http://www.infochangeindia.org/analysis61.jsp
The first and last
learners
Rahul Goswami
Infochange Website
7
February 2005
N30/L13/TP
If anybody knows about education for a sustainable future it’s young Kelechütsü and Megozokho in Khonoma, Nagaland. They are free to learn as and what they will, without fear of examinations and admissions, with the freedom to experiment with a curriculum that reshapes itself every day
Kelechütsü Tho-u is
an Angami Naga youth in
whose quick mind resides a formidable database of herbal and plant lore and
practice. Such knowledge makes it impossible for him to remain hungry in the
rugged, heavily forested hills that rise up around his
All of which he does
regularly. To walk the
Among these comrades is Megozokho Meyase. If his friend
can spot a promising clump of livino – a leaf which tastes best, they say, with the
meat of the free-ranging mithun
– at 50 feet then Megozokho's super-sharp eyes can
pick out against a densely wooded backdrop a honeybee speeding home, accurately
deduce the hive's location, and look forward to later relieving it of its rich
lode of honey [2].
These are resident skills
in the
Witnessed in context, these
skills appear extraordinary to the untrained (uncultured even) mind and eye and
comprehension. One experiences a sense of wonder at the education that has
nurtured such talents. Yet the youthful practitioners of such arts wear their
prodigious learning lightly, with humility, and unselfishly share what they
know with their communities. Theirs has been (they add to it every day, for the
'lifelong learning' that is now the fashion in the West is in fact a well-worn
consciousness here) a privileged education – free to learn as and what they
will; to associate that learning with their village and clan, family and
friends; without fear of grading and examinations, admissions and certificates;
with the freedom to experiment with a curriculum that evolves and reshapes
itself every day.
Contrast this world with
another. Early last year (2004) a young tribal girl in the district of Gadchiroli,
Compare this approach with
that of the indigenous. In Naga villages – as in many
tribal societies worldwide – the youth are housed and taught in institutions
usually referred to as dormitories. When they reach puberty, boys and girls are
admitted to their respective dormitories. But even at the age of five, these
young boys and girls have already been through an extraordinary education
compared with their peers in 'our' societies. From their birth, they are bonded
to the community and to their habitat – continuously cared for by mother,
father, sisters, cousins, uncles, grandparents, clan, and extended tribal
family.
This is all done in order
to introduce them properly into the new and natural world, not the world of
artificiality, and to protect their sensitive and delicate souls. While the
outside world feeds itself on a multiplicity of methods to help motor-skill
development and abstract reasoning, Naga children
quickly learn to develop their intuitive faculties, rational intellect,
symbolic thinking, and five senses. Their educational setting – close to
parents, close to clan – is not only a 'secure' environment, but also a very colourful one – complicated, sensitive, and diverse. They
are with their mothers at the pounding of rice and the hewing of firewood, with
their fathers at weaving of baskets and the tramps into the forest, with the
family while transplanting paddy and in the upslope jhum [4] fields, with their uncles
and elders around the fire of a morung (dormitory) at the telling of stories.
They are given the time and
space for inward journeys that allow them to reflect on what they have learned,
and to carry that new knowledge deeply into the unconscious. They learn to count
by watching their parents sort the materials they use for craft and for work
(shells and beads for traditional ornaments, the measuring of bamboo and cane
for the construction of baskets and other household and agriculture-related
items and tools), through the surprisingly complex games that need but a
pattern scratched into a stone and a few pebbles.
Activities in the morung were
not usually organised; most were spontaneous and
members (young learners) responded naturally. Much of the Naga
culture, its customs and traditions, has been transmitted from one generation
to another through the media of folk music and dance, folk tales and oral
historical traditions, through carvings of figures on stone and wood, and
patterns for weaves. This teaching-learning process has usually taken place in
the female and male morungs,
and a great deal of it while around a hearth and as song – many folk songs
contain tribal histories, also histories of the village, clan, and model (and
not so model) individuals. There are songs composed in certain seasons and sung
only at an appropriate time. In the absence of a practice of writing and
documentation, folk tales and oral historical traditions remained the sole
links between the past and the present. Young people acquired the skills of
learning their histories, their systems of knowledge, by listening to the songs
and the folk tales, and thus developed prodigious and utterly reliable
memories.
From early years spent in
such an environment the transition to the 'education system' as we know it is
traumatic. Today, under the pressures of globalisation and regimes like the
World Trade Organisation, the education system is
being ever more skewed in the direction of investing the resources of societies
to produce production digits for the global production machine. The more young
people are sucked into it, the more the prospect of challenging the present
model of development or the globalisation of the economy recedes, and what is
more, the quicker the destruction of traditional systems of instruction that
are, in every sense of the word, sustainable.
We cannot reverse or even
halt this process without also beginning to dismantle the education system in
which the global, homogenous consumer is created and nurtured. The intent of
the current countrywide system appears to be to demoralise
human beings. It undermines the young person's grasp of reality, cuts off their
links with the natural world, seeks to inculcate within the victims a contempt for the history of their own peoples, traditions
or ways of being.
There is international
consensus that we are facing multiple crises in the areas of environment and
development – loss of biodiversity, escalating poverty in the face of
globalisation and the rapid movement of capital, the marginalisation
of peoples are but some symptoms. In all these crises, education is a common
denominator.
In the South, adult
literacy and basic education are the goals that many policymakers strive for in
their efforts to meet the 'Education For All' goals while at the same time
holding the firm belief that education must contribute to 'modernisation',
and this in the mould of the North, which has generally proven to be socially,
environmentally, economically, politically and culturally unsustainable. Such a
trajectory degrades, erodes and ultimately destroys ecological and human
diversity, cultural diversity and diversity of knowledge. Without these
ingredients, what 'sustainability' can there possibly be?
Naga society, and
mountain communities, need the learning systems that seek to bring
change and 'development' to their lives to be oriented once again towards life,
to be open-ended and creative. A re-evaluation of how our current education
systems affect such communities needs to recognise
that learning must be separate from job training (and it is the tragedy that
befalls millions upon millions of young Indians that these are taken as
inseparable); that the primacy of print media as the media of instruction must
end, for knowledge generated in the form of audio-visuals, music, theatre,
artwork, and other media be listed, supported and circulated to break the
stranglehold of the printed textbook (and the great tendency for it to be
misused) as the sole repository of learning resources and as the primary means
for dialogue; that local languages and dialects be used for instruction with
just as much emphasis as our 'official' languages.
For Megozokho
and his friends, there is enough that can be pointed out as being palpably, indisputably,
wrong with the industries of knowledge and education as we know them, but it is
the lack of intellectual honesty that disturbs them
most. Giving a number or a letter to measure a human being is dishonest and
inhuman, in the context of an indigenous upbringing and education. It is
degrading, this process of grading, this obsession with ranking and percentage,
first and last, a hierarchy of numbers, whose human origins have been lost and
forgotten. As long as such values remain governing values, education will
continue to be an obstacle to learning.
It is such dishonesty which
characterises our methods of education, the
development, production and dissemination of knowledge. It is far removed from
not only the mountain people like the Naga, but also
from the Madiya Gond of Gadchiroli, and from the humble schools that are to be
found in hundreds of thousands of our villages. The dishonesty is connected to
the values which govern thinking and practice in the fields of education,
knowledge and development (mirroring the values in dominant societies and
serving mainly the lifestyle of consumerism).
The keywords that govern
this universe are control, winning, profit, individualism and competition.
Having a syllabus and textbooks, and evaluating and judging people (students,
teachers, administrators, and academics) through linear forms of authority and
through symbolic values (such as arbitrary letters or grades or preferential
labels), almost guarantee cheating and manipulation, and foster an absence of relevance
that is so very naked – a clear-headed tribal girl can so simply and distinctly
identify it.
In her world, learning
should not mean alienating the learner from her own cultural identity. Instead,
the learner affirmed such an identity, quietly and humbly, as part of her
learning process. The components of this learning include various skills for
survival (handicrafts, knowledge of medicinal plants, an understanding of
traditional agricultural techniques, the ability to improvise during times of hardship)
and an exposure to a variety of collectively-held and dynamic community
databases, rich with experience and lore. Her system also had a distinctly
native institution of education (called gurukul or its equivalent) which,
as is well known today, was suppressed by
There are not enough
educators and policymakers who recognise that the
vast majority of rural communities live far more sustainably
than urban areas and have a wealth of experience and knowledge to contribute to
our understanding of sustainable community development. Globally, although
there is the realisation that organisations
and communities in the South have a great deal to contribute about living sustainably and that formal education systems desperately
need their input, such realisation has still to make
an impact on our 'formal' systems of education.
Yet our knowledge base in
every discipline has been skewed, our development theories have been dominated
by imports, our academic research has drawn very little from marginalised sectors of society, women and indigenous
people, in particular. If these gaping chasms in our understanding are not recognised, addressed, and repaired, our efforts to achieve
'sustainability' or 'sustainable societies' will achieve little.
Every day, Kelechütsü and Megozokho see the
effects of the collision between their sustainable, holistic world and the
expectations of the 'mainstream' towards which they are sought to be herded. It
is an unequal contest and during our field visits [2] we witnessed the stresses
the hill village society is subjected to. Traditional patterns of agriculture
and cropping, craft and weaving, are already seeing not enough practitioners to
reliably ensure their survival two generations hence.
The alternatives that
present themselves to the Naga young are not
sustainable in their own eyes. Traditional village institutions are still
strong enough to counter the push (away from the hill communities) and pull
(towards urban homogeneity and the dilution of identity), but these depend on
the cohort of elders who shepherded the community through the turbulent
transitions of the last half-century. For now, these sensitive mountain youth
are all that stand between 'sustainability' and the Gadarene
rush of an over-consumptive society.
Notes:
[1] The mithun (bos frontalis)
is a semi-domesticated variety of bison kept by several North-Eastern hill
tribes, mainly for sacrificial purposes and whose meat is used for festivals.
[2] These paras are modified from an article that originally appeared
in The Hindu,
March 28, 2004.
[3] The environment
impact assessment and natural resource management study, for a Naga hill village, was released by the state government of Nagaland in late-November, 2004.
[4] Jhum or shifting cultivation is the traditional means of
agriculture based on indigenous knowledge systems. Produce from the jhum fields form a significant portion of the livelihood
for indigenous communities of the North-East.
(Rahul
Goswami is a freelance journalist and researcher
based in
InfoChange News & Features, February 2005