Reverential Ecology

An excerpt from an interview with Satish Kumar in Kyoto Journal by John Einarsen, Stewart Wachs, and Lye Tuck-Po.

In this interview, Satish Kumar discusses the role of practical experience as an integral part of students’ programs of learning in their local community. 

Many teachers in conventional schools are lately discovering that students learn better when a hands-on component is added to their programs. This can hardly be considered “experienced-based” or “self-directed learning,” however, in most cases, since the students are brought back to the classroom to continue cramming their brains with the useless information required to pass the school’s mandated standardized tests.  

EXCERPT:

SK:  The more you study with humility, the more you realize the unity of the world, its mystery, and yet you will have further knowledge.  There is nothing wrong with knowledge. It’s a question of knowledge with ignorance.  If you go only for ignorance, you are lost.  If you go only for scientific knowledge, you are lost.  There is this interplay between knowledge and ignorance.  It’s almost like a dance, like silence and speech. And in that dance you find relationship and you arrive at reverential ecology.  

Q:  What would education be like in reverential ecology?

SK:  At the moment our education is very formalized and intellectualized, very academic.  We learn everything from books, and now from computer screens.  Education based in reverential ecology is experience-based, so if you want to learn about the ocean you won’t start from a book.  You'll take children to the ocean and say, go dive in the ocean, and observe what is in it.  Walk and see and smell the organisms around it.  And once you have experienced this, you come back to the classroom and the teacher says, well you discovered this, but such and such a person before you discovered that, and you can bring out some books, some computer programs, and see what other people have to say about oceans.  Afterwards you go back into the ocean and compare what you have learned from your own experience, then from books and the computer and then come back to your experience.  So you learn much more directly.

Q:  This seems also to imply that education should not be, as it is here in Japan, so centralized, because clearly not everyone lives by the ocean.  Some live near mountains, some in urban centers.  Are you implying that this kind of experiential education should be tailored to local conditions?

SK:  Absolutely.  I gave the ocean as an example only to illustrate the point.  It could be trees or animals, insects, worms, mountains, or rivers. It could be just rocks, or grasses.  But it’s being outdoors in nature, letting all your senses experience: your eyes, ears, touch, smell, taste, thoughts, your consciousness.  So time, space and consciousness are included in a more holistic and more reverential education.  Whereas in the formal and reductionist education you are using very few of your senses, mostly your intellect.

   Holistic education with reverence for life would include a large emphasis on practical skills for life.  So, instead of only studying the ocean, mountain, or fungi as an observer, detached, you are studying nature as part of your life relationship.  You dig the soil and plant trees, vegetables and flowers, and you learn to grow them -- learn while you are studying nature as part of your life relationship. So you don’t learn just theory, but learn through practice.  In the Western way of thinking we say theory and practice.  In my way of thinking it should be practice and theory.  In Sanskrit the words are achar, vichar.  Achar means practice.  Vichar means theory.  Practice must come first and theory must follow.  Whereas in Western education theory comes first, then practice, if at all.  And you know, the head of any monastic order in India will be called Acharya, like Vinoba Bhave was Acharya Vinoba, and my guru was called Acharya.  This means one who practices is the head, not the intellectual, not the person who has the brain. 

  So you take children into the garden and put them to work and while they garden they are learning.  It's not as if they are missing a lesson.  Growing in the garden is the lesson.  Then you send them to the kitchen and say, now find out the knowledge of our food by cooking.  And cooking, too, is not by itself a separate thing.  It is to share.  So to learn about community is to cook in the school.  So holistic education is: growing, cooking, sharing, community, building together.   

           Kyoto Journal #43 (See. www.kyotojournal.org/kjinterviews.html)

                              

           Satish Kumar is the co-founder of Schumacher College and editor of  

           Resurgence Magazine

Two Types of Learning

This is my response in answer to the question,  "What do you think are the major deficiencies of the conventional education system?"

There are basically two types of learning: forced learning and self-directed learning.

Forced learning assumes that all children are capable of comprehending, memorizing, and successfully answering questions on tests based on specified abstract factual knowledge if they study hard enough. The educational polices and practices of the conventional school system are developed on the basis of this assumption.

Toward this end, billions of dollars are spent on education in this country, attempting to force all students to pass a prescribed set of factual tests so they can be “successful” in the job market and so the United States can “excel in international economic competition.”

The educators, politicians, and talk show hosts and reporters, who have participated in Education Nation discussions, as well as the architects of the current administration’s “Race to the Top” program, are all locked into this assumption about how children learn.

But the reality is that this view of learning is flawed. All children are not capable of successfully passing the conventional school’s abstract standardized tests. A small percentage of students are capable of this level of abstraction. These are the ones who do well on the standardized tests, the ones who get the As and the Bs. These are the ones who are endowed with this capacity at birth. 

For the majority of students, having been endowed with other gifts at birth, being forced to compete in this unjust system is experienced as torture and endless boredom. Their self-esteem is shattered. Their natural gifts are stifled, or destroyed all together. These are the ones who become dropouts, bullies, juvenile delinquents, drug addicts, gang members, and dangerous criminals. These are the ones who are overflowing our prisons.

These are the reasons I believe that conventional education is terribly flawed and needs to be changed. 

I would welcome any other perspectives on, or suggestions for improving, our conventional educational system.

Welcome to the Education vs. Learning Blog

In this first posting, I would like to sketch out my conceptual framework for discussing my view of the difference between education and learning. I believe that every child possesses a special, unique gift, or gifts, at birth. And every child has immense creativity, curiosity, and industriousness if its gifts have not been stifled or killed by experiences in their families or at school.

In discussing this framework, I will need to use a few terms and phrases such as “innate,” a word that refers to a child’s gifts at birth. I will also discuss “paradigms” (a scientific word meaning “world view”), and “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” motivation.

There are a few additional words we will need to use, but they will be introduced at the appropriate time in discussions.

My hope is that this blog will provide a forum for introduction and discussion of ideas that will further the development of a more humane system of learning. Children deserve much more than they are getting from our conventional educational system.

Again, welcome, and please feel free to add your comments or questions.