Inklusionspädagogik

Manish Jain: Seven Deadly Sins of Schooling

Manish Jain

Seven Deadly Sins of Schooling

All over the world, from governments to corporate houses to NGOs to UN agencies to Instagram reels, schooling and modern education is being sold as the panacea to all social, health, economic and environmental woes. The claim is that ‘educated’ people will make better decisions for themselves and the planet. Those who are not convinced and not willing to ‘buy’ these propagandistic claims are branded as ‘fundamentalist’, ‘superstitious’, ‘elitist’, ‘overly romantic’, ‘anti-development’, etc. In India, the government’s so-called inclusive Right to Education Act has been used to threaten, humiliate and compulsorily force such irreverent non-believers into submission. Globally, the Sustainable Development Goals - and many other efforts for democracy and social inclusion - promote a culture of superficial solutionism instead of a deeper look at the root causes of the meta-crisis. We must be made to believe that forced mass factory-schooling is the only way to the promised land of Development and Democracy (read: the American Dream).

In this essay, I would like to propose that contrary to mainstream belief, more enrollment and inclusion in factory-schooling is not the ‘solution’ but rather a huge part of the problem. Where schooling levels are the highest you have the highest rates of overshooting ecological footprints (measuring consumption, pollution and waste); the highest levels of social depression, loneliness and community breakdown; the highest levels of military expenditure and fear; the highest levels of corruption and debt; the highest levels of pornography and internet addiction; the highest levels of GMOs, pesticides and poisons in food and water; and, the highest levels of diet-related lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, obesity, cancer; the highest levels of corporate control, etc. Not so coincidentally, these indicators and their correlations to modern education are never seriously discussed by the United Nations and World Bank in their analyses of the Sustainable Development Goals. Doing so, may cause a dent in the grand narrative of Education = Development = End of Injustice = Salvation for All. It might cause a glitch in the underlying deeply troubling extractive and civilising rationale of the White Man’s Burden (Easterly 2006) which still dominates the global moral landscape. It might hinder the rise of corporate fascism and thought-control across the planet.

Never before in the history of world has the process of ‘education’ led to so many cases of suicide (or attempted suicide). To paraphrase the main character, Rancho, in the blockbuster Bollywood film 3 Idiots, it must be clarified for the official record that these are not ‘suicide’ cases but rather conscious ‘acts of murder’ as students are intentionally placed in the pressure cooker of stress and over-achievement. Thousands of such ‘murders’ go un-investigated every year all over the world as the student is the one usually blamed for not being able to cope. The system’s way of dealing with this remains tragically absurd. In a recent bout of several student suicides by hanging from ceiling fans in Kota, Rajasthan, the infamous ‘Suicide City of India’, the solution offered by the authorities of the high stakes exam preparation coaching institutes was to direct all local hostels to install specially designed spring fitted ceiling fans in rooms. They further diverted blame by citing ‘improper parenting’ as the cause of the suicides.

In this essay, I will elaborate on my claim that factory-schooling is a fundamentally anti-social, anti-nature enterprise that will be condemned fifty years from now just in the same way as we today condemn practices of slavery. Our great-great-grandchildren will one day wake up and wonder how could we have committed such atrocious crimes against innocent children. It is high time that a debate takes place in the world on the damage that schooling is doing to our children, the ethno-sphere and the eco-sphere.

Most people reading this essay will already be familiar with Lord Macaulay’s Minutes on Education (1835) in which he articulates the goal of British education in India is to create “a class of persons who are Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” This colonizing mission of schools has not only been limited to India. Johann Fichte of Prussia, also earlier said, “Education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.” More recently, many World Bank reports have openly stated that the need for spreading rural education is to develop new global markets with consumers who prefer global brands. Indeed, over the past 100 years, factory schooling has been condemned by leading social thinkers across the globe (including Ivan Illich, John Holt, Noam Chomsky, Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, Leo Tolstoy, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Rabindranath Tagore, J. Krishnamurti, Sri Aurobindo, Vinoba Bhave, and Mahatma Gandhi) as an instrument of mental slavery, indoctrination and totalitarian social control. It is interesting to take note of the fact that the same root thinking that gave birth to the organization of modern industrialized schools also gave birth to the modern industrial factory, the modern prison and the modern army. Indeed, we can note that the ‘best’ students in school are seen as the ones who most obediently follow the orders handed out to them from above, without any questioning of authority. They are the ones who are molded into good soldiers, good babus or clerks, good factory workers, good global consumers, and good citizens for the nation.

Indeed, we can find that factory-schooling has been a primary tool for indoctrination on two levels. First, it disconnects and up-roots children from their natural learning processes, web of complex socio-ecological relationships and contexts and the diverse spiritual-cultural-economic imaginations and worldviews that are present in their communities. It creates a culture of hyper-individualism and a feeling of self-hate, low self-worth, self-doubt and lack of belonging. Second, it seduces more and more ‘educated citizens’ with the promise of American-style development, trickle-down growth of the global economy, the obnoxiously blind faith in technological utopianism, White experts and consultants’ managerial sophistry, and the propaganda of so-called Western-style democracy. There is virtually no space given in the school and mainstream media to seriously question the dominant narrative of growth, progress or success. We are, in fact, properly trained to believe that There Is No Alternative (TINA).

Before I proceed any further, it is important to clarify why I use the term ‘factory-schooling’ to describe the modern education system. The inherent model has been patterned around modern factories and Fordist assembly-line production with a dominant view towards inculcating industrial discipline/obedience and routine-isation in the students. This was quite different from the predominantly craft-based traditional forms of production in which highly skilled artisans exercised substantial creative control over their conditions of work and infused their work with deep spiritual consciousness. In his treatise, Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Frederick Taylor devised a means of detailing a division of labor in time-and-motion studies, task allocation and a wage system based on performance, in order to increase the control over the pace and productivity of work. Taylor's gospel of more specialized and less complex tasks for workers, also known as ‘Taylorism’ would become the design standard for both industry and schools worldwide. Charlie Chaplain’s famous film Modern Times (1936) presents a devastating critique of this attempt to dumb down human beings to fit the factory culture.

In addition, human beings are reduced to being seen as ‘human resources’ (thus the need for Ministries for Human Resource Development and corporate Human Resource Departments) that must be molded and manipulated as a factor of production. The child is seen to be a ‘blank slate’, ‘clay to be molded’, ‘empty vessel’, etc. According to Ellwood P. Cubberly, Dean of Stanford University School of Education, 1898, “Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw materials – children – are to be shaped and fashioned into products… The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” I still find it very strange when I hear people across various social settings introduce themselves as being ‘products’ of this or that institution. More than 50 years ago, Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society (1971), described how schools were designed to convert homo sapiens into homo economicus whereby the value of our entire lives has been reduced to how much we can produce, consume and add to the GNP. And, as with all other natural resources like land, water, forests, air waves, learning, etc., that have been converted to commodities, the government, a.k.a Big Brother, becomes the primary custodian of all children, replacing the role of family and community. The danger behind this, of course, is that Big Brother is heavily influenced by corporate lobbies and now holds the power to sell these commodities to the corrupt global marketplace, whenever and at whatever cost they deem fit.

It is also important to elaborate that factory-schooling is not limited to just the formal schools. The culture of factory-schooling has permeated into non-formal education, into toys and play, into the way we organize our workshops, seminars and conferences, into TV and the mass media, into religious training, into tourism, even into our family lives, etc. It influences almost every aspect of our modern everyday lives and thoughts (see Box 1). There are two dominant assumptions on which the culture of schooling has been designed and built:

1)     that human beings are inherently greedy, selfish and isolated beings who can be manipulated and molded through reward and punishment, and

2)     that human beings are separate from and superior to Nature which is wild, un-intelligent and needs to be tamed, controlled and owned.

Box 1: Everyday quotes in the Culture of Schooling

Lastly, it must be clarified that there has not been a smooth and linear historical evolution from gurukuls and indigenous modes of learning to factory schooling as many mainstream educationists would like us to believe. I have sadly visited many schools around India where they simply replaced the word ‘teacher’ with the word ‘guru’ and now they think they are operating something similar to a gurukul. We must understand that there was (and continues to be) a massive cultural-economic upheaval to replace gurukuls, gotuls, gheranas, apprenticeship and other indigenous learning processes and learning spaces (for example, Shri Dharampalji 1983). These were based on a completely different set of pedagogies and philosophies of life. Indeed, the last 78 years of ‘Independence’ has witnessed the Indian government launch a massive propaganda campaign, at the behest of agencies like the World Bank, United Nations, etc. to dehumanize and silence the so-called illiterates and indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems of the country. This can be best exemplified in the saying, “the white teacher who brought the pencil also brought the eraser.”

Many critiques of factory-schooling are floating around India these days leading to many efforts to improve the formal education system. I have found that there are two common misassumptions amongst those working for education reform which need to be more deeply interrogated:

1)     they all agree that government schools are in bad shape but they believe that elite private schools like International Baccalaureate, Delhi Public Schools or even Waldorf schools are providing ‘good quality’ education;

2)     they agree that most education in schools may be ineffective or irrelevant but they fail to acknowledge the deep and far-reaching damage that is being done to children, communities and the human species as a result of factory schooling.

Thus, most efforts end up simply tinkering with the existing system with the usual check-list of extremely profitable interventions i.e., teacher training, principal leadership training, textbook reform, low-cost teaching aids or computer-aided technologies, more standardized testing and value education classes. Their cultural imagination has been colonized to such an extent that they cannot see the diverse and abundant learning possibilities still inherent across local communities and landscapes. So they continue to perpetuate the mistaken belief that we have no other options than to try to repair the same old school system. They don’t understand that the system is not ‘broken’. It is doing what it was designed to do.

These insights did not come to me from books and lectures, they came from practical experiences from being on Wall Street, to Harvard, to UNESCO and UNICEF to then journeying into indigenous communities in India and Brazil to unschooling myself with my daughter for 23 years. Things started making much more sense when I began connecting the dots between education, economy, ecology and spirituality.

The Modern Seven Deadly Sins

The seven deadly sins are a classification of capital vices that were originally used in early Christian teachings to educate and instruct followers concerning immoral man's tendency to sin. Described by Dante Alighieri in his epic poem The Divine Comedy (1321/1977), the seven deadly sins are as follows: Luxuria (extravagance, later lust), Gula (gluttony, overconsumption, over-indulgence, waste), Avaritia (greed), Acedia (sloth, laziness, apathy), Ira (wrath, more commonly known as anger or discrimination), Invidia (envy), and Superbia (pride). The epidemic-like spread of these sins essentially symbolizes the fall of humanity.

I believe that factory-schooling is guilty of its own deadly sins. I was recently at an education conference and met leaders from several spiritual groups who were calling for an additional class in value education to be taught in schools. Their core assumption was that because they did not see ‘good human values’ emerging in school graduates, there were no values being taught in the current education system. They could not see that the factory-schooling system is full of an unspoken and hidden set of values which are continually being communicated to students through the design, rules and daily practices of the education system. The system is not failing to teach good values; rather, it is quite successful in advancing a different set of values centered around the Industrial-Military growth paradigm.

After 78 years of Indian Independence and endless white papers, it is time to move our education debates beyond just good or bad content or better or worse teaching strategies and materials. We need to understand the hidden curriculum that underlies factory schooling, i.e., the systemic or structural dimension of factory schooling. As John Taylor Gatto aptly describes, “The method of mass factory schooling is the only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum, good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of education.”

In Tagore’s story, The Parrot’s Training, we are told of a golden cage that is built to imprison the wild and uncivilized parrot while she is being educated by the king’s pundits (Tagore & Jain 2016). All kinds of child-friendly and joyful techniques were tried on the parrot. But she was not allowed to leave the cage. Eventually she dies in it. We need to more deeply understand the nature of the cage and its impact on us. In schools, we are not only taught a particular subject but our whole way of thinking and perceiving ourselves and the world is being re-structured. This restructuring affects our conscience, our senses, our moods, our values, our desires, our imaginations, and our relationships. The ‘cage’ is the hidden curriculum.

I have been involved with formal education for the last 52 years, first as a ‘good’ student, then as a ‘bad’ student, then as a ‘brilliant’ student, then as a ‘teacher’, then as ‘education researcher’ and ‘education policymaker’, then as an ‘education reformer’, then as an ‘education resistor’, then as an ‘unschooler parent’, then as a ‘founder of an alternative university’, and now as an ‘un-learning activist’. Based on these experiences, I would like to propose the following seven deadly sins of factory schooling. I invite you to spend some time deeply reflecting on these and what they imply for a healthy, sustainable or just society as well as spend some time creating your own list of seven deadly sins of schooling.

1.   Creates a vicious knowledge hierarchy (academic vs. non-academic, scientific vs. superstitious, literate vs. illiterate, developed vs. underdeveloped, white-collar vs. blue collar, etc.) and rationalizes systemic discrimination against people without/with less degrees. Students are made to believe that one’s primary learning and growth of intellectual capacity can happen only in the classroom, with children their own age, and through the official textbooks and certified teachers. At a very early age, children are introduced to a vicious tracking system which labels and brands them as ‘slow learners’, ‘average learners’ or ‘gifted learners’. Millions of innocent children are sentenced and thrown away as ‘failures’ for life. Others are labeled with a string of extra letters next to their name, which they arrogantly confuse as more important to their identity than their human qualities. Everyone is conditioned to accept their proper place in the hierarchical totem pole -- when to act superior, when to act inferior. Those who don’t attend school or have lesser degrees are deemed as sub-human and treated with disdain and contempt. They have ‘wasted’ their lives - they are illiterate, uneducated, backwards, uncivilized. I used to think such things about my grandmother until I realized that she was more intelligent than my Harvard professors about what it means to live a good life. Furthermore, those who have elite degrees arrogantly believe that it is their right to make decisions for others who they don’t even know. Textual knowledge is valued over experiential, oral, intuitive and more than human forms of knowing. This epistemicide leads to a tremendous loss of diverse cosmologies, knowledge systems, learning traditions, languages, communities and ecologies and threatens the survival of our species on the planet.

2.   Inculcates a survival of the fittest competitive mentality and a feeling of artificial scarcity. The modern birthday game musical chairs visually illustrates this. Children are taught that life is a zero-sum game against others where there can be only one winner: more for the other means less for me. They receive one clear and direct message from their schooling - that it is only one’s individual achievements that matter and do anything you need to in order to get ahead. In other words, be first, even if you have to be greedy and selfish! Students are also conditioned to care more about the winning outcome rather than the process. They enter into a vicious game of constantly comparing oneself with others and feeling insecure whenever anyone else achieves something. I have always been puzzled when I have seen students develop a peculiar insensitivity which allows them to be happy, when all others, even their closest friends and relatives, fail around them. Learning and creativity is framed as an isolated, individualistic process. Competition actually discourages imagination, risk-taking and innovation, as students learn that in order to win, they must please the judges and conform to established norms. They are not given the space to imagine win-win relationships or play games or work on projects that promote collaboration, mutual care, co-learning and collective intelligence.

3.   Converts children into parasites who have no idea where their food, energy, clothing, water, shit, waste, etc. comes from or goes to. “I only know how to study for the exam and make Ramen noodles,” is the mantra proudly heard from students across India. Students around the world are actively being de-skilled (particularly those from artisan, healing and farming backgrounds) and are being taught to despise and devalue physical labor – since labor is considered as non-intellectual work. The education system goes on to label and ban all non-institutionally-approved forms of work as ‘child-labor’. We hear educators saying, “Those poor children are only herding goats, they are not learning anything. They are being exploited by their families. They should be in school all day.” They unfortunately fail to see that these children have deep knowledge of their local flora and fauna as well as how to care for goats. School students are not encouraged to be meaningfully involved in productive activities related to their basic needs or their community’s needs which would encourage them to understand deep inter-connections and mutual responsibility, seva (divine service and spirit of paying it forward) or a sense of right relationship/limits vis a vis their natural resources. Dependency on fossil-fuel technologies has also led to a noticeable evolutionary decline in the strength of the physical body and its capacity for tolerating harsh conditions. I am amazed to witness in village after village, 75+ year-old men and women having more stamina and capacity for physical work than their educated grand-children. In addition, students develop nature deficit disorder. A friend recently told me about plans for an elite school in Delhi which is planning to serve children chai and snacks directly on their desks so that they don’t have to get up and move around. As a result, they become inculcated into a spoon-fed value system of short-cuts and false entitlement – the entire world is theirs to be consumed and trashed without any responsibility. Students learn to view modern paraphernalia such as gyms, waste in trash bins and landfills, flush toilets, air conditioning, supermarkets, nuclear power plants, etc. as totally normal.

4.   Produces fragmented minds and fractured beings. This deadly sin happens at several levels and is where the factory aspect of schooling excels the most in the name of greater efficiency. Students are taught to think in terms of seemingly unrelated compartmentalized subjects and disciplinary categories (maths, biology, history, etc.). There is a fragmentation across generations. There is a fragmentation between mind, body, heart, spirit. Theory is separated from practice. Knowledge is separated from context and from Being. I have been told by many elders that one’s jabaan (one’s word) was once directly related to one’s dignity and status in communities. But modern education, with its emphasis on the textual-legal world, has ruptured the link between our jabaan and our actions. Short-term thinking and superficial concentration is also enforced through the 50-minute period system and the pressure of continuous tests. If a child is enjoying an art or music or a science project and wants to work on it longer than the allocated period, they are not allowed. Students are not given the time and space needed to develop the wisdom and sense of whole-ness needed to responsibly handle the multiple realities of a complex, diverse, messy and uncertain world.

5.   Introduces the notion of private ownership and belief in commodification of life. Students are educated into a ‘taker culture’ which believes that we are the owners of ideas, knowledge and nature rather than its trustees. Rather than sharing their knowledge, talents and gifts, they are trained to hide and hoard it. A world of copyrights, patents and private property are the accepted belief system. I have heard people tell me, “Since I am the owner of this property, I can do whatever I want with it, including destroying it.” Schooling also teaches children that learning is a scarce commodity that must be paid for with money. Or conversely, it teaches them that learning is free (to be distributed only by the State or taken/stolen with a sense of license). In both cases schooling disconnects us from the sacred spirit of the gift culture. We are made to be dependent on the money system to decide what is the inherent value of things and whether what we do is socially useful. For example, we are taught that those who get paid money at a job are those who ‘work’ and those who contribute to the household i.e., housewives, don’t ‘work’. We also come to believe that we don’t really need deep relationships with anybody else because we can just buy whatever we need with money. Happiness is to be derived from accumulating more money and owning things (which you can only acquire if you have a degree), rather than from forming intimate ties of sharing and connecting with each other. But as the ancient Cree saying goes, “Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned, and when the last fish has been caught, will we realize that we cannot eat money.”

6.   Subjugates the moral conscience, common sense, aesthetics, intrinsic motivation, spiritual selves and wisdom to the authority of institutions. Sacred, multidimensional human beings are also colonized to describe themselves only as atomized 'economists' or 'engineers' or ‘Americans’ or ‘Indians’. In army-like fashion, students are taught to follow orders and ignore their own inner compass. Like Pavlov’s dogs, they are conditioned to respond to authority through the carrot and stick approach. Gold stars, ‘very good’ remarks, and prizes go hand in hand with detention, low marks and physical and psychological torture. Standardized, decontextualized textbooks and black-and-white answers to tests dumb down our capacities to engage with complex philosophical and moral questions or to look critically at many of the underlying assumptions we hold. Through grades, badges and report cards, students are made to believe that self-worth is to be derived from external sources. Their own natural internal feedback mechanisms for self-evaluation, self-improvement and autonomous meaning-making are weakened. I am reminded of a 100-year old local story of ‘uneducated’ Heeralal the goldsmith. Even though the local king praised the beautiful gold necklace he made for him, his internalised spiritual standard of excellence was not happy with it. So Heeralal destroyed the necklace and made a new one for the king. This has been lost with modernity. In addition, as intergenerational bonds are discouraged and cut by the classroom age divisions, a pernicious peer pressure and a mob-like mentality grows, characterized by fear, de-sensitization, apathy, indifference and numbness. Some of the worst crimes of the 20th century have been committed (and continue to be committed) based on this sin.

7.   Denies the most basic right to learn on one's own and to make one’s own meaning of the world – maims the khoji (seeker) in each of us. Students are made dependent on the school teacher and textbooks as their primary source of understanding. Curious and sensitive learners are turned into passive consumers who must be spoon-fed ready-made world of facts and formulas. Complex questions related to each of our unique svadharma: Who am I?, What is the purpose of my life?, What does it mean to live with dignity and freedom?, What are my unique gifts and talents? have been replaced with one truth, one definition, one right answer, one moral of the story: secure the highest financial package possible. One of my gurus, Shri Dayalchand Soni, a Gandhian educator, once told me, ”Real democracy is not about people being able to choose their rulers. Rather real democracy means that people should be able to choose their gurus.” Schooling teaches us that you need an official PhD or BEd certificate to be considered a teacher. We are taught that we are not capable of finding our own gurus and learning on our own. Instead, we demand that the State should assign them to us in a compulsory fashion. One needs to attend official ‘certified’ courses and workshops to learn anything. We are given the message that anything that happens outside of the authority of schooling is considered to be ‘extra-curricular’, worthless or a waste of time. Also, students are filled with a fear to make ‘mistakes’ as they are told they will be punished for them. They learn to hide their mistakes rather than see them as a rich source of feedback and learning. In the process, our tremendous potentialities for self-initiative and self-organizing are shattered.

In Dante’s world, arrogance is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins, and indeed the primary source from which the others arise. There is a very famous saying among wise people, “The more I know, the more I realize how little I know,” which we seem to have forgotten with factory-schooling and the cult of hyper-specialisation. In many indigenous cultures, the act of bowing with humility was the first initiation. The often-mentioned policy term ‘first-generation learners’, which is used to describe children attending schools for the first time, is a prime example of this arrogance. This phrase implies that all of our ancestors who did not go to school for thousands of years never learned anything in their lives and that it is not possible to learn without going to school. Indeed, the arrogant claim that “we educated experts know what’s best…” and others who have not gone to school (including other sentient beings) do not know, is what has gotten us (and the planet) into big trouble in the first place. The need of the day is to question the arrogant claims that more factory-schooling is the solution – the only solution, in fact, according to declarations such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015). Recently, AI has burst on the scene with grand promises for education. However, rather than disrupting this arrogance, most AI in education projects are reinforcing and deepening it.

Many people will argue that all of this discussion is okay but what about all the benefits of factory-schooling, “Manish, you have presented a one-sided argument.” There are many myths about the benefits of factory-schooling which need to be exposed and re-examined. One of the silliest and also most depressing arguments that I have heard was when a friend started arguing with me that the purpose of schooling is to make friends and socialize and that without schooling, people would not be able to develop deep lifelong relationships with others. I would request the reader to interrogate the meaning of socialization and the kind of homogenizing and bullying in artificially created peer groups that happens in school today.

A more advanced argument is that, for many, factory-schooling is a necessary evil as it is the only way to achieve social liberation and economic equality. They will argue, “Government schools represent a way out of generations of poverty and discrimination for Dalits, women, villagers, tribals, blacks, etc.” They are thus working on promoting more forms of inclusion into the existing system. If this were to happen, then they believe that everything in the world would be fine.

I think that we need to examine the claims of social liberation and economic equality more closely and its White Man’s Burden roots. Has it led to social liberation for all or for a few at the expense of many others? How did it happen that now the 5 richest people hold wealth equivalent to that of the poorest 3.1 billion people, with a combined net worth of approximately $800 billion? What are the hidden costs to run the existing system? How are these being paid for?

Let’s take a common example: it is claimed that education has been a key to empowering and uplifting women. Kofi Annan of the United Nations once said that “there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.” He called for all girl-children to be brought into schools and to be ‘empowered’. While I agree with Annan’s statement, I would question both the sentiment behind and strategy associated with it. One benefit of schooling all over India, for sure, is that it provides girls with a social excuse to delay getting married and having children. It has also brought girls and women more into being targeted by consumer brands and the current political set-up. But it is difficult to see real wide-spread social liberation as a result of education taking place. In his TV show, Satyameva Jayate, Aamir Khan highlights that the highest rates of female foeticide, declining sex-ratio, dowry and problems with child-birthing are happening amongst the most school-educated. At the same time, so-called traditional illiterate women have been the pillars, whether it be in the areas of traditional seeds or water management or alternative healing or community media, for maintaining a healthy and vibrant community life. The same goes for Dalits and tribals who have handled local production needs and managed the forests and commons. Their joining factory-schooling and being ‘mainstreamed’ means that the last bastion of autonomous resistance to the industrial-military paradigm is being destroyed. While some token admission has happened into the ranks of the global elite, social liberation has meant over the mid-to-long term, for the most part, greater social alienation, loss of local-level security (food, social, health, natural resources) and self-sufficiency, more war and conflict, more debts, and a deeper enslavement into a fundamentally exploitative, volatile and destructive global economy. In other words, success for women has ultimately meant that female bodies have been enlisted into the capitalist, patriarchical, racist extractivist system. Any gains that have been made in the past century can be compared to a body-builder on steroids. They will be short-lived and eventually lead to the collapse of all internal organs. We are sadly witnessing the start of this collapse of all of our ecosystems on the planet.

Raising the Bar for Alternative Education

“Suppose a man is sucking a lump of arsenic and you warn him that the stuff is poisonous. Would he be considered sane if he countered by saying that he must first be given a cup of nectar; otherwise, he would not give up whatever he had?” - Maulana Azad

I am often visited by many well-intentioned people working in NGOs or private corporate foundations, who are trying to provide education, of either the formal or non-formal variety, children from urban bastis, ragpickers, construction sites, tribal areas, etc. They come very excited and share the latest ‘child-friendly’ and ‘joyful’ methods that they are using. But I am surprised by their blank stares when I ask them what is your vision for these children or their communities 10 years from now. What kind of lifestyle do you see them living, what kind of work will they do, what kind of community will they be part of? How will AI or climate change change our lives? They quite surprisingly say that they have never thought about it; their primary responsibility is only to ensure that students secure good marks. They don’t see that they are unconsciously perpetuating the false promise that going to school will yield everyone a well-paying job which equals lots of money which ultimately will yield lots of happiness. It is interesting to note that even the Government of India is predicting the growth of massive unemployment in the range of 180 million youth over the next two decades. We have already started to witness in pockets around the world how this might translate into frustration, depression and rage.

Because of the global green movement, it has become quite fashionable (and profitable) these days to describe one’s school as ‘alternative’, ‘progressive’ or ‘innovative’. This typically means that the institution has developed various techniques or tricks to help children access mainstream schools or help children perform better on tests. Nowadays, they may even have solar lights, mindfulness classes, mud-construction or an organic kitchen garden. Very rarely does it mean a deeper questioning of the core assumptions, structures and frameworks which drive factory-schooling. It is questionable whether they really give children the choice (and the tools) to say ‘no’ to factory-schooling, exams, textbooks, degrees and a life of drudgery in the global rat-race. I developed a little tool for myself to check if learning projects (including my own) are real ‘alternatives’ or just wolves in sheep’s clothing; it is called the 5Cs map - compulsion, competition, commodification, compartmentalization and de-contextualization.

I would like to propose that we need to raise the bar for alternative education experiments. Rather than seeing alternative school as an isolated space, we need to shift our thinking to evaluate how an alternative school can better support the regeneration and co-evolution of the local community, local economy and local ecosystem of which it is part. How can an alternative school enable more experiential opportunities within the wider learning web? Also, alternative education experiments need to look more closely at supporting families in their unlearning and deprogramming efforts in relation to the seven deadly sins. One can physically take a child out of factory schooling, but it requires much more effort to take the frameworks, fears and values of factory schooling out of each of us and our communities. We have seen that the children of many families who opted for unschooling ultimately went back into the formal system due to fear.

Indian educationists have committed two grave murders: first they killed Eklavya, and second, they killed Gandhi (they never allowed poor Rabindranath Tagore to even come onto the stage). The 4000 year old story of Eklavya in the Mahabharat is inherently a story of the power and potential of self-designed learning. The story inspires me to imagine approaches beyond ‘child-centered’ and take us on a journey into the world of ‘child-led’ learning that highlights the power of intrinsic motivation.

Whenever I think of it, I always celebrate the resilience of the learning spirit in all of us. It reminds me of when a class 8 boy named Sudeep, who was passionate about theatre, once came to us quite distraught. He had found out that his grandmother in Kerala was very ill on her deathbed and his mother wanted to take him to spend a month caring for her. Sudeep’s principal refused, saying that he could not miss a month of school. Sudeep came to me not knowing what to do. I said, “By all means, if you want to, you should go and take of your nani. You will never have this chance again.” So, he decided to go with his mother for a month and he cared for his grandmother until she passed away. When he returned, the principal gave him a hard time but eventually allowed him back. Today, many years later, he says this was one of the most powerful learning experiences he has had in his life.

The story of Gandhi is essentially a story of deep decolonization and swaraj, the dignity of learning with hands/labor, heart, head and home, and invitation to meaningfully engage with one’s own experiments with truth. By swaraj, I mean a commitment to relational autonomy, bioregional diversity, self-organization and the wisdom of interconnectedness. Swaraj is also about slowing down and creating spaces to question the narratives of industrialization, globalization and development, the dominance of science and technology, nationalism and the militaristic nation state. It is about reconnecting to the khoji (seeker/explorer/ experimenter) within each of us. It gives us new hope for the possibility of human beings living in harmony with each other and with the rest of nature, beyond the seven deadly sins of schooling.

Today, we must explore a discourse of learning which is not about mainstreaming into one homogenous monoculture of Barbie dolls and GM foods, but rather, about creating a world with the possibilities of ‘many streaming’. As the Zapastistas of Mexico so beautifully describe, “a world in which many worlds are possible.” In this essay, I should again clarify that I am not arguing that there should not be any organized or structured learning spaces. Quite the contrary, I am proposing that there are and should be many, many more spaces and opportunities than the monoculture of factory-schooling currently allows for. These should just not be compulsory. The learner should have an active role in designing and co-creating them. We can start by revaluing the wisdom of intergenerational interactions, the rest of nature, bodily labor, joint families, apprenticeship opportunities, local languages and pilgrimages, festivals and rites of passage. We can also try to publicly re-claim intellectual respect for those who do not have degrees, and for those ways of knowing which are not based solely on human rational, logical, linear, measurable frameworks of intelligence.

Despite what modern planners and technocratic managers believe, diversity is a core element to the resilience of our species. So if there are 1.2 billion unique minds in India, I believe we must have 1.2 billion customised diverse systems of vidya which are simultaneously autonomous and interconnected to their bioregions. This is the level of design imagination that we must aim for in alternative education. This is possible if we regain our faith in the power of self-designed learning and self-organizing systems.

My faith in the world of self-designed learning that exists outside of schools led me and my wife to consciously choose to unschool our daughter, Kanku, and ourselves. Unschooling means two things to us. First, as parents, we are trying to unlearn our conditioned and colonized schooled mindsets and recover our own genuine self-designed learning processes. As adults (parents and teachers) we have many conditionings (such as competition and comparison), traumas, insecurities, fears about the future, etc. which we consciously or unconsciously impose on children. Oftentimes, we are not even aware of these. As one entry point into this conversation, I like to invite parents to think about the 10 lies their school taught them.

Second, we are trying to limit the direct harm of the culture of schooling on Kanku’s authentic unfolding, while exposing her to a much wider socialization and life understanding than children currently receive in schools. Unlike, homeschoolers and alternative educators, we don’t believe in or follow the official syllabus, textbooks, exams or competitive practices of formal schools. Rather, we regularly ask Kanku what she would like to learn and try to support her in creating her own customised self-designed learning plan in a way that she is more conscious of the impact of her choices and of the local context in which we live. As part of her unschooling experiences, she has spent time in rural areas with indigenous communities, she has interacted and apprenticed with many local artisans, fashion designers, artists and musicians, she has had diverse friends across across ages who were from slum areas, shelters for street-children and even ex-jail inmates, and she has travelled to over 15 countries. We try to listen deeply to her own curiosity and creative impulses while co-navigating other forces such as Instagram, Amazon, fascist nationalism, etc.

Now, at age 23, she has developed the confidence to interact with many different kinds of people and the confidence that she can earn an honest livelihood and contribute to the world through her skills and relationships. We have also been inspired to explore our own passions and life questions along with her. Unschooling is not limited to just the home or one center or space. Rather, we have tried to regenerate the larger web of learning commons with many diverse learning hubs and resources in our Udaipur as a Learning City project. This includes: cafes, farms, fashion boutiques, art galleries, potters, animal shelters, nurseries, street festivals, cycling tours, community media centers and even our personal homes. I share this not in the expectation that everyone has to follow unschooling, but rather, in the spirit of noticing the rich abundance of our local contexts. We have learned that, if we remember to listen, the local context is continuously creating a lot of challenges, relationships and meaningful opportunities for our experiential learning and unlearning. It provides the real curriculum. This re-connection to local context is critical to shifting us from a selfish taker, consumerist ME-FIRST orientation to a gift culture WE eco-social seva orientation.

In our work, we often encounter a common critique that alternative education is only for the elites. This is something that I personally have given serious consideration and attention to. We have set up an unschooling centre in a government school in Delhi. We run our own parallel system there from two o'clock to six o'clock every day. It's not compulsory. There are no fees. School kids from nearby neighborhoods, any kids who dropped out of school, even homeschooled kids, can join. They get to do all kinds of real-world projects, they get to explore their interests, they get to travel. We also have created an unschooling center in the central jail to work with convicted inmates called the Swaraj Jail University. Lastly, we have developed a model with dropout indigenous rural youth in the Swaraj Farmversity. It is exciting to see how these learners are flourishing in these spaces. What is common to all of these diverse models is that they try to find the unique spark in each learner and they are learner-led and encourage collaboration.

Also, much of what we have done in Swaraj University hinges on the Healing Ourselves from the Diploma Disease Campaign. During our learning programs, if khojis want apprenticeships or internships with companies or non-profit organizations, we help arrange those for them. We've set up a parallel system, where experiential portfolios are more important than degrees. We are also inviting and supporting many young people to explore new regenerative careers as Alivelihoods as opposed to Deadlihoods jobs and economies which are essentially extractive, wasteful, exploitative and violent (Jain 2023). We have tried to make seed capital available for these Alivelihoods careers.

But these experiments are extremely fragile. I'm not advocating that we can go and do this everywhere; that we're going to fix or change this existing system and bring a revolution from within the system. As I said earlier, I don’t believe that these institutions can be fixed since their underlying philosophy is corrupted. What we can do is unleash an underground learning culture so that learners can see and start to believe they have better choices than to stay in school. They can walk-out of the system and walk-on to deeper, more meaningful learning opportunities. They can look for their own gurus and masters. That is why we are also nurturing the trans-local alliance of Ecoversities around the world which include farm-versities, grandmothers universities, travellers universities, river-versities, forest-versities, favela-versities, death-versities, etc. Ecoversities are practice grounds for building new systems in the world.

I have seen many international organizations working with children, such as UNICEF and Save the Children, ask school children what they would like their school to look like or what changes do they want in their school. Under the guise of progressive educators, they feel that they are giving a space to the child to express themselves and their needs. What often emerges are kids drawing things like a playground, toilet, kitchen garden, a nice teacher, etc. But I feel that this is not really a genuine process since many parameters of schooling are pre-defined and seen as compulsory - like being forced to sit in a school building all day, organizing according to a fixed timetable for all or taking a high-stakes exam. This is actually a very insidious way of manipulating children. These ‘child-friendly’ agencies do not ever give them the real choice to say ‘no’ to the idea of schooling or to think that they can find their own guru outside of school.

Invoking the spirit of Gandhi, Eklavya and the il-letterates, I would like to propose that we enter into a small but profound decolonizing thought experiment to engage children and parents with: Can we for sometime imagine that there are no schools in our lives? What would we like to create? How will we design the time and space in our lives (for both children and parents)? How would we like to learn? Who would we like to learn with? What do we feel is important to unlearn individually, in our local communities, across borders, and as a species? How do we wish to rebuild and regenerate our right relationship with Mother Earth? What kind of spiritual-political-economy do we wish to support? What does happiness and the good life mean to us? I have found when people understand that they have the power to say No to choices presented to them, this opens up their imagination to more possibilities.

Inspired by Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index, I started thinking about what are the things that are important for me and my community as part of our work in Udaipur as a Learning City. In my workshops on Reimagining Education, I invite others to explore this question in their own contexts.

Box 2: My Happiness Index: 10 Signs of a Healthy, Wealthy and Wise Society

Such a thought experiment is not an exercise in going backwards to some romanticized, past glory days. Rather, it is intended to help liberate us from the deep conditioning of factory-schooling which continually pushes us into formulating our efforts in relation to reforming, fixing, improving, transforming, etc. the existing system of factory-schooling and into prioritizing the urban-industrial-hi-tech lifestyle. Much of the decolonization discourse has become hijacked by conventional universities which reduce it to academic jargon, social inclusion in existing institutions and representational identity politics to fight for a piece of the pie. Having the mental space to question the absurdity of and ‘say no’ to the monopoly of factory-schooling might also provide a renewed sense of agency, motivation, connection and creativity to children, parents and even everyday people, who serve as the real gurus but do not necessarily have a teaching certificate or degree. It might even create some space to take a small pause from the great institutional addictions of our times: the addiction to debt/money, the addiction to 24/7 energy, the addiction to war (or threat thereof) to solve problems.

Another world is truly possible if the wholeness of the world once again becomes our classroom. The biggest challenge of our times is to create post-ideological spaces to shed labels and categories and bridge the growing divisiveness and complex challenges of our times. Can we enter the brave spaces of co-creation and radical trust with the ‘enemy’? Can our knowledge systems re-imbibe the deep understanding that what we do to ‘nature’, we do to ourselves? In Swaraj University, we have found that we can start reclaiming our diverse learning ecosystems and sense of hope with very small acts: spending time listening to stories from elders, organic kitchen gardening, cooking good food with friends, kindness towards strangers, sitting in silence, gratitude prayers, singing together, forgiveness rituals, communing with plants and animals, learning a new DIY skill from an ‘il-letterate’ person, etc. These are all powerful ‘ancient technologies and pedagogies’ which can help us to start to remember the profound magic of life and our sacred role as human beings on this planet.

References

Alighieri, Dante (1321/1977): The Divine Comedy. New York City, NY: WW Norton & Co

Easterly, William (2006): The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York City, NY: Penguin

Gatto, John Taylor (2005): Dumbing Us Down. The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Iceland Gabriola: New Society

Illich, Ivan (1971): Deschooling Society. Hamondsworth: Penguin

Jain, Manish (2023): The Journey to Alivelihoods. URL: medium.com/ecoversities-alliance/the-journey-to-alivelihoods-6f0465cac248 (15.10.2025)

Macauley, Thomas B. (1835): Macaulay's Minute on Education, February 2, 1835. URL: home.iitk.ac.in/~hcverma/Article/Macaulay-Minutes.pdf (15.10.2025)

Shri Dharampalji (1983): The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. Goa: Other India Press

Tagore, Rabindranath & Jain, Manish (2016): The Parrot‘s Training (retold). Hacking the Education System Series. Udaipur: Shikshantar Andolan. URL: shikshantar.org/sites/default/files/PDF/parrots_trainingfinalfinal.pdf (15.10.2025)

Taylor, Frederick (1911): Principles of Scientific Management. New York/London: Harper & Brothers. URL: archive.org/details/principlesofscie00taylrich/ (15.10.2025)

UN (2015): Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. URL: docs.un.org/en/A/RES/70/1 (15.10.2025)

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