Every Friday at SEA, we hold an "Assembly" where we discuss current issues with the entire school. The topic is generally chosen a week in advance and two or more people are appointed to frame the context of the discussion. Often, readings are circulated - including articles, news, essays or other material in public domain. Students are expected to participate and respond to the issue at hand. Yesterday, we were to discuss Dr. B R Ambedkar's "Annihilation of Caste", written as a paper in 1944, however never presented. Students were not prepared (much like always), for they had not read the book or looked topically upon the subject. The dissatisfaction of the faculty rose to an extent that it ended up in setting up rules for compulsory readings as well as summary-writing for everyone, per week, for a session that was otherwise more voluntary and discursive in nature.
Pro-active students opposed, and debated the imposition. These were also students who were more attuned to current political affairs, were good in verbal and written expression, well trained in English. Amidst a gathering of about 80 students, the number of these students could be counted on fingertips. It was strange to see these students talking for the rest, loud and clear, while others seemed to have already submitted to both - either the opinion of their vocal counterparts or to the faculty who had just announced a strong imposition. Their eyes down, faces with blank expression or even the self imposed silence was worth observation.
Let me make the situation more vivid - the faculty's intrusion of this silence didn't seem appropriate, for it made him more and more agitated. Struggling to understand and at the same time remain with the students' restraint, he kept making allegations and suggestions: "Why don't you all read? Can you not read 20 pages in a week? You can certainly write 5000 words in 10 days. You people do not have any capacity to sit for one hour in a place and read. Do you realise that you all can not read any thing beyond fiction? (shouting) You have to make it a practice to read..."
Perhaps the students did not register the essence of any of his questions. Instead, the faculty's rising voice, as well as temper created an environment of intimidation. It did not allow the students to reflect and speak out, but silenced them further. Rather, his laments were received as instructions - "you have to read, you have to write, you have to increase your stamina to absorb..." Any rebuttal or attempt to argue personal difficulties by the student would have been engulfed in his anger and thrown back at him/her. It happened - when the so called vocal group refuted to the idea of writing, they faced strong back lash. Eventually the faculty realised this perhaps, and in wanting to cool down, began to divert the discussion into a more productive one - engaging the students in the kind of topics they would indeed like to discuss over the coming 10 weeks, ascertaining students who would head the seminars for SEA Assemblies.
Yet, I had an intrusion within the above drama - much earlier, trying to open up a dialogue (otherwise SEA Assemblies turn out to be monologues, with only the faculty speaking). I strongly believe that one can not begin to absorb instructions unless a prior experience has deeply affected, influenced and motivated a certain necessity for one to open oneself up to a particular kind of knowledge. For example, unless one has personally experienced discrimination of any kind (body, gender, caste, class, etc.), he/she may not be able to relate to the discussion on minority politics or other-ing. Unless one has faced adversity, one may not realise how deeply economics is related to one's outlook (socio-economics) of everyday actions. Most middle class students, like I was, are fairly insular to these debates. They are socio-culturally trained and coated in a thick layer of perceived moral values which become the default mechanisms through which they rationalise actions in their life. Ready social acceptance of such acts within their own circles reinforces their conviction in these values, and prevent them from either interrogating the validity of their ways of seeing, or even allowing them to step in another's shoes to look the situation differently. There are no stakes involved, and such kind of moral coding also sets up their (unquestioned) ambitions - fairly linear with narrow ideas of a "successful" life.
While I would like to keep the frustration with the narrow moralities of the middle class lingering at the background of this writing (and not keeping myself out of this category, but looking at it from a skeptical lens), I would go back to the classroom, to put myself in the shoes of these 18/19-year olds by diving back into my own history.
I have to confess that I am still not very well versed with history, politics or political history. I was just a bit more averse and worse to these subjects when I was 18 myself. I had no idea about the world, no interest in global politics, no awareness about everyday happenings in the country or city. I could not stand news channels - for me they were monotonous speeches which I could not take in. I would listen to them with a deaf ear. I could register nothing, for I had no background of history to pose it against. Further, I wasn't able to relate to it and make it amenable for my own life in any way. I would ponder, for instance - How was the news affecting me? How was I a participant in the global affairs? What could I have possibly done for the world? Am I even important? These questions, in hindsight, had dual tendencies - on one hand, they repelled me from engaging in current affairs, but on the other hand, they kept getting stronger in opposition to what was going on around me - I was constructing a giant wall (of questions).
The fear of being ridiculed on my unawareness of basic facts kept me back from discussing my personal ambiguities with any one else - precisely that what can I do for the world? The question of one's relationship to the world (one's "immediate" environment) is a deep one - for one is constantly trying to find methods to interpret, engage and connect to reality around them. However, instead of enabling learners with methods, questions like the above are often posed with more rhetorics. To look at my own situation back then might help relating to the students here (for they seem to have gone through the same education system). As a sufficiently bright student, I couldn't retain facts in my head for nuts. I couldn't remember capitals of countries, geographies of countries, leaders of the world, years in which events occurred, and so on. If one told me poetries and metaphors, I could build ideas upon them; but facts seemed utterly useless - they did not have any potential expandability, they did not offer any food for thought. Rather, one had to mobilise facts to make them useful. My inability to throw facts within a given discussion kept be back from even participating in any. I had not lived the facts in the first place, and since I had not experienced them, I wasn't ever able to trust their validity. After all, it wasn't as if history just had facts, but also that facts themselves had histories.
Memorising facts, or even concepts in the manner of facts (think of how we were taught Newton's laws of motion, or Einstein's laws of relativity, or theorems in mathematics) seemed important. These would enable one to participate in discussions. I tried hard - but much like a weak bond, I could never retain facts and information in my head. Memorising is a method that I attribute to a middle class pedagogy. The thrust of such pedagogy is to prepare pupils for the purpose of passing examinations. In this view, to remember is almost sacred. But the logic of remembering is almost never elaborated or discussed.
History is not a science after all, although historiography is. But while the "rationality" of science can be experienced universally, the "causality" in history is an act of individual experience and interpretation. I clearly remember the extent to which teaching in my environment was focused on "how to memorise". We were prescribed several methods to memorise -- "speak loudly so that you can hear your own words", "write the answer 3 times - two times by copying and the third time without seeing it", "get up early in the morning and read when your mind is fresh", "focus in silence, two hours everyday, keep reading". These unsolicited (or sometimes asked) advices were constantly received from parents, elders, teachers, and every person who was apparently involved or concerned about education. However, the concern of education was easily and often lost to the idea of scoring more marks - for that's how you could prove "good" education. This is precisely what my childhood was like, and I tried all of the above methods of memorising blindly, for I wanted to be a good student. It helped topically and momentarily, but as time passed, all things painstakingly memorised were forgotten and left behind, just to create fresh mental space for new stock coming ahead.
In the process of memorising, emphasis was on digesting the answer, not savouring it. (Do you remember the Digests you read from in school days?). Education unfortunately has been made functional by our system, moreso by our teachers. But in this process, what I had almost lost was my love for language. Years of practising memorising techniques had failed me in language - both English, Hindi and my mother tongue, for it was about knowing the arrangement of words and not their meaning...I couldn't ever connect to history because there were far too many conceptual terms that I could never go beyond. Terms like "reform", "revolution", "renaissance", "movement" - and hundreds - those that I had only understood in the context of science, did not make any sense in history. In addition, remembering names, dates, events and places took a toll on me. After all, I had no historical experience of any of them...I couldn't have articulated this problem back then, and even if I did, I wouldn't have possibly bothered to ask anyone - I don't think I related in an intellectual way to any one in my childhood (if one was to accept that there is an intellectual in the young mind). Since the emphasis was on how much the mind could retain, the method one adopted was mugging up. If one didn't mug up, one couldn't champion the normative social discussions, or the race for being a "good student".
However, that language could play an important role in deciphering knowledge was never acknowledged or even understood. I often accepted words without getting deeper into their meaning, usage or etymology. When I had nothing to associate the words (and their meanings) to my everyday life, I would just remember them as new words. I would refer to the dictionary, but it was a cumbersome affair, and interrupted far too much in the flow of reading or learning. I still could not situate a word in the context of the paragraph. Sometimes, I also associated a deviated charge to the word's actual meaning. I carried this on until much later when I was introduced to a book on vocabulary (Word Power Made Easy, by Norman Lewis) by my cousin, who identified my leanings to writing. It was this book that initiated in me a slow process of revisiting my entire education. While I moved forward with vocabulary and word-building, I kept going backward to reclaim all my time and knowledge lost in mugging up some of the most beautiful concepts, writings and ideas in humanity.
Yet, I was not prepared to take in history and politics because they seemed to be embroiled within each other so strongly that I felt intimidated. One had to know so much more to understand a single ongoing act of politics. To an extent, I was losing patience in going through tons of information. Every act had a long history, every history was deeply entrenched in ideologies and every ideology had several perspectives. This multiplicity of history, yet again was interesting, but kept me from sharpening my focus and thereby my position for any event at hand. It took great amount of courage to fight the world who judged me (and perhaps still do) for not knowing a lot of things (facts/ideas/concepts). Such judgements can be demoralising and discouraging, but one has to still put in effort to be able to make it relevant for oneself, after which one is ready to have one's own reading of history.
I pulled this conversations back to history because we were talking about "Annihilation of Caste" - the designated reading that spurred this post. I am not sure if we are going to talk about it any longer. I read through the first few pages of the book which archives the undelivered lecture. It is interesting to read several succeeding prefaces by Ambedkar himself, emphasizing upon the multiple times the book has been published after its first print. Also, it was extremely fascinating to go through the letters that Ambedkar exchanged with the organizing committee - the inclusion of those letters conveyed a certain kind of immediacy, and made the reading more engaging and involving. I couldn't read through it further because of lack of time, but it is surely going to be on my reading list soon.
I would now like to divert this discussion to some points that this writing (which I have been writing over two days) made me think this morning. In writing the details of this incident, I have opened up to myself the self-initiated enterprise of learning. It is important to identify the processes and the methods in which one is able to learn, rather teach oneself. The question of "how do I learn" is an important one to ask. The emphasis on the 'I' is to draw attention to the subjectivities involved in the process of learning. Not that no one knows about it. But perhaps this aspect often slips off our mind. Moreso, in mass education, these subjectivities of learning are bound to be overlooked, hence lost.
Self-learning can reclaim the pleasure of savouring education. Self-learning involves much effort in identifying one's peculiar methods of accessing knowledge. Learning is thus a practice that one has to constantly undertake. The practice of learning shall open oneself to one's own interests, desires and disposition. This may help in constructing more confident and secure individuals, contrary to the ones that mass education systems produces.
(Perhaps the last two paragraphs are not exactly the way I wanted to bend this discussion. However, I will take the liberty of this blog as an experimental writing space to let out this work in public domain, and perhaps get more feedback to prepare a refined discussion)
