I am a product of an educational system in which learning was limited to repetition, recall, and memory. A good student in my time obeyed the teacher, diligently finished work, and asked very few questions, in return this compliance was rewarded with an elevated status within the school ecosystem. The subtle message here, confirming to the order harbours you, it wins acceptance and eventually ‘success’. In this system, the teacher-led and we followed. The teacher defined and we adhered. The teacher snapped and we shrivelled. The teacher enacted and we watched. As learners in this space, we were passive, mute, voiceless, drones. Paulo Freire, thinker, philosopher and father of critical pedagogy, in his seminal work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed calls this system Banking Education. According to Freire a system where the learner is “deposited” with information rather than being allowed to arrive at their learning in freedom, makes education an act of domination. Through this structure an unequal learning environment is established, here power, control and inequality drive the learning process rather than freedom, critical thinking, and dialogue.

Freire’s criticism of oppressive educational models is more relevant in these tough times. A close look at the world around reveals that apathy, adherence, and silence have resulted in unimaginable inequalities, transgressions, and oppression. People are delineated from realities, and the understanding that everything and everyone is interrelated is absent. I believe that we are all collective victims of an education that has failed to emancipate us, for transformative action calls for critical questioning, dialoguing, reflection and empathy. Yes, the very rights that were taken away from us by schools are what we so desperately need today to bring about social change. An entire generation of learners who are distanced from critical questioning, intuition, and empathy which are crucial skills in everyday life is possibly the greatest tragedy of schooled education. So today if we have mute citizens who fail to protest and question the anarchy and violations unleashed by governments, corporations, and institutions upon them, they are doing the only thing they have been taught to do, adhere.

I am increasingly beginning to believe that all conversations around our envisioned futures should begin with a close examination of our classrooms. How we enable learners to think will be the fountainhead of our future.

With school and college reunions being a part of our highly socialised world, I get to meet schoolmates more often. What amuses me about these gatherings is how it is never diligent, ‘good’ students that we remember when we look back at school, it always the ones who challenged the order, and these stories are retold with delight and much laughter. No one ever speaks of the day they managed to solve an algebra problem, but everyone remembers the day when one of the students who was dressed as a butcher for a fancy dress competition brought a goat onto the stage! The goat stressed in its new environment left droppings all over the stage and refused to walk. Ultimately the goat had to be carried by the butcher, making him look rather kind in contrast to his fierce makeup. The student was such a quick thinker that he remodelled his act to suit the hilarious situation. He kissed the goat and proclaimed that he loved his Bakri (goat) very much and hence won’t kill it. This Bakri will remain with me always, he announced.

There is a word the corporate world loves to use — ‘thinking on the fly’ meaning, thinking through something rather quickly, a skill so acutely lacking in work environments today that workshops on creative thinking and innovation are delivered by eternal consultants. But for the student who displayed this skill naturally at his young age, the story ended rather badly, the goat was confiscated and tied to a tree, the meat shop owner from whom the goat was borrowed arrived on his moped and took it back, the student was punished for his overzealous participation, and sports teacher was left to clean the goat droppings.

The students failing to follow procedural formalities and permissions could be used to justify the punishment, but that still doesn’t explain how a school full of teachers failed to recognise the critical thinking displayed by the student in his act. Why did disciplining become more important than the recognition of this trait? When I look back I recall countless such examples through my school years, the kid who tinkered with pencils and turned them into 3D models but failed every mathematics test. The child whose body came alive in movement and play, but was never selected to be part of the school sports team. The child who asked if the big bang emitted bad gases like a fart and got slapped. The girl who loved to doodle but was told that it was not art. The boy who imitated every teacher pitch-perfect, but was never given a role in a school play.

Today, when I recall these stories, I am filled with deep sadness. At many points, I have been tempted to ask my classmates about how a specific teacher or incident left them feeling. I wish we could talk about the deep longings we had as children and articulate them and heal together. The desire for such conversations also leads me to ask how our educational system after all these years continues to belie the truth children are displaying. As a designer of education, all I can see in each of these situations is missed opportunities for conversations, imagination, and possibilities for new learning.

So when I decided to work in education I made a set of sutras for myself. In Sanskrit, a sutra means “thread”, traditionally sutras attempted to weave knowledge, threadlike around into a few simple words or syllables. It is with these sutras that I entered the world of classroom practice, with the hope that I could create spaces of freedom, exploration, and possibility for the learner.

Generate value

Learning spaces are spontaneous systems that have the potential to produce unprompted change. By designing engagements as dynamic interactions various forms of innovation and collaboration emerge, it is in these intersections and interactions that learning generates its value.

Individuals are complex systems

Children reveal themselves as an aggregate of many unique interdependencies, relationships, and interactions. Hence behaviours and characteristics exhibited by each child are distinct. Designing learning opportunities for distinct traits to inter mingle and providing for individual dimensions and capabilities to flourish is the most enriching part of my job.

Textbooks are boxes

It is beyond the obvious, prescribed and structured that real learning lurks. The living, throbbing resource is my class. I listen to the faint whispers, notice the passion, the bright eyes, the yawns. I respond, react and reflect on this dynamism. By setting aside the prescribed, learning becomes a reciprocal act rather than a transactional endeavour.

Art is pedagogy

I engage students in rich, open, visual and creative tasks, where they use their own intuition and choices. I never seek sameness of meaning. I design experiences where connections are made between ideas by the learner.

Kindness creates knowledge

There clearly is no supplement to kindness, compassion, and empathy in learning. A place of kindness accepts desires and ideas and rejects fear and conformity. I remind myself each time to create a space where every child is heard, and every voice is included.

While the sutras persuade me to develop reflective professional practice, some days are incredibly tough and exhausting. I become increasingly aware of the wicked problems that plague this education and how hard practicing personal aspirations can get. But, as I was telling a friend recently, wicked systems are both exhilarating and exhausting. Nothing ever seems completely right, no change seems good enough, and this looks like a battle that I will never completely win, and yet all it takes is one day of good conversation with my kids to make me believe again!

Looking beyond my individual practice, I see education as a cog alongside a multitude of other factors such as poverty, politics, law, caste, history, society, economy, etc., which are wicked systems in themselves. For complete or optimal change to occur all the wheels need to move collaboratively at a unified pace, and as we all know, that seldom happens. When solutions are sought in optimums, disenchantment is unavoidable. I on the other hand, have discovered a heady space in this wicked system that I have come to cherish — the grey. This is the space anyone desiring transformation should embrace and hold close. Unlike the conclusive black or white, the grey allows for dialogue, new aspiration, confusion, distress, failure, desire, freedom, possibility, and imagination to co-exist together.

It is by residing in this ‘messy grey’ that I dream and envision ways to freedom, equality and dialogue within education.