As I enter the classroom, I see my students with a new perspective. The pandemic and lockdown has reawakened in me a searcher, a traveller and seeker of truth.
The months that have passed by have thrown up new challenges for parents and teachers alike. Possibly changed the face of education radically. These challenges will not go away easily. Over-reliance on the internet has reduced attention span drastically. Students are easily distracted, prone to skip written work and generally lethargic in a traditional class. A senior educator recently shared “Parents have stopped parenting”.
As I struggle to share meaning from the prescribed texts with the students, I succumb to contemplation and go back to my old love- reading.
The sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury wrote the short story “All Summer in a Day.” He paints a grim portrait of the persecution and victimisation of the other – the “different”. Here the setting is also a school and students.
After reading the story, the very meaning of the word “different” is troubling. It is what we now know as “othering”. A technique successfully and horrifically applied by dictators like Hitler to promote dominance by persecuting the “different” and demonising them as the “bad other”.
So I ask, “What is different?”
All of us are different yet we are taught to be same. Our DNA and fingerprints are different. Our food habits even within the same family are different.
A group with a majority language will look at a person speaking a minor language as different- perhaps colouring, labelling, judging and finally persecuting the hapless “different”. Here the comfort zone is the “same-ness” – we love it, the shared language, culture, religion. It is our safety net.
Some years ago I read (and still re-read) Identity & Violence- the Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen, I was struck by his amazing insight into the plurality of our identity. Externally, we try to mould our students to conform, to follow the “same-ness”- to sing the virtues of this wonderful illusion.
Yet finally releasing them to a world where nothing actually is same. Neither the colleges they will join, nor the course that they choose. In fact, they will be “different” in the city of their choice. A traveller in a new setting, learning and adapting.
This is the essence to understanding “different”. It is acceptance and tolerance. Every time see or experience something “not the same as another or each other”, it does not mean we have to immediately label it or worse condemn it.
To counter to this debilitating group-think, there must be thoughts of quality. If each one of us can choose which flavour of pizza he wants, or which musical artist or song is the best, and which brand of clothing or shoes we like- there is definitely a “different” in each of us. So, though it may sound difficult and elusive, we need to try to have a “Quality of Thought.”
The obvious response to exhortation and propaganda should be research and reflection. This leads to a train of ideas, a chain of thoughts and finally quality thinking.
In all this mad race for the mastery of the syllabus, the true and objective of education is lost. Many a finer soul is silenced to the altar of “success”.
“What is quality of thoughts?”
Before we begin to see the quality, let me share some instances where there is an absence, an emptiness, a dark shallow place where nothing grows.
It could be the empty chattering in the audience while a show is going on. It is murmuring and dissection of every piece of information – whether it is shared directly or not with you.
The constant urge to “bat every ball that comes your way”, and you don’t even know the rules of the game.
The need to join a group, the feeling to be a part of the larger “better” group, the secret desire to be accepted by the majority, the fear of being singled-out for your “difference”.
Quality is the ability to an individual to seek and not state. It is the long silence after the show is finally over. It is the sieve that filters everything expect the tiniest but most valuable golden nugget of thought.
It is that overpowering feeling of disgust that forces you to say “let him who has not sinned throw the first stone”. Quality is the lone Samaritan who is nameless and yet does the most endearing action of helping a complete stranger in distress.
Quality is letting go- of things that never mattered anyway.
As I write this, I know I will still struggle and try. To improve the quality of thought and accept the differences in each and every one of us.
Meditating.
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