Tasks of the Educationists

” Much education is today monumentally ineffective.

All too often we are giving young people cut flowers

When we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. ”

– John Gardener

About the state of affairs of the education system in modern India, Sri Aurobindo once remarked: “In India the students generally have great capacities but the system of education suppresses and destroys these capacities,” ( India’s Rebirth  p. 178). He didn’t approve of the method of the classroom where students must sit in the classroom for so many hours and pore over their books. What is needed, according to him, is an atmosphere – “a pervasive atmosphere of learning.” The student should imbibe that atmosphere, find out their own aptitudes and develop along those lines. A similar opinion has been expressed by Rabindranath Tagore in his essay on “The Problem of Education”. He compares schools in India to a factory. At the ringing of the bell the factory opens and as the teachers start talking, the machines start working. At four in the afternoon the teachers stop talking when the factory closes and “the pupils then go home carrying with them a few pages of machine-made learning. Later this learning is tested at the examinations and labeled”(Towards Universal Man, ed. Humayun Kabir (Calcutta: Asia Publishing House, 1962) p. 67).

The meaning of the word education is to lead, to bring forth, to educe. The purpose of education is therefore to educe that inner, hidden, latent, dormant potential within every human being. Educational system of India deteriorated in quality because Education was treated in isolation – having nothing to do with other aspects of the individual’s personality, humanity or nature. Decades ago Rabindranath Tagore had pointed out the bankruptcy of the educational system prevailing in India. But at last there was a glimmer of the realization that each human being is a self-developing soul and that the business of the educationists is to enable the child to educate himself. According to Sri Aurobindo the discovery that education must be a bringing about of the child’s own intellectual and moral capacities to their highest possible value and must be based on the psychology of child-nature was “a step forward towards a more healthy because a more subjective, system; but it still fell short because it still regarded him as an object to be handed and moulded by the teacher, to be educated.” He was happy that atleast there was “a glimmering of the realization that each human being is a self-developing soul and that the business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely. Not to be kneaded in an organic being, and pressured into form like an inert plastic material” (“Education of the Child,” Education of the Growing Child, p. 1).The present system of education is content with stuffing information into the student without considering what the student as an individual could contribute  something uniquely his. The student must conform to the standards laid down by the authority who knows nothing of his existence. The examinations test the student’s memory of the past and not to enquire into the future.

J. Krishnamurti says that what we now call education is a matter of accumulating information and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. “Such education, according to him, offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and like all escapes, it inevitably creates increasing misery. . . . mere learning, the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills,(without understanding our relationship with people, things and ideas), can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction”(“ The Right kind of Education,” Education and the Significance of Life( Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation of India,2006) p.17). That means education today is concerned with outward efficiency, and it disregards the inner nature of man. According to J. Krishnamurti, “to educate the student rightly is to help him to understand the total process of himself; for it is only when there is an integration of the mind and heart in every action that there can be intelligence and inward transformation”( Ibid., p. 46).

One of the major causes of the failure of modern education is its overemphasis on technique. Cultivating efficiency without understanding life will make one ruthless. The greatest need for a man as J. Krishnamurti puts it, “is to have an integrated comprehension of life, which will enable him to meet its ever-increasing complexities. Technical knowledge, however necessary, will in no way resolve our inner, psychological pressures and conflicts; . . . The man who knows how to split the atom but has no love in his heart becomes a monster”(Ibid., p.19).

Educationists carrying out theoretical and experimental research in the field of education and the child-psychology in the twentieth century came to conclusions similar to those expressed by Sri Aurobindo. They concluded that the child is foremost a developing being having its own needs, different from those of the adults. Hence the first task of the educationist is to make sure that the child’s needs are satisfied and that the child is happy. Well-known educationist Roger Cousinet observes: “New education . . . is really a new attitude towards the child. An attitude of understanding and love, and above all an attitude of respect. An attitude of expectation, of patience; the restraint of a delicate hand that dare not open a flower-bed nor disturb a baby in the midst of his first experiments, a student in the course of his early work . . . The has within himself everything that is necessary for his true education, and particularly a ceaseless activity, incessantly revived, in which he is totally engrossed, the activity of a growing being who is continuously developing, and to whom, for that very reason, our help may be useful, but our direction is not necessary”(L’Edcation nouvelle, Delachaux et Niestle, Neuchatel & Paris, 1950, pp.20-21, quoted in Pavitra, “The Growing Child,” Education and the Growing Child, p. 29).

What is essential for a child to educate himself I to provide him a proper atmosphere. Tagore always insisted that, for children the atmosphere is a great deal more important than rules and methods, equipment, textbooks and lessons.  According to Tagore, the power of thought and the power of imagination are indispensable for us for discharging the duties of life. We cannot do without those two powers if we want to live like real men. And unless we cultivate them in childhood we cannot have them when we are grown up. Therefore children should be given plenty of opportunity to think for themselves and use their imagination. Tagore also feels that our education bears no relation to our life. According to him the books the books we read paint no vivid pictures of our homes, extol no ideals of our society. The daily pursuits of our lives find no place in those pages. Nor do we meet anybody or anything we happily recognize as our friends and relatives, our sky and earth, our mornings and evenings, or our cornfields and rivers. Education and life can never become one in such circumstances, and are bound to remain separated by a barrier. Tagore compares our education to “rainfall on a spot that is a long way from the roots. Not enough moisture seeps through the intervening barrier of earth to quench our thirst” (“The Vicissitudes of Education,” Towards Universal Man, p.45).

Tagore insisted that the new schools founded should fulfil the following conditions: “that their courses are both lively and varied, and nourish the heart as well as the intellect; that no disunity or discord disrupts the minds of our young; and that education does not become something unreal, heavy and abstract with which the pupils are concerned only for those few hours when they are at school” (“The Problem of Education,” Towards Universal Man, pp. 68-69).

It is relevant here to have an idea about the concept of education in ancient India. Education was conceived as something springing from life itself. It was conceived as a part of the organization of life and it was designed to relate education with life and its highest possible fulfillment. Life itself was considered the great teacher of life. The Vedas and Upanishads were regarded as the records of “integral knowledge”—the synthesis of God-knowledge, Self-knowledge and World-knowledge. Ancient education also emphasized harmonisation of different aspects of personality. The physical being was made a strong base for sustaining the growth, and the perception of the vital, mental, and higher aspects of personality ( Kireet Joshi, Philosophy and Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Other Essays, pp. 380-385).