Aneesh Pradhan ji, Anjum Rajabali ji, trustees of the Dr Ashok Da Ranade trust, and friends, thank you very must for inviting me to deliver this year’s lecture in memory of the revered scholar musician Dr Ashok Damodar Ranade. When Aneesh ji asked me to deliver this lecture, I had great trepidation and reluctance as I am neither a musician nor an artist of any sort and I also come from the bad world of management that most scholarly artists look down up! I am an educationist and an academic – someone who tries to understand and think differently on how imagine new ideas and to do things better. And here I am before you, a bit fearful whether I will rise to your expectations. So, it is freedom from fear, that I must talk about today, amongst other things. In this talk, I will try to build a case of a new purpose for education, make a case for learning from the arts, and argue for building an integrative world view within the arts. I will also talk about a new experiment that we, at Ahmedabad University, are undertaking in that direction.
When I read about Dr Ranade, there was one sentence on your website that stood out for me and I connected with it instantly. It said, and I quote: “He was a composer constantly experimenting with new uncharted vistas.” I kept asking myself, what keeps us away from experimenting with new uncharted vistas? What is the preparation for such a mindset? Where does one get the courage and the ability to walk one’s own path? And, what is this world that our education is preparing us for? When we look around us, there are some challenges that are a copy of the past – for example, the destructive wars that surround us now. But there are many new challenges that are appearing amidst us and they look daunting – climate change and its impact on the planet and hence our well-being; AI and the new technology and how it will disrupt our lives and how will it affect our security; urbanisation and its 2 impact on neighbourhoods and consequently, fraternity; and the diminishing natural resources like water that define life on this planet. How must education evolve in such a context? Are the arts removed from the impact of these massive changes? Can the arts provide us with a direction to think about such challenges?
Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps most controversially, and also in a most visionary and a pragmatic way talked about the power of “doing” or “learning to do” in his “naitaleem.” In a highly publicised debate between Gandhi and Dr Ambedkar on Caste, Ambedkar seemed to have won the battle with his brilliant reasoning and his sociological and historical articulation of the detriments of caste. But if you think deeply about his stance, it appears that Gandhi may have been building his own arguments for basic education that had Ambedkar’s arguments embedded in them, front and centre. It is as if Ambedkar was helping him sharpen his perspectives or in changing them. Anil Sadgopal, in his article titled, “Nai Taleem: Gandhi’s Challenge to Hegemony” that came out in the Social Scientist writes: QUOTE: “The Gandhian programme of Basic Education for post-independence India proposed to place these occupations of the lowest social order at the centre of the school curriculum and pedagogically link them with knowledge, values and skills. The political message is inescapable: accord these occupations and the communities engaged in them a place of dignity that was never their destiny in Indian history. Gandhi had invariably recognised that all such productive tasks had a strong knowledge-cum-skill content, including scientific, along with their context of socio-cultural history.” UNQUOTE Interestingly, these included spinning & weaving, leather curing, dying, metal work, carpentry, tool making, printing, pottery etc. – all art forms that made vocations possible. Of course, the anti-caste implications of this Gandhian pedagogy was meant to create “uncharted vistas” to resist discrimination rooted in caste and patriarchy that have been practised by the Indian society and institutionalised by our educational system. Gandhi must have been smiling when Ambedkar’s was offering critical arguments against caste. Tagore, was not too far away from this Gandhian sensibility of putting “doing and work” at the centre of his arts. He too envisaged Santiniketan as a place that unites the mind, heart, and the body of Gandhian effort. In fact he went further. He wanted arts to inform education and human development. Jiddu Krishnamurthy, took a bigger leap. He called for addressing fear in the world of learning and education and emphasised “doing” as central to understanding of 3 oneself. Is it not understanding of oneself that all our endeavours must drive towards? Is it not walking on “uncharted vistas” that drives away our fear and vice-versa? It is this fear, Krishnamurthy points out, that stands in the way of self-awareness in education.
Let me delve further into this understanding of learning and more fundamentally, into the purposes of education. Education is both a public and a private good. Society wants us to get an education because if one is educated properly, and I emphasise properly, then all in the society benefit out of it – if one earns then one will give taxes, one will not throw stuff or spit on the road, one will not misuse common resources like water etc. etc. – that is the public good story. We also benefit individually from education – one will become more responsible, will become independent minded, one will pick up skills, one will live a better life – that is the private good part of the story. So, if done properly, it makes education a very powerful vehicle to uplift society.
I believe there are three main purposes of education:
- Learning to become a better citizen of any nation where one will live – learn to question, learn to follow a constitution, learn to contribute to the welfare of a nation, and more importantly its people;
- Learning to build a livelihood – find a job, start an enterprise – do things that will help live a better material and social life;
- Learning to develop a love for life-long learning – pick up a passion, develop an interest so that one engages with learning of new ideas and new perspectives throughout one’s life;
This is what liberal education is about – to discover the purpose of education, to discover one’s passion in life, and to build ideas by integrating knowledge from all directions or pariprkshnen samruddhi!
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