Understanding the natural way of KNOWING & BEING
“TEACHING subjugates LEARNING.
AUTHORITY obliterates AUTONOMY.
INSTRUCTIONS obliterates EXPLORATION.
KNOWLEDGE obliterates KNOWING”
Liberating learning from the clutches of teaching
Natural learning is the way we learned mother tongue Effortlessly, Choicelessly……
Connecting the world and the word, seamlessly Retaining the role of the word for communication and world as content
Choicelessly?
Yes. We are shaped by our context and we imbibe whatever language we are being immersed in without choice. In Bangalore slums, children speak 4 to 5 languages by the time they reach 5 years. There was neither teaching nor conscious learning. Children just imbibed the language as part of their total experience.
Learning like breathing is a choiceless activity as learning is the very nature of LIFE.
How did we lose our ability to learn?
There is the story that Osho says with regards to how we lost our natural ability to be. (THE FROG AND THE CENTIPEDE: A STORY OF PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS) Because in that stage learning is natural. We lost this natural ability because we made learning subservient to being taught!
Natural learning is like the river in nature that flows choicelessly yet with total abandonment to its natural destination and modern dams are like the school that contains the natural flow of natural Learning.
Dams may be giving us a temporary comfort but in the long run, dams are really dangerous and only time will tell how it has been harmful. Similarly, schools might help us to provide some silly job but at the core level, at the being level, it is totally destructive.
But homeschoolers are doing more harm because they are teaching children at home. School per se is not the problem but the act of teaching and the way children are taken away from their natural content to what we decode as what children should learn.
Unless we understand the real nature of learning whatever we do will be damaging.
Children imitate the adults; are we worthy of their imitation
Children learn by imitation. This is an accepted statement by all in early childhood education. Then the question we need to ask is are we worthy of their imitation. What qualities should children have to lead a meaningful and harmonious life that children can learn from us?
Children play teacher games because they see teacher teaching. But if you were to ‘create knowledge’ in front of the child, then the child will learn to ‘create’. So, the ‘teacher’ needs to become a learner if we want our children to be learners. What about self-respect, sensitivity, sustainability, etc. If we end up using mere words children also end up learning to use the words instead of living them. It is the spirit of the adult that the child will imbibe. The very psychology or the position of ‘teacher’ exudes authority. Naturally, children will imbibe the hierarchy implicit in the teaching paradigm.
If these questions are important then we have to re-imagine what opportunity is being offered by children for our transformation. How do we step into their space with sensitivity, alertness, and awareness to ‘teach’ them without teaching, the spirit of freedom, democracy, and autonomy?
The focus of the WEBINAR will be to understand how learning takes place in the real world. Childhood is the time for developing the tools, qualities, abilities for learning (for being). just like the way they learn to talk or to walk. In the case of talking gradually and automatically, along with learning the word and its connection with the things and process, the structure for placing words at the right place also gets developed. Similarly, for experiencing the world, understanding it the tools get awakened and refined, the qualities for learning gets developed, the process of learning gets developed and so also a structure to place the inputs get developed. The world gets organized and understood within the experiential realm without the help of words. In a way, the content and the process get developed simultaneously. This is true even if the child is forced to learn the word. The word will develop tools, processes, and structure in the learner to understand the word (to inhabit the word).
Learning is not the appropriate word. What really happens is that we imbibe and become or take on the qualities of our cognitive source. We connect and inhabit the world if the world is our formative (cognitive) source or the word if the word is our formative source. Play is the process and playfulness is the quality inherent in nature to make the human child connect with the world. Children are equipped by nature to imbibe and be in the world. The way the world looks, the way the world feels, the way the world functions, and the way the world is organized and made all become the subject of a child’s investigation only to awaken the same qualities in the child. In that sense, the child is the world.
In our exploration at the school, we found that children have a way to protect themselves from becoming the ‘word’. That is to inhabit the world and use words as tools. Drawing is their preventive measure to protect them from being captured by the word. But it has to totally self-initiated without any interference from the adults. The process and structure of play get repeated in the drawing. In that sense drawing is the playing that children do in the two-dimensional world.
The WEBINAR will focus on the structure and logic of play and drawing along with exploring the teaching paradigm (meant to teach the word) and the learning paradigm (children’s way of learning the world). The most crucial period in human beings’ life is childhood and earlier the more crucial.
They are biologically equipped to learn. They are born to enquire. But children enquire non verbally. Their touch is a form of enquiry.
In fact, play is a form of enquiry. The making of toys is yet another exploration. Modern people seem to have completely misunderstood why children play and that is the reason why we are giving them toys. The toy can be compared to knowledge. both are in fact end products of a process. Schools want to bypass this process and directly give them the toy/ knowledge!
The process is the most important aspect as it is through the process the beingness of the human is formed. So early childhood education is the time where one has to give real importance as the child is getting formed at that point. What is required at this point is real sensitivity and respect for
children's autonomy. At this period children not only awaken their cognitive tools- the senses but also form the basic structure to understand the world.
CHECK OUT THE LINKS BELOW
1. How the West became WEIRD
Book argues these cultures make people more analytical, individualistic, impersonal
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/
2. Learning ‘From Nobody’: The Limited Role of Teaching in Folk Models of Children’s DevelopmentDavid F. Lancy
Abstract
Among the Western intelligentsia, parenting is synonymous with teaching. We are cajoled into beginning our child’s education in the womb and feel guilty whenever a ‘teaching moment’ is squandered. This paper will argue that this reliance on teaching generally, and especially on parents as teachers, is quite recent historically and localised culturally. The majority follow a laissez faire attitude towards development that relies heavily on children’s natural curiosity and motivation to emulate those who are more expert.
3. David F. Lancy: Children’s Play and Learning in Traditional and WEIRD Societies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1an2BPvFow
4. Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm — Peter Gray Ph.D.
Research reveals potential risks of academic preschools and kindergartens. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/freedom-learn/201505/early-academic-training-produces-long-term-harm
5. How Early Academic Training Retards Intellectual Development — Peter Gray Ph.D.
