KB Jinan is an activist of a different sort and his aim is to rescue children from modern day education! We had a three hour
session with him, at Mitr arranged by Scan mom, Sneha, who efficiently managed to proceeds so a donation could be made to Jinan‘s Existential Knowledge Foundation. A short report on the same:-
Jinan with his, as Sneha it -a
cross between Tagore and Santa Claus look, caught our attention within a minute
of starting his talk, with him saying how much he hated school when he was
young, and home, too, since both his parents were teachers and home felt like
school, so away from school he was school- sick, when he was home!
Leaving this stifling atmosphere behind, joining engineering college, he experienced a wave of freedom
with cigarettes, booze, ganja and hated all the education he got. Finally , he quit engineering and walked into National Institute of Design, Ahemdabad, and found himself become a
first-bencher, cause here was a place that his heart and mind liked. He found
people asked each other eagerly what they were working on as everyone was
working on something and education was a process of self- discovery.
This change of ethos got him
thinking about the contrast with his earlier straitjacketed education and soon
he was advocating ‘no school’ to all. A friend of his ran a school and in the
process of trying to help her, he started working on his ideas and researching
what happens with kids when they are given utmost freedom to do what they want.
He spent many more years- recorded 5000 plus videos of children playing, studied
how children learn.
Jinan says that children are
natural explorers and learners. A toddler is constantly escaping its mother’s
arms and running around. The mistake that we as parents do is lift the child
up- preventing this ambulation, when the child is young, so when the child is
older and when we DO want him to walk- He wants to be lifted! Since that is
what he was used to from toddler days.
Jinan asked us a simple question
which displayed how limited our thinking can be- What colour is the sky? Everyone answered
blue. Then he pointed out that the colour of the sky changes as per the time of
the day, from pink, orange, white, pink to black at night- so one has ask
the question what time do you want the color of the sky of! Not straight away 'blue'!
But thanks to our education
system, our brains have ossified certain answers.
Jinan spoke at length of how
modern toys have destroyed the joy of childhood. A child he says, can make a
car out of a chair when she sits holding its back like a steering wheel and
moves with her feet, but we hand over a toy car and take away the joy. Jinan showed
us pictures of three children who had made three stones into imaginary dolls
and were playing with it. He said that when the first doll was manufactured, a
friend of his, remembers, keeping the doll close to her body at night, thinking
perhaps the doll was dead as it would not shut it eyes, and body heat would
make it alive! Later of course doll manufactures remedied this with long lashed
eye balls which rotated to sleep.
Jinan explained that learning
is done by the body- mind combine and is a natural, instinctive process.
Children learn constantly by watching. He showed a picture of a child who was
reading a book upside down as that is how his mother kept it (so the child has
the right side up, while she saw it up-side down)! In villages, children learn
all tasks with this method of osmosis and do it with natural intelligence and
joie de livre.
Learning requires patience,
observation and concentration and Jinan showed a picture of a boy watching fish
in a puddle of water while all around were running around, in quiet learning.
By spoon feeding knowledge, we have made children’s minds into libraries of information,
with their incapacity to pick up knowledge on their own.
Jinan spoke about various
other issues, some quite obviously questionable like when he said homosexuality
was unnatural and is a modern day occurrence and not something people of the
ancient times were familiar with. Personally, I don’t agree with that view, as has
been documented on LGBTQ community that, most of them are born that way and its
not a matter of nurture.
How all these views can be
brought to a practical application in full stream education requires a longer and more intense workshop, perhaps will be
organized soon, meanwhile Jinan recommends accepting children as they are and
letting them do what they want. He said when he adopted a child he promised he
would do three things- He would let her be free, he would never lie to her and
never question her.
When asked what was the time frame he thought his ideas would find a universal acceptance, he said perhaps 700 or 1000 years!
The truth is my best memories of childhood are the times I was 'adult interference free'!
Perhaps Jinan's ideas will be picked up by the world some day and we can give our children their childhood back!
