education should empower me like this!
Tarini: Correct. But to do that, I need to recognise that something is changing. To know change, to spot the change, the variations. How is the new OS, for example, different from the last one and is this changing the route for accessing data? If yes, then what next? But what has happened is a lot of people have got badly outdated. There is a book by Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future. He examines how the future of tech will change the face of these very tech-led industries and asks, how will we adapt to the changing nature of work. He asks what can today’s parents do to prepare their children for tomorrow?
I ask, are parents really looking into the future? Not in order to design your child’s life, but to stimulate that young mind enough to see a larger, bigger picture. Ross is painting a scary picture of what could happen, that the middle classes that have come out of poverty in countries like India and China can slip back into poverty if we are not careful. Why? These are those who took advantage of the low labour cost market and climbed into the lap of innovation. But if these kids don’t adapt, learn and get prepared for change, they will fall back into that old poverty. For the future belongs to those who run with change. Are we investing in that level of teaching, Mahi? So, when those college principals and teachers told me, ‘Tell us and we will prepare them’, I was angry.
Basu: You therefore need to notice change and accept that you need to level with it fast. Learn to paddle in the new flow, learn new strokes. The water being the same, the current is going to be different…
Tarini: Correct. That is one more of the competencies to develop. I also have Grade 12 pass kids here. Like you. And I find them unskilled to deal with change.
The ability to recognise change and adapt. And the ability to solve problems — this does not come till you are taught to do it. You can’t leave it to common sense. Basically you have to LEARN how to solve problems.
Mahi: Ah! Commonsense also has an expiry date! It has a context. Other things remaining the same, for a given period that sense remains common to all things in that period. But when things change and in a quantum manner, it changes across the board, as for example with the coming of mobile phones, market behaviours changed, human behaviours changed, attitude and response to business by the small entrepreneur including your hole-in-the-wall plumber — changed; consumer behaviour changed; response to products changed, product advertising changed; even the paradigms in advertising changed. From a ‘beta khayaal rakhna!’ entreaty to a son headed to a new job in a new city, rain pouring, mother weeping, today mother sends SMS to son, ‘All good beta?’ There was a whole quantum shift in the appearance of the world. Now, my common sense has to become version 2.0 . The old version 1.0 cannot operate this new market, you see? That is what I mean when I say common sense is not always common to all times. And that is why I am advocating for a mix of subjects in school, not compelling students to make choices at age 14!
Basu: You got it! Therefore we teach them it is ok to aspire to grow out of being repair man and sales person. That he is going to change and find another job; that their needs will change. So, we decided to equip them as people and make them adaptable so that they will always find their way around. The idea was to equip them for beyond just the skills for a job, that is when you ensure they remain out of poverty. If you say I am going to train you so that you can get a job, that is limiting. Tomorrow should something in the equation change, some variable change, these people are going to be back on the streets. And just as confused as before.
Tarini: Absolutely. Suppose their small retail shop was going to transform to modern trade, say a hypermarket, they should have the cheerfulness and ability to extrapolate on the small knowledge and arrive into the larger vision that their organisation is now developing.
Basu: Jobs are a plenty, it is people with initiative and drive that are missing or difficult to come by.
Tarini: And initiative and drive is not a skill that you can teach, it is a function of education.
Education has to give you that inner confidence that you teach me a little and I can pick that up and run. That confidence education must bring. Why do you need school to read text books?! School time should teach how to apply knowledge, how to work with knowledge!
Read analysis: Nisha Nair | Kaushik Gopal | G. Gautamacasestudymeera@gmail.com
