Should we be worried today, about a society that is deeply divided? We have political disagreements and personal flareups at the drop of a hat, wage wars on friendships on WhatsApp groups, and social media platforms. So called intellectuals and even the highly educated, fight on the most banal events. Has our society lost its way? Where have our people skills gone?
Several amongst us criticise that the university education neither builds values, nor develops life skills. With a great emphasis on new age skills such as machine learning, programming, automation, data analytics, data visualization and cyber security in the curriculum, we seem to have given up on psychosocial competencies or simply life skills. Even logical reasoning or analytical skills are found wanting with the current less than imaginary teaching and ineffective assessments.
For a change, should we not teach adaptive and positive behaviour that helps deal effectively with the demands and challenges of life? Have we completely forgotten our roots, our ancient writings and teachings to the western alleys? Employability skills and placements are important for a life after college. But so are skills that endear us to fellow beings. Chaos and uncertainty seem to have found a permanent place in our lives. How do we help ourselves?
Is our ancient wisdom so ancient that it does not count anymore? As the past generations gave way to new generations, we lost much of our wisdom and knowledge too to time, resulting in fading foundational skills. Today, we thrive on a culture of instant gratification. A culture of hate and not love.
Our ancestors existed. Their creativity existed. Their science and mathematics existed. Their abodes existed. Their wisdom existed though their ways to reach conclusions of life may have been different. Would it have been possible to write the Samhitas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas, Upanishads and Vedangas thousands of years back if they had limited skills?
We only need to look back at our ancestral knowledge and reconnect with nature. A simple way of living today is a luxury that is available to everyone, and it’s the way our ancestors had lived. However, instead of values, we have learned that wealth and ownership is the key to happiness. We believe that happiness comes with positive experiences, but forget it’s conditional. When happiness doesn’t depend on the occurrence of any particular event, it becomes sustainable and unconditional. All our emotions must lie here.
The dichotomy between western and Indian belief has always been on the inflection point of materialism and spiritualism. In reality, they are complementary. In that subtility of thought lies the delta of intuition that is owed to the Indian belief, system and practice. The ancient wisdom teaches us to look at both zero and infinity with equanimity. It also teaches that ‘prajna’, ‘priyam’, ‘satyam’, ‘ananta’, ‘ananda’ and ‘stithi’ manifest themselves in space and hence in our lives. The Indian university education would do well to build back these subtilities into learning.
Another barrier has been the language. The dominance of English language has snowed the Indian belief system much under its own pedagogy, that is further buttressed by the infallible argument of the British that leaves all other languages indefensible. To qualify English, the British, perhaps had just one argument, “English puts every other language at an equal disadvantage”. While it sends the jury into a tizzy, the affairs of the world carry on. So, we continue to think in our native language and end up paraphrasing in English. We end up doing neither right.
We are at the crossroads today. With AI tools becoming a reality, the time is not far when we will outsource even our thinking, logic and reasoning to machines. Forget people skills. People themselves would be rendered redundant.
Isn’t it time the education paradigm is reinvented, to make learning fun and meaningful? Should we as teachers, build our own towers of babel? When teachers make learning engaging and fun, students are more willing to participate and take risks. Having fun while learning, also helps students retain information better, for the process becomes enjoyable and memorable. Is it a tall order to ask the universities to reflect and push back a little?