Author: Arun Elassery

When I was growing up in a government colony, we had a grassy ‘ground’ between the rows of two-storey flats. This meant that in the fifty or so homes surrounding the ground there were enough children to play all sorts of games. The grassy ground was large enough to allow us to play football and cricket. We made our own badminton court in the ground, installed lights and played badminton at night. We also played marbles, gilli danda and many games that involved running and hitting each other with rubber balls. As I remember it today, I played outside every single day after I got back home from school. There was very little money available and so we played with bare minimum equipment which everyone contributed towards.

I see the big expensive playing kits that children carry today and the special shoes and clothes. As if it is not possible to play cricket if twenty people were sharing one bat and one ball and there was no ‘coach’ giving advice. In the huge sports stores that have mushroomed in all cities, every sport has its own special section – badminton shoes are different from tennis shoes. And everything is expensive! In the poorer neighbourhoods children are still playing like we used to play but the intermediaries (product companies and service providers) have wormed their way in and made all of us, rich and poor alike, believe that we need their services.

If we look for intermediaries in the city schools, we don’t have to look beyond the yellow school buses that clog roads and provide the inessential service of picking up and dropping children right outside their homes. The school dresses, the school bags and books, the special water bottles and tiffin boxes, all carry the stamp of the intermediaries. Intermediation looks like something that happens inside all systems as they grow and the money supply inside increases. It seems obvious that at some point intermediation will reduce the efficiency of a system and we have to think whether this has already started happening inside our school system.

Let me conclude this post with an excerpt that remembers an older less-intermediated world…

As children, we grew up learning how to make many types of paper planes (ordinary/ fast/ rocket etc.), boats (ordinary/ with a sail/ catamaran etc.), whistles from leaves or paper, string telephones with empty cans, rubber band powered rolling toys, a jumping mouse from a handkerchief, a boat cut out of a plastic tongue cleaner with a blob of soap at the notch behind etc. I can go on adding to this list. Nobody formally taught us any of this but every child knew many such tricks. This was probably because there was a lot of unstructured free time to play, explore, talk to other children and adults, read, get bored, etc. This has now become replaced by the idea that learning is all academic and structured and there is no space for children or adults to discover such things.
– From ‘Learning to learn – Ideas on Implementation‘

Principle 1 of true teaching: Nothing can be taught
All learning happens within the child. No teacher can have direct control over it. The teacher is a helper and a guide. They can only attempt to draw the attention of the student to where the knowledge lies and thus assist him/her to see it.
– From ‘Learning to learn’ (More details and link to buy the book is available here)

(In the Hindi version of the book we changed it to make the same idea clearer:
सिद्धांत 1: समझाना और समझना पृथक प्रक्रियाएं हैं।
शिक्षक समझाने का प्रयास करता है और उसके लिए तर्क विधि का प्रयोग करता है। विद्यार्थी उसे समझने का प्रयास करता है और उसके लिए अनुभव विधि का प्रयोग करता है।)

It was under Pawanji’s close guidance that this small book, ‘Learning to Learn’, was conceptualized and written in 2018 but it lists my name as the author. I bring this up as the prelude to this blog post because what should have been one of the central insights of the book revealed itself to me only last week. Let me explain.

I had gone to Purnapramati school in Bangalore to run the prototype of a science learning program I have recently developed. In this program the learning process described in the ‘Learning to Learn’ book is encoded in the study material. The children learn science by following the written instructions given in the learning material and without any ‘teaching’ input from a teacher. In other words, the program is an effective demonstration of the inherent self-learning ability of children.

While the children were busy with the program, I was talking to the science teachers trying to convince them that their job should be to be inspirational science educators and not people who transact the simple content that is in the NCERT textbook. I was also telling them that although self-learning is natural and, on introspection, may turn out to be how we have learnt everything, but we will still have no confidence in the process. This may be because we have been brainwashed through long experience into thinking that it is teaching (and teaching only) that results in learning.

While this conversation was going on, I had my moment of insight, my epiphany. Nothing can be taught is one aspect of it but the other important aspect is that learning (समझना) is effortless. The children are putting their effort in following a learning process but the learning itself is a natural outcome of this process and is effortless. It will become clearer if we look at the effort of thinking, reading and following the learning process in other ways as an external process (in the realm of doing/gati) and learning or understanding or समझना as an internal process (in the realm of being/sthiti). All effort is in gati. There is no movement or effort in sthiti. Or, again, if we use the Hindi version, समझाना तर्क विधि से होता है (tark implies effort) लेकिन समझना अनुभव विधि से होता है (there is no effort required in anubhav).

I felt that it was only now that I fully understood what ‘Learning is natural’ really meant.