Over this year I have had the opportunity to be exposed to the possibility of a wholly different way of growing up.
When we grow up seeing every child around us going to school, then college and then hunting for a job, we come to believe that it is the way of the world. In just the same way as we begin to automatically believe in death, in God, in the need to have wealth or social standing or so on. Simply because we have not been exposed to another paradigm at all.
It has been observed that prior to the Renaissance, artists were less concerned with the illusion of reality and more concerned with the content and symbolism of their work. The size of each element in the image related much more to its importance, rather than it's placement in a space. So clear three dimensions drawings where all objects or persons are in relative size to each other, began to be drawn only when the modern, western world began.
The sense of perspective that automatically comes into play when we draw or sketch anything is thus not inherent in the human mind. It is only one way of looking at the world.
Expand the implications of this and we realize that the world we know, as WE know it, maybe hides so many other dimensions, simply because our minds do not look at life that way.
You are the world, suddenly, has much greater meaning than before.
Such a realization posits that there is no absolute right we can hope to arrive at. Only multiple universes that we glide in and out of. The universe that feels more like home to our nature, is where we decide to set up home.
--
Meanwhile, going back to where I started, it was both scary, sad and liberating to know that there are several parents in the country who have been and increasingly are home schooling their children. Scary because radical change always challenges oneself to question deep assumptions and fears. Liberating because it shows us the fact that the dominant system is not entirely inescapable.
Several resource materials are now available for dedicated parents to teach their children at home. With much time on their hands, these children are able to travel much more, spend time learning in depth the things they like to do or are good at. They can learn a subject for the sheer joy of it and not with the pressure of exams on their minds.
Now the fact is that by the time they are 18, these children have quite possibly learnt lesser than their school going counterparts. (at least lesser than mainstream school, if not alternate schools)
But obviously, how much of what we learn at school is ever used. In fact increasingly, we are studying for the degree, and eventually we have to unlearn much of the patterns and ethics (if any) that school life has given us, when we step into working life.
However, the shift here is much more that just one of less or more learning. It is about growing up for the sake of living life itself, enjoying it, exploring it, being exposed to its multitude of forms - for the sake of those things themselves and not because they’ll get us somewhere.
A slow, unhurried education, allows for the flowering of a happy, secure person, who is not always worried about who is going to outsmart him.
Why should climbing a mountain only be about a school trip, about taking a break from what is the normal life. The mountain, its streams, its trees and plants are education – biology, geography.
Otherwise we just visit the mountain in summers, litter the slopes, talk loudly and completely fail to come in touch with the life that vibrates in it. Not that talking loudly doesn’t have its own charms J
To grow up with lesser fear and competition and to be able to be exposed to subjects as an interactive whole and not dissected areas of expertise…
To know that we are of value irrespective of the value we derive from doing socially rewarded actions – giving exams, getting prestigious jobs, marrying well… even while these things can be done
--
In our minds a ‘different’ education was the luxury of only the extremely rich or a compulsion of the poor.
The rich were anyway outside of the normative space. Meanwhile, thanks to well meaning governments and reformers, several of the poor have been convinced of the benefit of public schooling.
But the fact is that mainstream education furthers mainstream norms. Today education gets you a job. As demand increases higher and costlier qualification is required to apply for the same posts.
The poor have also entered this race mainly because education is seen as the ticket to upward mobility. But they are getting caught in a strange quandary. Their children, if by hook or crook manage to fund education till college find that they often join the ranks of the unemployed or at best underemployed educated. Because someone else did a post-graduation and won the race.
Where did the wonder of science, hindi, maths or history go in this whole process? Where did an energy which is not driven from insecure competition, and which is inherent in every child go? What is the point if half the lot feels they won while the other half live with the feeling that they were shortchanged by a system that claimed to be doing them good?
--
However, one must mind that it is dangerous to be caught in the romance of something better. It is the nature of the human mind to envy a life it could not lead.
Home schooling need not be the answer. But the realization that ours is not the only way to live and grow up, or the way we can bring up our children is real. Because it tells us something that we keep forgetting at we begin to robotically follow a pre-patterned life -that we are the boss and not the system that we ourselves have created around us.
