This Teachers’ Day I spent at home, longing for the classroom and its possibilities of debate, conversation and epiphany. It was sad for all sorts of reasons. But what follows is not a sad tale.
As education has proven to be an important site to battle and engage with the conditions of a pandemic, those of us who teach for a living have found our time occupied many times over in virtual space. Over the past month, I have participated in a seminar on masculinities and gender studies, recorded podcasts on virtuality, taught postcolonial theory to scholars in batches of two, three, seven and 15, been a panellist waxing eloquent about the importance of the humanities and social sciences, and offered a webinar on anthropological thinking. Yes, it’s exhausting. Not to mention, fodder for cynicism.
It is easy to think of the current situation as the playing out of what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze terms “societies of control”. Here, continuous training has replaced the school and the individual is constantly in orbit from one virtual room to another. To Deleuze, the paradigmatic activity of such a society is surfing, and no, he isn’t talking about Hawaii. And of course, in such a society, falling off the orbit is tantamount to social and perhaps even literal death.
There is a silver lining, however. These past weeks of virtual engagement have also forced me to reflect upon what might be a necessary reform to the classroom. In classes I teach, I am re-learning patience and the fine art of letting go. I no longer control who enters a classroom, who listens, who exits, who tunes out. I speak often to faceless audiences, a voice piping up every now and then. I have to listen better to faraway voices. We frequently interrupt each other. More often than not, whether due to technological interference or the inability to read each other’s gestures and expressions, we sit together in silence, a mass of icons and windows.
A different classroom
It is clear that we need a different kind of classroom, whether online or offline. One that allows noise as much as silence, one that re-structures groups in a circle with no one at the head of the table, one that allows for the unpredictability of the everyday encounter and technological failure. Such a classroom may also do well to invest in the fine art of doing nothing.
HFBK University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany, for example is offering timely ‘Scholarships for Doing Nothing’. Applicants to the scholarships must respond to four questions, “What do you want not to do? How long do you want not to do it for? Why is it important not to do this particular thing? Why are you the right person not to do it?” Think for a second, and consider how hard it would be to write this application. For all our educational systems are geared towards doing. Something. Even as those some things do not add up to any connections with life in the moment.
In a recent radio interview, Sonam Wangchuk, engineer, innovator and education reformist, and founding-director of the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), spoke about how fortuitous it was that he grew up in a village with no school. For he was then able to learn about leaves and shoots and trees via actual leaves and shoots and trees. Lest we dismiss this as romantic pastoral longings and excuses for infrastructural lack, how about we use this tale as an entry point into asking about the profound alienation of education from the conditions of life?
Teachers’ Day
Teachers’ Day, long ago, brought with it the pleasure of being able to temporarily assume the mantle of one’s teachers. We would dress up in a manner we thought befitting the solemnity of the profession and perform the cadences of lecturing and instructing. In that moment, though, we were also being indoctrinated into the institutional compulsions of authority, rigidity, and power. As one involved in the profession today, I think it may be time for another kind of reversal of no solemnity and much joy. Where we participate collectively in the act of undoing. Where we can all feel free to sit at the back of class, staring out the window, carving words into wooden benches with the pointy ends of our compasses.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.
