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Freedom Lecture

"Education which does not help the common mass of the people to equip themselves for struggle for life, which does not bring out the strength of character, a spirit of philanthropy and the courage of a lion is not worth being called education"
- Swami Vivekananda

Fifth Samanvaya Freedom Lecture
"Learning Environment and Freedom To Learn" (In Tamil)
by
Dr. L.S. Saraswathi, Educationist

(L to R) Dr. L.S Saraswathi, Shri. Annamalai, Gandhi Study Centre, Shri. Ram, Samanvaya

Samanvaya is a learning organisation – neither do we compartmentalise learning into the formal boxes that we are constantly conditioned to do, nor subscribe to the conventionally accepted myth that ‘education’ and ‘school’ are synonyms. Learning takes place all the time and we are concerned with these thought and learning processes of life. However, of recent times, we have started examining and exploring the formal ways in which our society currently organises this learning, since the realities of “Education” are rapidly changing and new formulations of teaching, learning, academics, and opportunities are being evolved.

In keeping with this, on 11th August 2007 Dr. L.S. Saraswathi delivered the 5th Samanvaya Freedom Lecture, speaking about her experiences with education and the learning environment of a child.

Presiding over the function was Sri. Annamalai, Director of Gandhi Study Centre. Getting straight to the point in the introduction that he gave to the audience, he spoke about the current ‘learning’ conditions of a child – that s(he) is sent to school so that s(he) is not a “nuisance” at home, s(he) is given class work and homework so that s(he) is not a nuisance at school. He said that with such attitude it is no wonder that children do not like going to school and also wrongly associate their learning with such school. He also touched upon other issues like language and the problem of English-medium, pedagogical issues like age-groups of children in conventional schools, moral and values-based issues like the decrease in confidence and increase in confusion with regard to their career and life decisions as students jump from one std to the next, and the disconnect between reality and the education in the class room. He further explained this with an insightful example, that sometimes a boy who is not able to tell how many “10s” make up a 100, is able to look at a hundred rupee note and say how many 10 rupee notes will he get back for that 100 rupees!

Introducing Dr. L.S. Saraswathi (Dr. L.S.) to the gathering, he said that were that boy sent to her to learn mathematics, she would make him understand the connection and learn effortlessly, and without chalk, black board, notebook or any other aids. One can teach anything – science, mathematics, geography and so on with what is around one, and Dr. L.S.’s work and experience reflect this, as also other revolutionary ideas. He welcomed Dr. L.S. to deliver the lecture saying that in today’s world, where education has become a commodity, here is someone who will be able to tell and show the audience how simple, learning is.

Following Sri. Annamalai’s introduction, Dr. L.S. Saraswathi gave an insightful and thoughtful talk full of observation and compassion.

A summary of her talk

Dr. L.S Saraswathi, Educationist, Delivering the Freedom Lecture

Let us look at learning. Learning is something that happens through out our lives. Every moment, in our interaction with our surroundings each one of us is gaining experiences. These experiences shape our thoughts, inherent qualities, knowledge… shapes us. This is learning.

Look at a child. This process is so clearly and obviously seen in her. They are intrinsically enthusiastic creatures, and natural explorers. More importantly they have a certain awe and wonder about everything that they discover. They are all the time moving around, disturbing and experimenting with things around them, and they learn by themselves. These are qualities that we do not give them. These are nature’s gifts that men are born with. We can only see that we do not hinder this natural process of learning and interfere as little or facilitate it. We can learn a lot by observing children. All their different activities of supposed ‘disturbance’ and their experiments are their experiences and shape them. With small children, many times in all good intention adults stop them from doing certain things or giving into their natural urge to explore. What we don’t understand is how much learning we have stopped. This is the way she will learn about the materials around her first-hand, their properties and textures, colour, shape and smell and what are the possible uses of the things around her. Some things that we may have observed children doing and even thought what a waste of time! A list of such things that we may see around us in the city or in the village:-

- give her a piece of coal and she will keep rubbing it on the wall, floor, maybe other surfaces and you will tire of the activity much much before her
- he will gather sand from one place with both his hands and drop it in another place in order to collect it there
- he will continuously bang on the plate with any other piece of object like a spoon or stick that he may find
- she will keep sifting and sieving through the sand with her hands again and again or other like material
- breaking sticks or anything breakable
- trying to bend objects
- following or trying to catch ants creeping on the floor
- trying to bite into objects
- dropping down or throwing objects
- trying to lift very heavy objects that he may not be able to lift and has been told not to

Whatever the children learn is continuously being used by them, and this is how the learning stays with them. This is how it occurs naturally. Whatever is learnt comes out automatically. How does this learning come out? At the first level, it comes out as Imitative play, just imitating sounds, people, and gestures without understanding the meaning behind much. Next step is Make-believe play, where they use metaphors and meaning. For instance, the chair may become a scooter in their play. This is followed by the social dramas, wherein they start enacting people and situations with meaning. In this process, how do aids come in? In the beginning, they may use material to make things with their hands, like playing with lumps of clay. Then comes drawing and painting. Only after this would they even begin to comprehend symbols, i.e. A, B, C… But we dismiss much of what the child learns before symbols as play and many times bypass this learning to push them into these symbols which are several layers after the fundamental.

In my interactions with children, especially in the rural areas, I have seen such beautiful work by them, and some of them would not even have really attended school. I have seen such beautiful clay models of cows, a model of a bullock cart assembled together with different things and what is available. Now the front part of made with piece of wood and the back part with black soil very ingeniously. So I asked the child why this is so, and he told me because the wood pieces were over and he obviously had to finish making it within a certain time. Another model that I have seen is that of a “working model of a rice mill”. The child had actually put together the rice mill model as it would be in reality with all its working parts and so on, using different material etc. Now how is this possible without observation? How are these type of creations possible without observation? Children observe. How much of this do we actually try to capitulate on and cultivate in our education process?

The one major factor is what do the people around the children think is learning – the parents, teachers, community and so on. Studying textbooks and writing exams has become learning today. But this has no effect on anybody’s real learning and achievements. What we consider as learning has a direct impact on the achievements. If we really want to teach our next generations’, then we must stop being obstacles to their learning, we must not stop them from exploring, we must ensure the freedom of environment that is required for that learning not to be disturbed. What we have to understand more importantly is that whatever is around is a learning material, not just slate or textbook or other aids.

Let us now look at schools.

What are our expectations of schools and how are they manifested? Schools today mean textbooks and more textbooks, exams, rote writing, and marks and grades. The rules in the Balwadis that I have been to, unspoken or otherwise are :-

- that children should not speak unless expressly told to
- they may not move their hands and legs about
- marks got in the exams are above all other considerations

More important than how much and what I have learnt is how much marks I have got in the exams. How unnatural can circumstances get? These above are the very obstacles to education. We ourselves create the above and more such obstacles to education. Each one of these is taken as a decision at very ‘high’ levels but what gets affected is the child’s environment.

The first obstacle is the medium of instruction. The issue now becomes English Vs mother tongue. It is important for one to learn in the language that he / she speaks at home naturally, which in many cases and definitely so in non-urban environments, is the mother tongue. There are two myths about language: one is that you necessarily have to talk in a language to learn it well, and second is that only if it is the medium can we then learn the language well. The corollary to this in our case becomes that our medium of instruction be English. This poses a problem and I think that today it has brought us to a situation where our children are accomplished, neither in English nor in Tamil (regional language).

Another obstacle is that we don’t see aptitude, rather stress on information stuffing. As a result there is an information overload and sluggishness rather than self learning, creativity and resourcefulness. Teaching the principle or meaning rather than the actuals is necessary, i.e. if we cultivate the aptitude in the child to find out herself how, when, where, to what purpose should information be got rather than stuffing her with the information itself, education happens.

Yet another significant obstacle is that education today is universalised and not contextual. If the child is not able to connect what he has learnt with the realities of his own surroundings, family and world, then it is of no use. For instance, we had been to Kanyakumari to meet with the women from the coastal families there. The women there told me that we struggle, somehow save money and educate our children. They do these big studies like MA, but then they come back here and ask us for 10 Rs. to spend! The other thing that the women told me was that we don’t let our children go to the sea at all, because if they get fascinated with it, they will not go back to school at all. What the children see around them is not in the textbook, what they don’t see is in the textbook. Getting an MA does not give them money to spend, but they still ensure that they put their children through this process.

In recent times, there have been reforms coming into primary schools and beginners’ programmes. I am speaking of this because this is the base, what happens here will stay for life. The teacher plays an important role in the child’s learning, as a facilitator. Their understanding of learning then becomes very important no matter what the policies are, or what the system is. It is good that an Activity Based Learning (ABL) method has been instituted. As long as ‘teaching’ is underlined, only the teacher is central, once the focus shifts to learning, then both, children and the teachers, as well as their relationship become important. ABL method is a very important step in the formal system because this is the first time in this system that the child’s learning, curiosity and initiative is being given importance. The only glitch in this entire scheme as far as I have seen is that of the understanding of the teacher herself. Sometimes the teacher perceives herself to be the loser in this reform, and teacher once told me that what was earlier was better. The other thing is how they understand the contextual learning process. For instance, in the Tamil class, the teacher showed a picture of the bucket and asked the child to identify it. The child identified it as “buckit” and not “vaali” (the ‘proper’ Tamil word for bucket) and wrote ‘buckit’ transliterated in Tamil, correct spelling according to the pronunciation. The child is right, because he does recognise the bucket and he has identified and written it correctly, only that he has used the word that is used in his area and community rather than the proper Tamil word. This is learning, he will also in time learn that there is another word for it, which is “vaali”, isn’t it? But according to the teacher this is not learning.

I will also share with you some of the methods that we used with our Non-formal Adult Education programme.

For the literacy and written skills, we found that the adults learn better if they communicate with the teacher. For this the relationship between the teacher needs to be an equal one, and in the beginning this was not so. There was a gap and distance because the ‘students’ perceived that the teacher is better because he or she knows something they don’t and hence is going to teach them. So, we decided to go the “social problems way”. That is, we didn’t know about the problems that the villages and the people faced, so we had discussions in each village about the problems there. Each village developed its own primers about the problems in the village. Through these discussions about their own problems and trying to express them, they learnt to read and write in 6 months!

The other subject is mathematics. Now what was said to me was that people were weak in maths and numbers. This was a shock to me, as I knew from my experience and interactions with people that they could do mental arithmetic very fast. It is only their writing which needs help and practice, nothing is slow or weak about their maths.

The other discovery was that there are so many answers and perspectives for everything. This came across especially while discussing measurements. How many ways to measure! Today in schools this is gone. There is only one answer to a question. This cannot be possible at all if you come out of the school. These multiple yet simple ways to measure things using just their own limbs and body parts or what is around them or context showed a lateral thinking and practical thinking that is astounding. For instance, in a village where they were making mats, when I asked them in what measurements they made the mats, the villager answered me that it was very simple. “Mats for one person sitting, two people sitting, two people sitting, one person sleeping..and so on.”

The one fact that I have learned through all this is that all these qualities of learning is in our nature. Just drowned with other matter. All we have to do is keep questioning.
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Dr. L.S. Saraswathi, has had decades of experience working with the people in the rural areas of Tamilnadu in South India. Her special interest is in non-formal education for children and adults, both men and women. The thrust of her work has been to evolve a methodology for integrating peoples' practices with known and accepted forms of academic information. In the process she has spent considerable time focusing on women's learning processes. Folk mathematics has always held her particular attention. Dr. Saraswathi is regularly invited to contribute to literacy, non-formal adult education, and home science programmes. She has several publications on these themes to her credit.