Repurposing Education
We take for granted that teachers need to teach. The assumption is that ‘I know’ and ‘you don’t’ and therefore my role as teacher is to teach you. The other assumptions we hold as teachers are that you as a student don’t have the capacity to learn on your own. You are therefore dependent on me as a teacher. And that the areas of learning need specialists and I as a teacher am a specialist. Only I know the language needed to understand this specialisation. In fact, the more I create an aura of complexity around a subject the more I justify my existence as a teacher.
Knowledge Stocks vs. Flows
However, what the Internet has done is to democratise knowledge. The student is now empowered to learn from anywhere and at anytime. Knowledge is no longer seen as a fixed stock. It has become more of a continuous flow. Continuously being challenged and renewed by the changing environment and its needs. In the old paradigm the teacher felt that once he/she had acquired this stock of knowledge it ensured him/her of a job as a teacher for life and therefore there was no necessity to continuously learn. So, teachers remained with the same knowledge they had learnt, which made their teaching irrelevant. And ultimately got industry all roiled up.
Teacher as Facilitator
Students are young and ambitious. We are living in times of compression. Children today are learning how to handle the mobile and how to code at very young ages. In fact, some of the brighter ones are becoming entrepreneurs when they are barely in their teens. So, what does the role of a teacher become in this emerging scenario?
The teacher would now be expected to be a facilitator, coach and guide. This means that a lot of learning will be self- learning done by the student. And the teacher would be challenged to know
much more if he/she has to become an effective facilitator, coach and guide. But the irony is that the teacher can never claim to know more than the student in all the possible areas. In fact, in some areas because of the ubiquitous presence of knowledge, the student may know more than the teacher. So, learning would need to become a collaborative search for knowledge with the teacher and students journeying together, co -creating and discovering what needs to be learnt and how it is to be learnt.
Outer and Inner Worlds
We live in two worlds viz. the outer world and the inner world. The outer world would be covered through the learning of formal knowledge which as Peter Senge says is “the academic, explicit, codified facts that any expert would need at his or her fingertips.” For instance, I need the formal knowledge of Geography to understand where am I located and how much do I need to travel to my chosen destination. Similarly, I need the formal knowledge of Biology to better understand my body and so on. This also assumes the transfer and application of this knowledge.
Our inner world however consists of our thoughts, feelings, ideas, concerns, mental models, perceptions and so on. We have very seldom dwelt on the deep connection between the inner world and the outer world in our teaching and learning processes. How we see the world is the way we create it. We have not placed adequate emphasis on this and therefore find ourselves in the dire situation today where we are facing extinction as a species. We have seen nature as being separate from us and therefore have systematically exploited it for our indiscriminate greed. Today we realize that we are a part of nature and because we have very nearly destroyed it, we have literally very nearly destroyed ourselves as a species. We are now waking up to the fact that we need to see nature differently.
Discovering one’s ‘calling’
We have neglected another aspect of our inner world in our teaching learning process. Our inner core which connects us with ourselves or what some may call our soul or others may call our spirit or still others may call the ‘God within’. All of us have a yearning to experience this core, this connect. To discover our unique purpose in this world. To discover our ‘calling’ which is in alignment with our inner being, our essence. But there is so much emphasis on domain knowledge, or formal knowledge that we have forgotten this aspect or even if we address it, we do it in a very perfunctory manner. You can give only what you have. If teachers themselves have not experienced their inner essence and are not at peace with themselves and see their job of teaching as mercenary, then we have only ourselves to blame for the state of the world today.
Children have ideals. Deep down they have dreams. But when children enter our schools they are presented consciously or unconsciously with new purposes which are unrelated to their own desires and aspirations. They need to please teachers, to get good marks on assignments, to receive awards and to be ranked high. Gradually these new purposes are reinforced as they progress from class to class. They have forgotten about what is important and deep down within themselves. They seem to have lost their souls. There is no alignment between the school and the child’s life. Students without a purpose are lifeless learners.
Living Communion
Children are not raw material to be moulded for the heartless needs of industry. They are human beings seeking fulfillment. Their hearts and souls need to be of prime concern, not secondary. One teaches a child and does not just teach mathematics or any subject. As Parker Palmer, an educationist has said “Good teachers bring students into living communion with the subjects they teach. They also bring students into communion with themselves and with each other.”
