Where the Mind Is Without Fear

From an early age, we have been taught that education is probably the only path to achieving success and happiness in life. And yet, so many of us, in spite of the education we have been blessed with, get swayed away by the volatility of life, a volatility that has heightened significantly in the current times. This might lead us to wonder - has education lived up to its promise? Or has it lost its intrinsic sense of purpose and vision in the wake of industrialization, capital markets, and the search for high-rewarding careers? Fundamentally, education needs to be reimagined. Had we heeded Tagore – “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high” – this might not have been required.

Mapping Tagore’s famous words against the charter of the current learning establishment, the purpose of education should be three-fold: sharing information, building skill sets and cultivating wisdom – to better understand the context of life and the ‘human condition’. Truth be told, our education system, as exposed by the accelerated change in the 21st century, and more recently by the pandemic, has obsessively focused on the first two aspects only and consequently, failed to be as “future-proof.” Our schools and colleges never taught us how to respond gracefully to a colleague’s chiding remarks, double down when things get hard, manage our thoughts, emotions or our worst fears – or to keep our heads high in the face of uncertainty. In our race for survival and higher economic status, wisdom remained in the timeless teachings of our past seers only.

The tragedy of Indian education lies in our inability to capitalise on our more-than-5000 years-old legacy – the Gurukul system of learning – that included all essentials for nurturing educated, and responsible beings, where students lived in the Guru’s residence, learning, and working together as a community, as one unit. Learning was seen as a lifelong process where “life” was the most important teacher, and the Guru the leading light. Upon graduation, the Gurukul curriculum allowed students to gain a certain level of mastery over their sense of discretion and self-restraint, personality and intellectual prowess, personal virtues and social awareness, protection of knowledge and culture, and more – most of which have been left out from our present “schooling” framework.

As society advanced, rote learning and crude memorization became mainstream, and Gurukuls merely captured a page in our history books. These gaps in our education have now manifested into real-world problems, and the raging pandemic and the subsequent disappearance of brick-and-mortar learning has only complicated matters. What then is a balanced and nuanced path towards reclaiming the old order of cultivating informed, skilled and conscious individuals? How can a corporate-savvy society move from developing agile workers to agile humans? Is there still a way to tap into our ancient wisdom and reinvent our cultural heritage against the current wave of complexities? Three things need to be done.

First, if our present education system is designed for “limited learning,” through our growing years only, we have to reframe education for the long haul, one that is focused on “lifelong learning,” for life is our greatest teacher and we are all students of life and for life.

Second, the learning horizon needs to be expanded from parents, teachers, authors, managers, to include friends, cultures, strangers, community, and life events, for we have always learnt from “others” and limiting who or what we learn from limits our potential even more.

Third, the student-teacher relationship needs to be deepened again, where teachers are fully responsible for students’ growth and well-being, and teach emotional intelligence as an integral component of the school curriculum, much like Delhi government’s newly minted Happiness class. But for that, we also have to draw talent and compensate teachers in a manner that adjusts well against the rewards of a mainstream career.

If these three changes can be incorporated into our current education framework, we can expect to live up to Tagore’s words again – “Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action, Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.