Student, know thyself

Is our cookie cutter educational system capable of producing someone who can break the mould?

An acquaintance of mine recently asked everyone on her Facebook friend-list what career they thought was appropriate for her. The person in question is around 30 years old and has a graduate degree from Harvard. But such uncertainty about what one wants to do, what one enjoys doing and what one actually ends up doing is not restricted to this one friend — she at least, was searching for an answer. Visit LUMS, my alma mater, a little before graduation time when the career office invites big organisations to interview students and you will hear conversations that go something like this:

“Hey man, where to?”

“Hey. Just got done with the P&G interview.  Got the Maersk interview next. Need to line something up with SCB and Ufone soon.”

Twenty-something years old. 16 or so years of schooling. And applying for every job available. From FMCGs to shipping to banking and telecom.  These young people are far from sure about what they want to do in life. And in the absence of this knowledge, most end up making ‘careers’ in whatever field they get offered their first job in.  I have friends who are bankers not because they want to be bankers but because the first organisation that offered them a job was a bank. Others end up in telecom for exactly the same reason. After a couple of years in the industry, it is ‘illogical’ to switch fields because then one would be wasting all the effort one has put into that career; never mind that one comes back home every evening a Gremlin, ready to bite everyone’s head off.

This is not to say that everyone in these organisations is unhappy. But if you are one of the lucky few who does not hate his/her job, then you were either smart enough to know who you were early enough or you just got lucky with the job you found. Most people I come across aren’t either. They will interview with every organisation they can find.....spurred on by demanding parents, ambitious peers and financial need into a career that leads to nine or so hours of unhappiness every day, five days a week for the rest of their working lives.

One of the primary reasons people end up like this is because they do not know who they are, and consequently, what they like and dislike. The purpose of schooling is to prepare students for the outside world. Schools need to be imparting a skill-set that allows students to deal with uncertainty and creatively deal with new situations in a rapidly changing world. Instead, our schools are doing just the opposite by minimising a student’s exposure to uncertainty as much as possible. “This is what your day looks like,” they say to students, handing them a timetable. “You don’t need to worry about what you want to study and what you don’t want to study. We’ll make that decision for you, regardless of whether it interests you or not and whether you have a talent for it or not. And we will teach all 40 of you in this class the same thing at the same time and at the same rate…irrespective of interest levels and natural talent. And we’ll do it in an atmosphere of fear. Fear, obedience and restraint on physical movement. Those are characteristics of a prison, you say? Why don’t you go stand in the corner for a while so you know to respect your elders henceforth? No, you are not old enough to decide for yourself what you should learn or think about what you want to be. Oh, now you wish to go to the washroom? No, you may not. Yes, I think it is reasonable that another human should have to ask me for permission before they are able to perform a regular bodily function. Fear, obedience and restraint on physical movement.”

This intimidating environment is designed to produce standardised drones — a “batch” of students who are all taught the same things but are profoundly unaware of who they are. Our educational system never gives students the freedom to ask questions. Instead, they are told: this is who you are (all of you are more or less the same) and this is what you should do (good students go into science, average ones into commerce and the bad ones into art). As a culture, we are authoritarian. We like telling people not just what to do but who they are. Parents push their children to grow up in their image; teachers insist on telling students what they should do with their lives. The idea of letting people choose what is best for themselves is foreign to us.

And that is exactly what alternate schools do: let students figure out who they are and what they are interested in. That’s what student-centred means — it’s not a catchphrase that the next standardised school system can put up on their standardised website and prospectus. We aren’t ready to let our schools be student-centred because that would mean relinquishing power and opening the classroom up to uncertainty. Teachers, principals and even parents would need to let go of the regimented lives they create for students and cede the ground to the chaos of student curiosity and interest. In such a learning environment — decidedly not an environment of fear, obedience and restraint on physical movement — students of all ages who are interested in a certain area come together and develop their own projects.  Such projects are invariably interdisciplinary because the students interested in putting together that re-imagined play of Shakespeare will read up on the history, build a set, figure out the math involved in such construction, deal with team dynamics and politics, acquire props, memorise lines, interpret them for their own unique context, put together a musical score and so forth. Teachers exist as mediators, coordinators and guides in a process of self-discovery, not authoritarian rulers who dictate what students should learn and when they should learn it.

Our educational system has devolved into a state where we have the highest degree of disregard for the curiosity of the young. But curiosity and play is how we learn. Do you have to force your little ones to explore the world around them? Of course not — they are wildly curious, touching and poking everything around them, bumping into things, putting their fingers into sockets. But put that child in a classroom in our schooling system and you are sure to suck all creativity right out of him. Our educational system is failing because we are too controlling, too hidebound, and too traditional.

Howard Thurman, the American philosopher and educator said: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” Schools need to be places where students can ask themselves what makes them come alive and find out who they are, not places where their elders can tell them who they must be.

The writer is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It has taken him 32 years to figure out that what makes him come alive is photography. And he’s doing that now. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, October 9^th, 2011.