Do we really want to unburden learning and make it an enjoyable experience? Here is a thought. How about reorienting learning on the pattern of play? Playing, unlike the current way of learning, does not burden a child. It involves strenuous efforts and patient labour, yet, no student ever complains about it. One can never have enough of playing.
‘Burden,’ in the learning context, is not wholly quantitative. We keep piling knowledge on students, quantity on quantity. We pity them on this very count. This pitying prevents us from understanding and mitigating the problem. And, nothing has improved in half-a-century. The problem has become worse.
Burden is a modern epidemic. Not only children, everyone is burdened. We slur over our burdened existence, believing this to be a plight that we are doomed to endure.
What is the most significant thing about a child at play? It is that she is fully engaged with her primary goal. For her, playing is the thing; it need not lead to anything beyond. She does not play to impress anyone or to be rewarded.
Now, consider a different situation. A child is made to do elaborate preparations to play. She is told that if she works at it better than everyone else, she would be able to play after a year. This work will burden her, for whom playing is primary, and preparing, secondary.
Professional or competitive sport is a contradiction in terms. Sports as a profession is work, not play. Professional players have one foot in the primary and the other in the proximate goal. The primary goal is to enjoy playing. The proximate goal is to impress the team managers and to retain one’s place in the team. The fact remains, still, that only a player who is fully into the joy of playing can excel professionally, too. Anyone playing under the ‘obligation’ to excel and to produce magical results under fear of being fired, will feel choked and burdened.
What burdens a child is that she is shut out from the exhilaration of the primary goal, which is to enjoy learning. There is a world of difference between studying, say, mathematics for the joy of it, and learning the same to ‘top the list’. Marks can never be the primary goal of learning. Growth is the primary goal. Whatever relates to growth is joyful.
Ironically, a demonic pattern of playing is at work in the present practice of learning. War and hunting are games, too. The essence of both is to outwit the other. This may result in trophies, not in growth. Learning as playing is learning as education for peace. All education, as Maria Montessori said, is education for peace.
The prime goal before a student today is to score high in the annual examination. This prevents him/her from enjoying the learning experience. It does an even greater harm. It persuades the student that nothing one does has any ‘intrinsic value’. Everything is to be valued only as instruments. This has serious consequences on the personality development and values-formation of students. If most people today think of their fellow human beings as tools to be used, we only have to blame our idea of education for it.
Sadly, for teachers — including those in higher education — teaching is not a vocation any more. John Dewey provides a relevant illustration in his work titled, Democracy and Education . You hitch a horse to a carriage. The horse draws it, say, over a distance of twenty kilometres. At the end of the journey, it is given fodder and water. This is routine. So, the horse comes to associate the work it does with a particular reward, which is all that matters to it. It is not aware of participating in a socially useful activity. Teachers who go to work only to earn a monthly salary are no different.
The point we are arguing is not that students should have more time to play at school, but that their learning experience should be more like playing. Philosophy was play — a free play of ideas, accessible to all who cared for it. Socrates was a stonecutter. Philosophy became a ponderous burden when it became professional work. Instances can be multiplied.
Work and play are two contrary paradigms. A paradigm is a shaping principle, which holds in pattern the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. So, learning as play calls for a shift in foundation.
A complete revamping of the educational establishment is a long haul, a veritable revolution. It will take time. But teachers don’t have to wait for a new heaven and a new earth. They can initiate mini revolutions in their classrooms right away.
For that to happen, teachers need to do the following:
Master their subjects and the art of teaching. Mastery of anything expresses as playfulness in handling. Clumsiness indicates the opposite. Novak Djokovich, though a professional, ‘plays’ tennis and not ‘work’ tennis.
Attain optimum oneness with students. On the court, the players become one through the game. That is so even when they ‘fight’ hard. The match is impossible without each other. The tougher the fight, the greater their mutual respect and bonding.
The willingness to give their all to the task at hand and to seek perfection through the classes taken. This incremental perfection, not salary, is their greatest reward.
The skill to maintain an ambience of happiness in the classroom, much like what players do in a stadium.
If children feel choked with tension on the eve of examinations, if they go to school and come back looking cheerless and burdened, if the sun of happiness has set over the landscape of childhood because of learning, surely it is an atrocity that screams for redressal. It is a crime to sweep it under the carpet.
The writer is former principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and the founding member of the National Commission for Minority Educational Education. Email: vthampu@gmail.com
