IN SEARCH OF EDUCATION
0. ANNOUNCEMENT
I write too, as a person practising the act of teaching, learning alongside, primarily within the Indian sub-continent. Having travelled and ‘taught’ at many places, one is compelled to a point of absolution to say something about the dreadfulness that one encounters at every step, every point, every moment even of the endeavour that we have convinced ourselves as a species to call Education.
We live within the precincts of a possible world peripherised and ostracised by governments that are increasingly claiming self- proclaimed quasi- intellectual, pseudo- spiritual & psycho- social rights not merely over organised religion & therefore organised crime, but over everything, most things unfortunately & shoddily organised in our times-- our economic inequalities, our class differences & their incorrigible willingness to scoop- out the vestiges of a post- colonial occidentophilia that surfaces itself only in such hostile home- environments, our self- grown tendency to seggregate, categorise and label in accordance with our neck- deep suppressed urges to one- up each other over claims of allegiance to strange notions of racial supremacies, our dilettente non- accessionist politics attempting to guise centuries- old oppressed anger with an equally misplaced reverse- ostracisation as Truth. Furthermore, this possible world in which a multitude of ways of being can take root in a deeply enquiring questioning of our pasts & our presents and can envision futures that not only rid us of the habitual fears of our hitherto critically divisive co- existence, but which can emerge triumphant in their abilities to locate us far away from the rampant superficiality in our approaches to culture, to work, to our strategic sensibilities that readily manipulate moral codes to serve our instant- gratificatory self- interests, is under threat. These possible worlds are in a danger that is apparent in the manner we mete out education in our houses, our schools, our colleges, our Universities, and now, our studios, our apartments, our roads & streets, our vehicles & shops, our hotels & libraries.
What is this creature we call Education? Does it really, truly come alive in our frustrated parenting practices that are projections of our even more half- baked, confused parentages? Can its meaning ever exist alongside our urge to market our rather meagre, premature & shallow claims towards ‘urbanisation’ of supposed- rural desires to be educated and other such, at popular-populist talks, speeches & functions? Is it possible to encounter the fundament that educational enterprise can mean and be when we are engaged in this age- old rigmarole of making ‘non- profit’ Trusts & Foundations out of spaces, monies and initiatives that deserve only to be shunned for their sham & hypocrisy, again and again and again?
We have a penchant, a fetish almost, to separate the ‘corporational’ from the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘mainstream’ from the ‘alternative’. Our flippant jargon-isation of anything educational is steeped in our extraordinary condescendence on the one hand and our fixation with unquestioned notions concerning ‘life- lessons’, age, death, ritual, freedom, tradition, nationhood, identity & even learning, on the other. We don’t seem to be able to extricate ourselves from the perennially over- protective, possessive atmospheres of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, misogyny, sexism and abuse that govern our infantilist views of living and therefore, of romance, of the institutionalisation of marriage, of natalism & its opposition, of our opinion that ‘children’, ‘kids’ and ‘students’ must be ‘taught'.
Practices associated with education are tormented by these and umpteen other such problematics that are edging towards crises that seem ever so repeatedly escaping our senses, our good sense.
In an attempt to approach some, if not all, of these matters, I intend writing in detail what might be called articles on subjects encompassing the crux(es) that dictate the hollowness that is getting to be the education of our times.
These articles shall be openly published on this website, https://varunsthitaprajna.blogspot.com/.
If the consciously teaching entity has to find any solace and continued vigour in the teaching- effort, it must learn to dispassionately question the tide of times. Furthermore, it must acquire the skill to subvert connotations and take the final step into appropriation of these subversions. What does this mean? It means simply that the teacher’s inner questions, responses & stands find articulation in the teacher’s decisions, actions, living and therefore in the teacher’s being: what we wear, the things we use and carry, the manner in which we speak, what we speak about, the responses we choose to make, refrain from making, undertake and own, in observance & action, everything- All and Everything! The manners in which we choose our interventions shall decide the politics by which we teach.
I. THE TEACHER: A POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF LIVING AND BEING
The teacher is a struggler, a grappler, a magician. The teacher attempting discernment is a straddler between worlds that are inhabited by natures- of- being that are as diversely specific as the particular wants, desires & exigencies that are governed by the accidentals & the probabilities of Time. The teacher attempting sensitivity at the core of her/ their/ his teaching is that creature standing perpetually on the pin- edge of paradoxes that challenge at every moment the millennial conditioning that has dictated the securities, identities, responses & withdrawals of our inner beings. Like the magician who conjures a bouquet of flowers from within the hat while all the time directing our quasi- suspended disbeliefs towards the possibility of a special occurrence, a supernatural phenomenon, the teacher is employing an unending patience and skill to present possibilities of worlds & visions of universes that while on the one hand wait to be fathomed, also on the other hand wait to take shape from the generous, compassionate, only sane acknowledgement that the diversity of our creatural ways- of- being is limitless. In other words, that within every hat is embedded the occurrence of a different bouquet and that each has its place in the cosmos of our living(s).
The teacher is a political being. That Life itself is a phenomenon of the cosmos notwithstanding causality, that it has its method(s) of teaching, that every individual being through practices in living, parenting & experience of care does inevitably teach, that learning and its phenomenology is unfolding itself at every moment whether we are conscious & aware of its precipitation, are matters concerning the accidental. They demand discussion within the purview of a different discourse. The question here is whether the individual making a conscious choice to belong to the teaching- milieu, to consciously become an agency in what we have come to call Education, to willingly practice the art/ art- science/ science- art that teaching entails, is after all choosing this line of work in order to & while facing the fundamental problematic of the human condition: that of the individual’s relatedness with Society. While educational philosophers labelled, categorised & nomenclatured under various schools of thought have faced this problematic repeatedly & have approached it from their specific constructed perspectives, while the question itself provokes one to retiredly accept its cliched emergence, it cannot be denied that no other consciously- chosen work- milieu apart from that of the teacher comes upon this question, its dilemmatic implications & its omnipresence in theory as well as praxis at every step of the way, at every minute juncture that proves to be a meeting point between structure, function & vision, at every point of crisis involving decisions, every day, why, even at every moment. The paradoxes presenting themselves at the intersections between institutional- societal- economic- personal- pedagogic structures and the histories of experience- feeling- sentiment- emotion- vision- hope that the consciously teaching individual encounters are mind- boggling! Simply put, they are paradoxes demanding an equilibrium between the mundane and the profound, between the decisions that govern our everyday living & the forces that dictate our deeper beings. The manner in which each teacher meets these complexly layered histories & futures playing themselves out in the present forms the substance of the individual’s ideologies, of the individual’s worldview, the individual teacher’s politics. The teacher therefore becomes a carrier of this specific politics in their/ her/ his living and being.
The teacher is also a revolutionary. In the manner that J. Krishnamurti carried out his work and his teaching, he spoke of the teacher as the entity that is enormously invested in the reflection of the inner self, in the questioning of one’s own conditioning, beliefs, images and outlook in order to discover a realm that comes in touch with the violence that has become integral to our living, only to transform it, to allow it to wither away. In other words, the teacher’s inner self is incessantly observing not only the teaching- milieu & the student but also itself at an equal rate if not more. In the manner that G. I. Gurdjieff spoke of the teacher, for instance, there is the implication that our Society, if at all it has to carry on with sanity, is in requirement of the fundamentally transformed mind, (a) fundamentally transformed human being(s), as whom we can together contribute towards the harmonious development of our presently rather bleak futures. IN the manner that Michel Foucault speaks about the teacher {attempting even to live as one such in his lifetime}, the teacher is the agency of change, of a turn- around, of a flip- over for societal machinery, being in closest pointed- contact with that section of our societies which has always been the target for political propaganda, for economic hope, for cultural upheavals and for futuristic visions- the children of our present & tomorrow, young minds, youth- the student. Any change requires that the agent attempting it reads the phenomenon in question. This reading- act, this bridging- act between the inner vision of our subconsciously lodged instinctual impulses for true & total freedom and their outer manifestation to fashion the sub- structures & megalithic constructs of our Society is precisely the task accorded to the revolutionary. This confluence of the personal, inner life of the teacher with the need, wish & hope for possible outer manifestations of our inner selves is the same as the juxtaposition of the personal and the public. For the active teacher responding earnestly to the world, the personal is the political.
What then is this active, discerning, sensitive, revolutionary teacher- creature responding to? It must be acknowledged that we live today within the precincts of a possible world peripherised and ostracised by governments that are increasingly claiming self- proclaimed quasi- intellectual, pseudo- spiritual & psycho- social rights not merely over organised religion & therefore organised crime, but over everything, most things unfortunately & shoddily organised in our times-- our economic inequalities, our class differences & their incorrigible willingness to scoop- out the vestiges of a postcolonial occidentophilia that surfaces itself only in such hostile home- environments, our self- grown tendency to segregate, categorise and label in accordance with our neck- deep suppressed urges to one- up each other over claims of allegiance to strange notions of racial supremacies, our dilettante non- accessionist politics attempting to guise centuries- old oppressed anger with an equally misplaced reverse- ostracisation as Truth. We live in a world that is perennially finding itself at the brink of war that can only be the result of hate- politics disguised as steps towards security & protection of identities. Automation technology in its wake has thrown up for us extraordinarily challenging questions concerning surveillance, sousveillance, censorship and power. Patriarchal misogyny in all its forms, guised or otherwise, pervades commercial, cultural, peripheral, administrative and even legal fronts. Is the teacher to receive these matters callously and prepare the ground for the future in a non- responsive silence and an apathetic ignorance, lack of robust action and unyielding wishful prayer? The teacher is, at every waking- working second moving within the ambit of conscious- subconscious issues of consent, gender roles, of structures & the norms- rules- memoranda supporting them, of languages, grammars & articulations that must learn to respond with awareness-- all with & through that core lynchpin that all good education must base itself upon- affection, compassion.
How does one approach this ever- increasing set of problems? In other words, what is the role of the teacher- creature? Without doubt, the interested teacher is left with no choice but to embark on a journey of perennial, tireless reflection and introspection. The teacher’s capacity for a deep inner looking in order to discover, fathom, decipher and therefore implement what could be called a Presence seems to be, with foremost certainty, the need of the hour. The teacher must need be Present in body, Present in voice, Present in action, Present in awareness, Present in energy, Present in stamins, and most of all, Present in a deep- rooted austere affection. While the food for this cultivated, nurtured presence is the teacher’s inner self- the inner life, its source of inspiration is the observation of the world. This deep concurrence may take the teacher a long way in participating, contributing, constructing even, the grand design that could be one’s teaching.
To design one’s teacherhood and teaching is to be wholly aware of the paradoxes spoken of before, that govern our lives- the foremost among them being the relationship of our individual natures to the structures of our collectives and the most stark among them being the waves of popular cultures sweeping through masses, numbers and populaces around the world.
If the consciously teaching entity has to find any solace and continued vigour in the teaching- effort, it must learn to dispassionately question the tide of times. Furthermore, it must acquire the skill to subvert connotations and take the final step into appropriation of these subversions. What does this mean? It means simply that the teacher’s inner questions, responses & stands find articulation in the teacher’s decisions, actions, living and therefore in the teacher’s being: what we wear, the things we use and carry, the manner in which we speak, what we speak about, the responses we choose to make, refrain from making, undertake and own, in observance & action, everything- All and Everything! The manners in which we choose our interventions shall decide the politics by which we teach.
The teacher’s attempt therefore is to delve, dig, scourge into oneself for that portion of honesty, earnestness & austerity, in the manner that J. Krishnamurti suggests, which shall position itself to present the teacher’s personal question before the student alongside the limited response that one can have as an individual confronted by any situation, by the dilemmatic enormity that is Life itself. The teacher therefore is incessantly engaged in designing the teaching- act to even subconsciously raise questions, to nurture experientiality and to lay oneself bare to a multitude of ways- of- being. This attempt to reach, to hit upon an honest depth is one’s only true light. It is our only source & repository of sensitivity, inspiration and discernment.