Ancient teaching methodologies, the way out of creating human robots

This is 21st century, the era of the great growling engine of change-Technology. We don’t use technology, we live in the technology and so do our mentors and their teaching styles. Remember the days when teachers were addressed as “Gurus” and students as “Shishya”. Those were the days where the sole motto of teaching was to make students independent and secure instead of transforming them into robots. However, it may be reasonably apt to entitle today’s education system as a ‘National Waste’. As time has elapsed there has been a tremendous change throughout the land, but the most drastic change has been seen in the teaching sector due to the introduction of new technologies.

Let’s trace, how it all began! During the reign of Lord William Bentinck, the concept of the western education system was introduced in India. He ensured that only the people who are educated got government jobs and thus formulated a law which is known as “The English Education Act of 1835”. This law was seen as a welcome change in India since the naive people didn’t realize and foresee the impact of this law.

Before the western education system, the native Gurukul system of teaching was followed in India. Now the Gurukul was one of the best teaching styles ever prevalent in the world. It ensured complete understanding of the subject with practical implementations and findings. Unlike today’s system, the education at that time was free and openly available to anyone who was interested in learning the dynamics of the world.

They often followed the concept of-“Spare the rod and spoil the child”. Hence, it was no surprise that we were bestowed with the world class economists or doctors, be it the jurist Chanakya or the great mathematician Aryabhata, who gave the world, the concept of zero.

Chanakya’s Nitishastra (Moral science Lessons) and Arthashastra (Financial Management Lessons) are the famous works which are of great value even to this day.

Similarly, Aryabhata is the author of several treatises on mathematics and astronomy, some of which are lost. His major work, Aryabhatiya, a compendium of mathematics and astronomy, was extensively referred to in the Indian mathematical literature and has survived to modern times. The mathematical part of the Aryabhatiya covers arithmetic, algebra, plane trigonometry, and spherical trigonometry. It also contains continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums-of-power series, and a table of sines.

Chanakya and Aryabhata both believed that one’s whose knowledge is confined to books and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge nor wealth when the need for them arises,and this was one of the pillars of Gurukul.

Another noticeable feature of the Vedic education is the values that were ascribed to it. In fact not just in the Vedic period, but also till recent times (before foreign invasions)the following objectives were ascribed to education.

· Self-control

· Development of character

· Generation of sociability or social awareness

· Integral development of personality

· Propagation of purity

· Preservation of knowledge and culture

Hence, it’s evident that at that time the aim was to make better individuals and not better robots.In ancient times, the education system was used to attain wisdom whereas now it is used to gain knowledge. The Gurukul system was based on attaining practical knowledge and followed the modified Chinese proverb:

Don’t give man, a fish

Don’t teach him how to fish

Rather inspire him to develop his own way of fishing

However today, the education system is heavily burdened by other factors. As s result, it pays less attention on making students aware of what they are learning and more attention on how score marks in the exam. Some schools and colleges even lack the basic practical labs required to conduct experiments.

The modern schools and colleges are among those amateurish machines which accept input in the form of large stacks of dollars and don’t even care about what they are producing. On the other hand, theGurukul were run by public donations, they didn’t care about how much money you have in your pockets all they cared about was the “Talent and desire to succeed”. The teacher-student ratio at that time was 1:15, unlike today’s system where there are about 50–60 students in a class.

It’s evident that proper care and attention was given to every student, which is all that is required to develop successful human beings. Students at that time were allowed to choose their own subjects and were not tied to a strict and rigid curriculum. Gurukul followed the policy of Albert Einstein-“Everyone is a genius; but if you judge a fish on the ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it was stupid”. Gurukul believed that the whole purpose of education is turning mirrors into windows.

Instead of asking students to just cram the concepts, the focus should be on how well they understand them. In Gurukul system, attention was given to theoretical knowledge but the knowledge of a student was always measured by practical examinations. There were oral citations of Vedas, competitions of archery which not only built confidence among students but also helped them to learn the concepts for the lifetime. The goal of education must be knowledge plus character and not only the memorized concepts. Gurukul believed that true purpose of education is building minds and not careers.

I strongly feel that the ancient education system was one of the best systems of teaching. Anyone can tell you how to read from a book but the real challenge is making a student understand what he is reading, its importance so that he can use the knowledge in the outside world. Today the mentor’s only focus on making students get an ‘A’ grade in their subjects.

Although subjects like moral science and environmental studies have been introduced in the syllabus but the lack of importance to these subjects pretty much renders them useless. On the other hand, the students of Gurukul period lived away from their family in the lap of nature hence; there was no need to make students learn about the concepts of the environment.

The values of the Gurukul system ran deeper than just the delivery of concepts. A gurukul was effectively an extended family. Gurukul = GURU+KULA, GURU means the teacher and KULA mean extended family. The extended family of students comprised of friends who were on the same journey of becoming better individuals.Since all the students lived together, they by themselves cultivated the feelings like love, care and respect hence there was not even a need to teach students about all these feelings bundled up in a subject called Moral Science.

To summarize, teaching methodologies have always been a problem in our country and lack of it has been blamed for all sorts of evil for hundreds of years. Eminent scholars include academicians, poets, nobel laureates like Tagore have written lengthy articles about how Indian education system needs to change. The funny thing however is that from the colonial times, few things have changed.

We may have established IITs, IIMs, law schools and other institutions of excellence; students may now routinely score 90% marks and even students with 90+ percentages may find it difficult to get into the colleges of their choice, but we haven’t really changed and improved. India is in dire need for change and the true change can actually be invoked only by embracing the older / time-tested, ancient practices in education.

Specially designed schools for residential, vocational, social, impact — focused education, like Gurukuls is what we need today. Simple products, services, teaching methodologies, pedagogy that enables students to learn through experience is what we need today.

For more articles like these, check out www.projectsforschool.com, and let’s together try to work towards this larger, visionary goal.