Education for Tomorrow - CONTENTS OF EDUCATION

CONTENTS OF EDUCATION

Aims of education determine the contents and methods of education. If our aim is that of life-long integral education, the contents of education have to be conceived quite differently from what are normally pursued in our present system of education.

In India, almost all schools follow a curriculum which was originally designed to arrive at the end of the educational process within a limited period and to fashion clerical abilities among students. Gradually, it has been expanded to suit the needs of producing lawyers, engineers, medical doctors, businessmen and teachers. Vocational courses have only been recently introduced, even though they have not flourished to any expected degree. Moreover, curricula are so designed that they do not cater to the needs of those who want to or are required to drop out of school system at early stages. Even the curriculum of class X, which is the first terminal point in our Indian system, is geared to the needs of higher levels of education. Upto class X, all prescribed studies are compulsory for everybody. Hence, no child can have an experience of free choice and free joy of learning until the completion of class X.

If a student wants to become a mason or a carpenter, our schools have nothing to offer to him. Similarly, if he wants to be a poet,, there is hardly

anything which would be directly related in our curriculum which would nourish his abilities to become even a budding poet. If one wants to be a musician, the students will hardly find anything in his curriculum excepting a few classes in music meant as a part of general education. Examples of this kind can be multiplied.

Let us take the example of physical education, which has somehow secured some place in recent decades in our system of education. There are periods allotted to physical training or to Yoga classes. But what exactly is physical education, what is the importance of the human body, how miraculously human body works, what are different forms of physical education, --these and allied questions receive hardly any place in the curriculum. Something about the human body is, of course, taught in courses relating to physiology and hygiene, but the orientation is not related to physical education.

Moreover, we find that there are a number of interesting questions and studies which come up if we allow freedom of enquiry and freedom of pursuit of subjects of interest. Students often ask questions like this : " What is below the waters of the ocean?" " What kinds of animals live in the ocean?" " What has been the history of costumes?" " What has been the history of weapons?" " How to learn?" " How to widen interest?" How to concentrate?" These and allied questions are hardly answered because they do not form part of curriculum or syllabus

A very important question is being debated in regard to value education. Should there be a special curriculum for this subject? Or else, should the study of values be integrated in different studies? The debate has been inconclusive, and in the meantime, no serious effort has been made to spell out the curriculum in respect of value education.

In regard to the study of languages, curricula do not manifest any concern for developing adequate competence to express oneself faultlessly, perfectly, and beautifully. Where more than one language are taught, there is no concern to correlate these languages and to advance the capacity of translating from one language to the other. In fact, there are no courses on translations in our schools or in colleges.

In one of his essays on national system of education, Sri Aurobindo had underlined the importance of language in the development of mental faculties. He had said that mental faculty should first be exercised on things, afterwards on words and ideas. But he had added

''our dealings with language are much too perfunctory and absence of fine sense for words impoverishes the intellect and limits the fineness and truth of its operation. The mind should be accustomed first to notice the word thoroughly, its form, sound and sense; then to compare the form with other similar forms in the points of similarity and difference, thus forming the foundation of the grammatical sense; then to distinguish between the fine shades of sense of similar words and the formation and rhythm of different sentences, thus forming the formation of the literary and the

syntactical faculties. All this should be done informally, drawing on the curiosity and interest, avoiding' set teaching and memorising of rules. The true knowledge takes its base on things, arthas, and only when it has mastered the thing, proceeds to formalise its information." ¹

If these ideas of dealings with language have to be fulfilled, we have to think both of new contents and new methods of teaching languages.

The field of history needs a very special attention/It is not sufficiently realised that Indian history, with its uninterrupted continuity of more than five thousand years, has a rich account to be conveyed to students. Excepting China, no other country has had such a long historical account, and even in regard to China, the continuity is not so great as in the case of India. As compared to the students in other countries, the Indian students have, therefore, to be obliged to receive and assimilate a much greater burden not only of the quantity of information but also of the complexity of numerous currents of civilisation and culture which had again landmarks of various kinds, the interpretations or which are varied and numerous. The history books which are now used in our educational system were written during the British period, and they have only been slightly modified during the last fifty years;

The question as to how we must present Indian history to Indian students poses many problems, and they have not received the attention that' they deserve. Very often, the history of northern India

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1. Sri Aurobindo: Vol. 17, centenary Edition, pp. 224-5

over-shadows the history of southern India; the accounts of various dynasties that ruled parts of India at different times overshadow the accounts of civilisation and culture that developed in various forms in various parts of the country, retaining yet some kind of essential unity; much of the cultural ethos is treated marginally by proclaiming that the concerned literature is legendary or mythological in character; even the basic facts of the most important texts of the ancient Indian history, -- and for that matter of world history, --namely, of the Vedas, are not known even to the most educated Indians of today; the sheer poetic excellence of the Veda should have merited the full attention of the whole nation; even the three great national poets of Indian history, Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa, and their works are hardly known and only very briefly mentioned in our history books; the great achievements which were registered by ancient Indians in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, natural scien ces, metallurgy, as also in the fields of grammar, ethics, philosophy, religion, psychic and spiritual sciences, yoga, art, music, dance, and architecture, hardly figure in our history books. Even the political account of Indian history suffers from great short comings and Indian students remain ignorant of how Indian polity developed through the ages and what great dreams and deeds were nurtured by the leading personalities of the country in different epochs.

Again, Indian history is taught in such. a way that while a student becomes conversant with, say, Maratha period, he remains quite unacquainted with the Mughal period or earlier periods or subsequent periods.

Inter-connections of history are hardly presented or grasped.

It is true that many important facts about India's development are besieged by controversies in regard to their historical accuracies; it is also true that much is not known about many great men and women who flourished in different epochs of history; it is also true that the meanings of some of the greatest products of Indian literature have been interpreted differently by different scholars. But the answer to these questions is to undertake a programme of thorough going research instead of subjecting them to neglect or even oblivion. Our students deserve to be given a rich account of the heritage to which they have a natural right.

The question of the study of history is further complicated by the fact that, in order to keep abreast with the increasing drift towards human unity, which is spreading all over the world, we have to teach our students the entire history of the world in a meaningful manner. This subject is very vast, but at this stage, we need not enter into any further details. We may only make a remark that there is a need to present world history and its relationships with Indian history at least in three forms: in synoptic form, in. the form of an outline, and in the form of detailed exposition, so that they can suit the needs of at least three categories of students, namely, those who want to have a general and rapid view, those who want to be acquainted, and those who want to study at a deeper or scholarly level.

Before we leave the subject of history, we may make a few important remarks which are associated with this subject. The first is in connection with the study of legends and mythologies. At one time, there was a great prejudice against ancient beliefs, their symbolism, and their literature which lacked scientific or philosophic rigour. This prejudice is gradually being corrected, and there is today a salutary movement to understand ancient legends and mythologies with fresh eyes. It seems, therefore, desirable that a study of legends and mythologies in so far as they constitute a part of the cultural ethos, should be brought to the notice of our young generations. In any case, our students should not have wrong facts about legends and mythologies. Accuracy of information on this subject is very important. Secondly, we have deplorable dearth of good biographies of great men and women of our country; a similar deficiency is not there in regard to world history, but our own knowledge of books concerning the same is very limited, and even that limited knowledge does not find any route of transmission to our teachers and students. This is a very important subject, and we must give considerable place to biographies, and accounts of important events should form a part of the contents of education. Thirdly, we have to take a great care to ensure that the study of the past and the present does not become a prison preventing the visions of the future. There are golden reaches of our consciousness, and from them and from the reaches between them and our ordinary mental consciousness there have descended forces and forms which have become embodied in literature,

philosophy, science, in music, drama, art, architecture, sculpture, in great and heroic deeds and in all that is wonderful and precious in the different organised or as yet unorganised aspects of life. To put students in contact with these, Eastern and Western, ancient and present, would be to provide them with the air and atmosphere in which they can breathe an inspiration to reach again to those peaks of consciousness and to create still newer forms and forces which would bring the golden day nearer--this should be the aim of the study of history.

A very important area that is developing today is that of interdisciplinary studies. At present, this is pursued only at the higher level of education or at the level of research. But there is an urgent need to develop this subject even at lower levels of education. Basically, all subjects are complementary to each other; and there is no subject which is not , interesting, provided we can show the interrelationship of a subject with those subjects which are supposed to be interesting. Many may not know how much mathematics is connected with music, and how Pythagoras saw the relationship between these two subjects; and many do not know or appreciate the relationship between music and poetry. Again, mathematics is closely connected with logic,--there is even a view that mathematics and logic are one and the same and logic is often considered to be the key of metaphysics; there is an obvious connection between metaphysics and physics; and physics, chemistry and biology are closely interconnected; again, the main theme of biology is that of evolution,

and evolution is closely related to the theme of man. Now, the study of man leads us to the study of history and geography; study of geography leads to the study of the earth, and the study of earth is connected with the study of planets and stars and galaxies and of the entire universe. In fact, it must be said that the pursuit of man to know himself and the universe and to relate himself with the universe as effectively and harmoniously as possible is the underlying idea of all education. This interrelationship of man and the universe is central to the aim of integral education. If integral education is concerned with the development of the physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual parts of the human being, it is also connected "with the knowledge that links universal Matter with universal Spirit. And this covers the entire gamut of knowledge and the means by which all knowledge can be united in one unity.

Closely connected with the problem of unity of knowledge is the contemporary problem of explosion of knowledge. Considering this unprecedented explosion, one is obliged to ask as to how one can relate oneself to this explosion in such a way that one is not crushed under the increasing flow of information. On the one hand, there is a pressure towards specialisation; on the other hand, there is a pressure for interdisciplinary and holistic knowledge. Knowing more and more about less and less bestows upon the individual a specialised capacity and proficiency but it also creates disabling inefficiencies in respect of larger questions where multisided knowledge is indispensable.

There is more to perplex us. Specialised knowledge and efficiency that the individual possesses today tend to become obsolete at a rapid rate. There is, consequently, increasing pressure to continue to learn all the time. But this leaves very little time to expand horizons in fields other than those of specialisation. With the passage of time, our inefficiency to deal with general questions of life goes on increasing.

At a certain stage, this situation, if not corrected, can really become alarming. Crises of various kinds are bound to multiply and this is what we witness today all over the world.

Against this background, an important question that can be raised is whether there is something like "essential knowledge" which every human being, as a human being, ought to possess and which ought to be communicated to every student during the educational career.

Reflecting on this question, it seems that there are at least three global subjects which can be considered to be essential and at the same time inherently interdisciplinary; if they could be taken up as the basic umbrella of curriculum, we can more easily combine the needs of general and specialised education. The first subject is that of man and the environment, the second subject, which is closely related to the first, is that of man and evolution; and the third subject is that of the aim of life.

As these areas are quite neglected, they require special consideration of educationists.

Two final remarks need to be made.

We find that most of the books which are prescribed in schools and colleges are so written that they are extremely uninteresting. Students read them because they want to pass examinations, and often they take to short-cuts and resort to guide books which are even more boring and less instructive. There is a need to prepare learning materials in such a way that every subject is made interesting, vivid and even charming. It may be said that this is a tall order, but when we are thinking not of narrow or immediate goals, and when we are thinking of education for tomorrow, we need not hesitate to make tall orders.

Secondly, if integral education is to be freed from the evils of subject-oriented, book-oriented and examination-oriented system of education, if liberty and self- discipline are to be the hallmark of the methods of integral education, and if the emphasis is to be laid on self-education, we shall need to write books in different forms that will be required for different kinds of students, different kinds of backgrounds and different modes of learning. We have to think of preparing worksheets, workbooks, monographs, reference books, documentation books, and books which can be read along with TV or audio-tapes.