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My mum pointed me to this BBC Radio 4 programme about Russell Ackoff. He’s not so much an education guy but a management guy, but he is more than aware of the impact education has on business and management system. Freeing up education isn’t just about obtaining some kind of ideal of individualism, freedom and culture, if also has massive implications for the abilities and productivity of economies – hard-nosed capitalistas should be interested too. I’d not heard of him before, but in the 10 minutes that have passed since I started researching him on the internet, I think he has some sensible things to say on education:

Learning should be a lifelong enterprise, a process enhanced by an environment that supports to the greatest extent possible the attempt of people to “find themselves” throughout their lives.

For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists, extinguishing their creativity, and instilling values antithetical to those of a free, 21st century democracy. The principal objective of education as currently provided is to ensure maintenance and preservation of the status quo-to produce members of society who will not want to challenge any fundamental aspect of the way things are. Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching, there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. Being taught is, to a very large extent, boring, and much of its content is seen as irrelevant. It is the teacher, not the student, who learns most in a traditional classroom.

Without motivation, no amount of teaching can produce learning. Motivation comes from within, not from without-it can not be imposed on students. With motivation, young students and adults learn, and they do so by means they select. Most of what we learn before, during and after attending schools we learn without it being taught to us. For example, some schools have done away with reading instruction altogether; these schools allow children to acquire that skill when they seek it on their own. They eventually do, some at age 4 and some at age 12. Reading disorders are extremely rare in such schools. In the old one-room schoolhouse, the students taught each other. The teacher was a resource that students could call on when they want help.

Mass education was explicitly developed to mold naturally unruly children into compliant, obedient young people. Inspired by the Industrial Revolution, schools were, and still are, designed and operated as much like factories as possible. Incoming students are treated as raw material to be processed into saleable products. Creativity is actively suppresses , and in most schools conformity – which is anathema to creativity – is valued instead.

Worth reading in full, which you can do here.

Great news! One of our teacher’s, Ajit, has just had a baby! It’s super news, a healthy little girl to go with his young son. He’s really happy and excited about it and came to Hunar Ghar to ask Deepak if he could get some sweets for all the other staff and children to celebrate the occasion. It’s even better that he is so happy because there can be a tendency for people to prefer male children. When girls get married, it is they that has to move away into the home and family of her husband, so economically speaking they cost more and pay back less to the family as a unit.

What’s also really nice is that he phoned up Ash to tell him about it. It’s alway really great for Ash and I when the teachers do something like that, that for all our talk of wanting to be no heirachical we actually see it come through in how the teachers involve us intheir day to day life, talk to us and respond to us. It’s the little things like someone phoning up to say they have just had a baby girl that says that we have come a long way in the two short years Hunar Ghar has been open. They tell us a lot, but I don’t think you are allowed to put that kind of stuff down on project proposals and anticipated outcomes!

Another of our teachers Preeti is very pregnant, so she will soon be returning to her native home for a couple of months to give birth and rest and be supported through that by he mother and aunts. Babies. Everywhere.

For Teddy, who’s going to join us in building some new classrooms. Read it here.

I’ve just been chatting with Ash and the topic of government involvement in education and development came up. Part of Ash’s mandate on his university placement over on the Bengal side of India is to look at women’s groups relating to health and how they can be promoted by the government. In the area Ash is currently in there has been great success in using women’s groups to reduce infant mortality and life expectancy to a large scale on a low budget. In fact, further south in India life expectancy, to take one measure of population health, it higher than that of the USA, but with a health-care budget almost a factor of 10 lower per person. Health then, is not all about the money and the treatment but depends as much on the conduct of the population. It’s obvious, I know, but can be over looked, especially in the development circuit.

For example, there are scores of women’s groups across India, but they tend to be NGO initiatives and they tend to focus on the financial side of things – handicraft groups for feeding the tourists, vegetable co-ops, micro finance loans, finance pooling etc. What Ash is looking at is how the health related women’s groups are structured, their method of impact upon society, and whether it could become a government undertaking to scale up the life and health benefits found in this particular area. Women’s groups have been around for long before the phrase was coined – people naturally congregate and share tips and skills, help out others in their communities. With regard to this, poverty related poor health issues in some cases can be as much about the destruction and undermining of natural social knowledge systems, by pillagers, companies, governments and NGOs, as it is about the lack of access to skilled medical practitioners or health care. Eg, heavy advertising of a particular drug to remedy a problem can lead to the neglect of or develop mistrust towards local ways of dealing with that same problem: Modern=good,traditional=bad becomes the view. But people might not have the money to purchase the medicine necessary to replace the forgotten traditional knowledge, and so the community’s health suffers. Women’s groups then, are one way of returning trust and faith in the knowledge and ability of ‘uneducated’ people and unbranded treatments, so long as it is always remembered that they are a way of return to local empowerment and control rather than existing as state-sponsored ‘heath interventions’.

Ash and I want to open Hunar Ghar up a bit more. We’ve been so totally focussed on getting it running to a high standard and generating self-progressive tendencies in involved people that we have, in some respects, been a little too introspective. By building relationships of government representatives we can begin the process of normalising them to the concept of informal and natural learning patterns – oft still feared in India – so that in time they will become more receptive and responsive to the idea, whether from us or other exposure they may have. We will discuss with them the successes and continuing challenges of Hunar Ghar, and perhaps develop a simple framework though which some of the lessons learned at Hunar Ghar will be integrated into government schools, and so increasing the standard of child understanding and learning in those establishments. We may find that some people will start to regard Hunar Ghar as a bit of a pet project for themselves, and that they may if they are very canny pick up on the current climate of demanding change to an outdated educational system, claim our ideas as their own and promote them on a wider scale thus boosting their profile.

It really does go very deep, the potential. Even from a bit of a capitalistic, power hungry way of looking at this Hunar Ghar is pretty ace. It is a learning system that enables a higher proportion of citizens to develop higher capacities and abilities which can drive a stronger economy. At a primary level it is more expensive per head to teach the children, but the nature of the learning means that a lower investment will be required in secondary education as the children will be much more capable and will develop a custom of learning for themselves and working hard for themselves, which reduces the need for dogmatic teaching. Combined with heath initiatives as described above, it also reduces the cost of health care, creates more sustainable economic and social systems, as well as increasing personal productivity of the individual. That’s not really how I tend to look at it, I see more the creation of the opportunity of individuals and societies to obtain swaraj which means, in a very over simplified and stunted form, self-rule. But self rule is good for the functioning of broader society too, which is why is why it such an important and necessary concept.

Ed

I was recently on a train from Urumqi to Shanghai when I met Teddy, a young architect, in the restaurant car. We fellow Europeans ignored each other for the first day or so, neither wanting to just gravitate to the familiar ‘other backpacker’ when all around there were people and culture to discover. But on a two day train journey, one can meet a lot of people, and time came up for us to chat with one another.

Teddy was very interested in Hunar Ghar and thought he might come out and help us, which I thought a splendid idea. But lots of people think it is a fun idea to come out to India as they live a happy fantasy of challenge and adventure. Teddy however seems to be a man who converts his ideas into reality, because he continued to email me about the idea, eventually say that, if it was ok with us, he would come in March. And so he is coming in March to help build two new classrooms.

I’ve not fully developed his brief yet, but a central idea will be the creation of ‘developed’ classrooms from local materials. This is not a simple challenge. The idea is that the completed classrooms should be of as high a quality as can be achieved using modern materials and equipment, but using the simpler tools that we have to hand. It is a great misconception of developmental thinking that it must use materials such as concrete and steel. These are both expensive, high energy, polluting materials that cannot be maintained as effectively as more local materials.

The challenge is to use materials such as stone, mud and wood to the effect that is required, strong, secure buildings of ergonomically effective design that people can be proud of. And there in lies the problems; poverty, as it were, is not always objective. There are many houses in the UK made from wood, wattle and daub that are strong, secure and highly desirable but in India among certain societies it may be seen that it is the materials used that defines a house as modern and developed, rather than the house itself. In this same manner, it may be more desirable to have a poorly designed building, because that is what other people have and it is desirous to fit in, rather than have that which is actually better.

This situation is not all too dissimilar to the PT which Ash talked about in the previous post. Wrong or right isn’t a concern – what other people are doing is.