Our education has got to be revolutionised. The brain must be educated through the hand. If I were a poet, I would write poetry on the possibilities of five fingers. Those who do not train their hands, who go through the ordinary, rut of education, lack music in their life. — Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhiji’s words are a lament on the mark education is missing at the present time. Our practice of education is fractured by the split between ‘brain’ and ‘hand’. As a result, education has become an exercise in ill-health. What is unhealthy can neither empower nor enlighten. Education is meant to be a pursuit of individual and collective wholeness. A society must become dynamic and creative, and not crippled, through the education it practises. The practice of education is predicated on social transformation.
To transform is to lead a thing from its present state to the fullness of its scope. That involves empowerment and enlightenment. In a transformed stage all aspects of the given entity perform at their best and in harmony with each other and the whole. All parts are in synergy with each other. Alienation is the very opposite of this. Whatever is infected by alienation becomes a burden. The burden of a relationship increases proportionately as its fullness is compromised. We mistake quantity for fullness. A hundred noses or eyes, by themselves, cannot comprise the wholeness of the face. Nor will every organ and lineament of the face put together randomly. The wholeness of the face involves all the parts and their mutual synergy, facilitated by something beyond the face itself.
A symptom of this compromised educational wholeness is the widening gulf between transfer of course contents and the skills for using them. The learner becomes a mere receptacle of information. Learner-passivity is inherent in this approach. Surely, this cannot be a valid approach to human growth or empowerment. Passivity is akin to paralysis, not empowerment.
Knowledge
The transfer of optimum information — the driving goal of our current approach to education — is then tested through quantitative assessments. Whether or not a person is being empowered through education to express the scope and stature of his being in a personally fulfilling or socially beneficial way, is a question rarely asked. Surely, education is incomplete if the knowledge imparted is not ‘empowered’ by the willingness to use them in this fashion. Human beings are social animals. Leave out the social, and you are left only with the animal.
Work is the bridge between the ‘animal’ and the ‘social’. Animals too labour. But their labour does not amount to work in a human sense. Human beings can be made to ‘labour and toil’ like animals, as they do at the assembly line of an automobile factory or in complying mindlessly with a party ‘whip’ (what an appropriate metaphor! Literally, ‘whip’ is akin to beasts of burden). Work is inherently wholesome; for it involves also the world beyond the self. Work is social. It can bring down the walls between individuals who could be separated, otherwise, by other divisive labels. When bombs went off in Sankatmochan Temple (Varanasi) a few years ago it was feared that a communal backlash would break out. It did not, because the members of the two communities were interdependent through work. That is how powerful work is. What law and police cannot achieve, work can. The deepest and most fulfilling relationships are forged through work. The more creative the work shared and the more wholesomely it is pursued together, the deeper and happier the relationship.
Approach
Yet, our approach to education, from its very early stages, shuns work! The most prestigious reaches of our higher education aim singularly at producing ‘white collar’ sahebs. White, in this context, is not a symbol of purity. It denotes the absence of manual work and, correspondingly, negativity to such work and workers. The whiter the collar the greater the alienation from one’s fellow human beings and the smaller the need to integrate ‘brain’ and ‘hand’. The purest white collar sits, slanted in superciliousness, on the left half of the human brain!
The good news to those worried about the mounting symptoms of collective ill-health at the present time is that education, understood and practised wisely and courageously, can arrest our social degradation. It takes, however, a paradigm-shift, or a ‘revolution’ as Gandhiji put it. Cosmetic changes will not do. We need to regain the lost harmony between hand and brain. Heart is the source of that harmony. Education is a symphony (‘the poetry on the possibilities of five fingers’) of the hand and the brain, with the heart as the conductor, enunciating the music of life.
The writer is Principal,
St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and member, National Integration Council.
