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Main ideas

n Education and society are closely linked - the system of education reflects what is happening in the larger society.

n Just as education can maintain ‘status quo’ in a society it can also become a powerful tool in transforming it.

n Many important thinkers and educationists have looked at the system of education and the preva-lent social structure and reflected on the power of education to create a just and equitable soci-ety.

n Seen in this context the work of Mahatma Gan-dhi, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich has had a pro-found impact on the way we view education and its role in society.

List Of Materials

n Cue cards for group work (set of three)

n Copies of Handout 2: Three thinkers: Study them to understand our work.(one copy per student)

Session 3: The school is society !

MODULE 1

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Activity 1

Begin the session by reminding the class about the quilt activity where they noted down their thoughts about India’s strengths and weaknesses. Now tell the class to imagine that a genie appears before them, telling them that they can make two wishes for their country - they can ask for one thing that should be changed and one thing that should never be changed about India. What are the two wishes they would ask for? Encourage students to respond and note down their responses on the blackboard.

Now ask the class what role education can play in making these wishes come true.

Also ask a few volunteers to share their responses to the worksheet given in the previous session. Conclude the

activity by saying that this link between education and society will be explored further in this session.

Activity 2

Divide the class into three groups and give each group a copy of the handout. Tell them that the handout explains and analyzes the philosophy and work of three important 20th century educationists.

Assign one educationist to each group; explain that the group has to read and discuss the ideas of the thinker assigned to them and make a presentation to the class. The presentation must talk about the educationist’s work with reference to the context in which he lived and worked and describe his key contributions to education.

Allow about 20 minutes for group work, then call each group to make its presentation.

Remember, only two boons !

Education and Society - What we think

Three thinkers

The school is society !

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At the end of the three presentations, have a brief discussion around the following questions..

n What did the three thinkers have in common?n What were the main differences in their approach?n Will you call them ‘educationists’ in strict sense of the term?

Why?n Do you think their ideas and work are relevant to us today?

In what way?

Sum up the session by making the following points.

One of the key contributions that the three thinkers made was to underline the link between education and society. All of them recognized that the societies they lived in were unjust and exploitative; that their objective was unlimited industrial profit at the cost of people’s well-being and environmental sustainability. They saw that the education system as it existed played a major role in institutionalizing inequalities. They understood that for society to become more just and humanitarian, fundamental educational changes were necessary.

Education has the potential to empower a people for a

more just societySociety and Education are inseparable.

Schools can add to inequality in society

Session 3MODULE 1

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Despite these shared concerns their approaches to the problems of education in their societies were very different. While Illich wanted society to be ‘deschooled’, that is, to eliminate formal education altogether, Freire wanted education to focus on the oppressed and empower people to become active participants in the creation of a more just society. Gandhi saw dignity of manual work as a critical part of education, and believed that education must build qualities of head, hand and heart.

In a society like ours, where deep inequalities persist, and a majority of people remain poor and oppressed the work and ideas of these three thinkers continue to remain relevant.

Our education system reflects the iniquities in our society. But our society today is also the result of the kind of education we received. The kind of education we give our children today will determine to a great extent the society of the future. In other words, our tomorrow depends on what we do today.

Home Activity

Distribute copies of Three Thinkers. Ask the participants to read the handout at home.

Cue Cards

The school is society !

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Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

Group 1

M.K. Gandhi (1869-1948) This note talks about the philosophy and work of one of the more important 20th century thinkers: M.K. Gandhi.

M.K. Gandhi was born in a well-to-do, traditional, Gujarati family in colonial India.

He trained as a lawyer in the land of the colonizer, England, practiced law in another colonized land, South Africa and returned home to challenge the idea of colonization.

Before he threw himself totally into the Indian freedom struggle, Gandhiji had engaged with education through his initiatives in community living in the Phoenix (1904) and Tolstoy (1910) Farms in South Africa. Later experiences in India helped him to understand our divided society better. For him freedom from the British was the beginning of India’s betterment and not an end in itself. His opposition to colonial rule was based on his belief that a culture that promotes and justifies enslavement and exploitation of other human beings was not a culture worth emulating. The fact that western men had spent ‘all their energy, industry and enterprise in plundering and destroying other races’ was evidence enough for Gandhi that western civilization was in a ‘sorry mess’. Therefore it could not possibly be a symbol of ‘progress’, or something worth transplanting in India. The education system established by such rulers thus needed to be questioned.

Although he was disturbed by the feudal, caste-ridden, gender-oppressive rural Indian society, he preferred to modify traditional structures rather than to negate them altogether. He said ,“The revival of the village is possible only when it is no more exploited. Industrialization on a mass scale will necessarily lead to passive or active exploitation of the villagers as the problems of competition and marketing come in. Therefore we have to concentrate on the village being self-contained, manufacturing mainly for its own use.”

He believed that village economy based on self-sufficient production was a more socially and economically viable option for India’s wellbeing rather than industrial production and urban growth. Economic progress for him did not mean betterment of a few at the cost of many, but equal opportunities and justice for all. Truth and

Education should bring out the best in human relations.

‘Learning’ is possible only by ‘doing’

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non-violence were non-negotiable on the path of development. He believed that education did not merely have the limited purpose of helping a person to earn a livelihood but was a way of helping people to become better human beings. He said learning was possible only by working or ‘doing’.

He saw Buniyadi Shiksha (Basic Education) or Nai Talim as a plan to turn the caste-system upside-down by giving manual labour the place of ‘core-curriculum’. Based on his earlier experiences at the Tolstoy and Phoenix farms in South Africa and in Wardha, Maharashtra, he proposed this educational model to the Zakir Hussein Committee in 1937. He visualized these schools as a necessary remedy to the prevalent educational system and as agents for transforming the social, economic and political life of India.

Gandhiji’s Nai Talim died a silent death due to political reasons; his vision was tacitly killed by denying it the prime importance it deserved and by terming it impractical, idealistic and old-fashioned. The new State of India preferred to walk the path of development chalked out by the Western world and thus through its plans and policies ignored Buniyadi Shiksha. It essentially carried forward the educational system of the former colonial regime by merely making some cosmetic changes.

You will recall that you have read about Gandhiji’s Nai Talim last year and that you have a handout about it in your files. Please refer to that if you need.

Your presentation must talk about the educationist’s work with reference to the context in which he lived and worked and describe his key contributions to education.

Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

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Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

Group 2

Paulo Freire (1921-1997) This note talks about the philosophy and work of one of the more important 20th century thinkers: Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire has had a significant influence not only in the field of education but also on political processes in Chile, Nicaragua, Africa, and in his own country - Brazil. Born into a middle-class family, he witnessed extreme poverty and deprivation in his childhood during the Great Depression of late 1920s. The inequality between the rich and the poor and the social unrest in the country drew him to the Movement of Popular Culture in Recife (Brazil), where themes like nationalism and development were discussed. By the end of 1940s, he began working with local illiterate peasants in the area of adult literacy, although the work he did went much beyond teaching of the ‘three Rs’.

It was not until the late 1950s that he wrote about his experiences and insights - first as part of his doctoral dissertation and later as Professor of History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Recife where he worked until 1964. However after the military coup in 1964, Freire was jailed and banned from teaching. He later went into exile in Chile and then moved to the USA, where he taught at Harvard University’s Centre for Studies in Education and Development. He travelled widely and even visited India in the late 1970s. It is at Harvard that he wrote his path-breaking book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1972.

To understand Freire it is essential to familiarize ourselves with some key concepts used by him.

Banking Education and Domestication

Freire was disturbed to see how knowledge was being compartmentalized and used primarily in the interest of the powerful. To describe this he used the term ‘stockpiling’ - just as traders collect or stock so-called valuable shares of different companies in the stock-market, only a certain type of knowledge is ‘deposited’ or stored in the mind of the learner. This he called the‘Banking Education’ model, where knowledge is deposited in the mind of the consumer just as wealth is deposited in a bank account for future consumption.

Change necesitates continous reflection and action

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Such limited, pre-packaged knowledge, passed on mechanically, does not result in genuine learning as it fails to challenge the learner’s mind. It merely leads to Domestication, in the same way as animals living freely in the wild are captured by humans and trained or domesticated for use. “Whereas Banking Education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of the reality”, says Freire.

Education for Reflection, Action, Awakening

Freire attempted to lay the foundation of an educational programme of a political nature, not just different kinds of schools. He developed a unique method while working with the people of Recife. Rather than teachapre-selected curriculum, the learning exercise would begin by using key words taken from the everyday lives of the peasants. It is from their own context that the learners would begin relating to the key word and finally go beyond that to analyze the issues that it represented. Thus the connection between deprivation and exploitation would be made clear. This understanding according to Freire, meant real learning.

Praxis

Freire popularized the concepts of praxis and conscientisation in the process of education and liberation. According to Freire, Praxis the “continuous process of reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it”. Through praxis, oppressed people can acquire a critical awareness of their own condition, and, with their allies, struggle for liberation.

Conscientization

Conscientization means developing critical consciousness that has the power to transform reality. Freire explains critical consciousness as a means to engage learners in questioning the nature of their historical and social situation and to play an active role in the creation of a democratic society.

Freire proposed that the use of his student-centered methods could help them to: See– to open students’ eyes to what was happening around them and to get them to explore the situation to discover its positive and negative values; Reflect–to get them to make their minds up about what they saw and to express and clarify their ideas; Act- To commit themselves to action, which can take many forms; it can be a personal or group action.

Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

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Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

To understand the processes of Praxis and Conscientization here is an example from our own land. Mahatma Phule started schools in 1947 for girls and later for ‘lower’ caste boys. However he soon realized that efforts like his would reach a miniscule number of children and were economically unsustainable. He thus presented a Charter to the Hunter Commission in 1882 wherein he demanded that the British State (government) should take responsibility for education of all children. Similarly besides opening schools for girls he also continued his campaign against child marriage, for widow remarriage and against evil practices like tonsuring widows. He organized the historical strike of barbers against tonsuring of widows from the upper caste Brahmin community.

In education, Freire advocated interdependence and equality between students and teachers where both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in making sense of the world.

Dialogue

Freire advocated dialogue as the preferred method for education as against the conventional one-way teacher-dictated learning. He felt that without dialogue there is no communication and without communication there is no education. Dialogue requires a profound love for the world and its people, humility, and an intense faith in the power of individuals to make and remake themselves.

Freire saw education as a weapon for changing an unjust social order. For him education was meaningful only if it was socially relevant and led to the betterment of the society. Freire says “Liberation is a social act . . . even when you individually feel yourself most free, if this feeling is not a social feeling, if you are not able to use your recent freedom to help others to be free by transforming the totality of society, then you are exercising only an individualistic attitude towards empowerment or freedom . . . Individual empowerment is absolutely necessary for the process of social transformation, but is not enough by itself.”

Your presentation must talk about the educationist’s work with reference to the context in which he lived and worked and describe his key contributions to education.@

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Group 2

Ivan Illich (1926- 2002) This note talks about the philosophy and work of one of the more important 20th century thinkers: Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna in 1926 and trained as a priest in Europe before working in the USA as an assistant pastor in New York City. From 1956 to 1960 he served as the vice-rector to the Catholic University of Puerto-Rico in South America, and co-founded the widely known Centre for Intercultural Documentation.

Illich was disturbed by the unquestionable power of the Church over people’s lives; he strived for ‘secularization’ and ‘democratization’ to reduce the Church’s monopoly. Like the Bhakti poets of India, he questioned the authority of the priests to be mediators between God and his seekers; in doing so he tried to expose the vested interests of organised religion. Two of his best-known books are De-schooling Society and Tools for Conviviality.

To understand Illich it is essential to familiarize ourselves with some key concepts used by him.

Cogs in the Wheel

His questioning of the Church soon led him to critically assess other institutions that control human society. He thus put forth a radical critique of contemporary industrial society and its educational systems, since he believed that they are interlinked like parts of a machine. The individual is seen to be merely a cog in the wheel, a small part, of this gigantic machine and modern education reflects this attitude.

Illich says that just as the Church is not the centre of spirituality or reaching God, school is not the centre of learning or attaining knowledge / wisdom. In reality, it is always outside of the school - from nature, family, friends, the media and our casual observations - that we learn the vast majority of the things we know rather than in the ‘sacred’ enclosure of the school. Despite this the institutional school continues to have unquestioned prestige in society.

Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

Change necesitates continous reflection and action

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Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

What Goes In Must Come Out

Carrying forward the analogy, Illich says that a machine takes in a certain amount of raw material and processes it. It makes useful products that are consumed by the society and discards the unusable chaff. The school system too functions similarly. Examination and competition are means to control the ‘quality’ of the product and to decide who is ‘unusable’. And just as a machine produces uniform goods so does school produce types of successful students ready for the industrialized society.

The Commodity and the Consumer

In an industrialized society like ours, knowledge is split-up into different parts and only the part which is useful for such a society is given the label of ‘knowledge’. Such ‘knowledge’ therefore becomes a commodity.

The school system operates like a market. Just as producers of goods supply what is demanded by consumers, schools respond to the demands of their consumers - children and their parents. At the same time, just as producers create a demand for their products by using strategies like advertising or creating conditions of false scarcity, the school system too creates a demand for certain kinds of knowledge products for example, courses in engineering, medicine, law, information technology and management are the products in demand at the moment. As he says, “We teach consumers to consume only those products which are put on the market.”For example, since agriculture is not considered to be a highly paid profession, an Agriculture science course may not be in demand whereas a Computer science course is. Hence very few colleges offer such a course while computer courses are available everywhere. The powerful in the society acquire and control knowledge for their own interests and those who are less powerful are kept away from it; we have seen that this was the case in ancient India too. Illich says that the same dynamics operate in modern industrialized societies today.

The Tool

As we can see, Illich’s criticism does not merely concern the educational system but also the society in which it exists. The type of society in which we live today and its future are causes of deep worry. Illich writes that societies in the advanced stages of mass production are producing their own destruction. Nature is destroyed; people lose their roots and their ability to be creative and, as a result of the industrial modes of production, are themselves converted into tools. He says that beyond a certain

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threshold of growth, the tools and instruments designed to serve people, turn against them and enslave them.

Proposed Alternatives - Conviviality and Learning Webs

Illich did not propose alternative schools; on the contrary, he attempted to lay the foundations of an educational programme of a political nature. In his book Tools of Conviviality, Illich suggests some broad solutions. For him “Conviviality is the society where people control the tool.” A tool may be used in many ways, ways which are sometimes very different from its original purpose. For example, a needle can be used to stitch clothes or to dig a thorn out of one’s finger. Buta machine usually fulfills a single purpose – a sewing machine can only stitch clothes. Illich clarifies that he does not advocate going back in time or doing away with science but he criticizes its central role in modern societies and its commercialization for the benefit of the few.

He also talked about negating school all together or ‘De-schooling Society’. He suggested the creation of ‘Learning Webs’, which he visualized as open, informal exchanges of ideas and information, where acquisition of knowledge would take place with the help of a reference service that would be available to all in situations of ‘peer-matching.’ For example, the learning that takes place in workshops or during exhibitions, farm visits, conferences etc. Something like this is happening in the world wide web of the internet also. Illich proposed that learning takes place better when it happens in its natural context- like a child learning a language within the family -and where the roles of learner and teacher are interchangeable-for example, a group of farmers working together and exchanging ideas. He envisages that ‘Learning Webs’ could be an answer to competition, marks and the acquisition of degrees.

Ultimately Illich urges social reorganization based on new values - survival, justice and self-defined work. “Each of these three values imposes its own limits on tools. A post-industrial society must and can be so constructed that no one person’s ability to express him or herself in work will require as a condition the enforced labour or the enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another.”

Your presentation must talk about the educationist’s work with reference to the context in which he lived and worked and describe his key contributions to education.

Cue Card

Module 1 Session 3

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Three thinkers One of the key contributions that the three thinkers made was to underline the link between education and society. All of them recognized that the societies they lived in were unjust and exploitative and that the education system as it existed played a major role in institutionalizing inequalities. They understood that for society to become more just and humanitarian, fundamental educational changes were necessary.

What they said about :

Illich Freire Gandhi

The prevalent education system

A consumer product; false competition; success = exam results

Banking; Stockpiling knowledge; Naïve(false) Consciousness

Industrial society gives rise to a system filled with lies, violence and selfish greed.

Industrial society Alienation; destruction of the environment; dehumanization - people lose control over their lives and turn into tools; exploitation of many for the benefit of a few.

Oppression exists not only in traditional feudal societies or the ‘third world’ but also in the so-called developed world.

Industrialization is essentially oppressive - ‘a tragic affliction’; exploits human and natural resources and creates inequality, poverty and war – ‘the unending cycle of greed and violence’

What are the problems in such societies?

Society becomes like a machine, a prison - ‘an upside-down world’.

Prevalence of false consciousness; oppression.

Injustice; foreign rule; inequality, oppression, violence (mental as well as physical; against humans as well as nature); untruth

Module 1 Handout 2

Three thinkers - 1

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What are the solutions they suggest?

‘De-schooling society’, total negation of formal education; social reorganization based on ‘Survival, Justice, Self-Defined Work’

Conscientisation and critical consciousness; liberation possible only when society is changed, not when its structures are simply modified.

Dignity of work, equality, justice; respect for all forms of life, non-violence and truth. Empowerment and wellbeing of the most downtrodden.

What is the Aim of Education?

To build a convivial society; freedom, justice, equality; people control the tools.

Praxis; education for liberation and humanization.

Weapon for liberation; can draw out the best in all individuals; developing qualities of hand, head and heart.

How can Education take place?

Learning webs. Problem posing; critical pedagogy; By examining the immediate context and experience of the learner, theory and practice go hand-in-hand; Dialectical relationship between action and reflection. See – reflect-act

Learning by doing daily labour; the work done by the lowest strata has utmost educational value; social responsibility.

Teacher’s Role No role for specialized teacher.

Needs to be politically involved with the oppressed.

Service to society; is an ideal role-model.

Three thinkers - 2Three thinkers - 2

Handout 2

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Role of the State Saw education as an instrument in hands of a powerful State and wanted a fundamental change in both.

Same as Illich, but wanted to use education as a weapon to challenge the power of the State.

Wanted minimal interference of State in education as he did not trust it at all; wanted economically self-reliant schools.

The nature of the society we live in and the type of education it promotes, are both interrelated and inseparable. So as teachers analyzing and understanding our society, forming opinions and acting on considered decisions is an important part of our work.

Handout 2

Three thinkers - 3

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