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!