Reported By:
| Edited By: K Yatish Rajawat |Source: DNA |Updated: Oct 02, 2018, 10:46 PM IST
Sonam Wangchuk, is a Ladakhi engineer, innovator and education reformist. He is founding director of the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SEMCOL), which was set up in 1988 by a group of students who had been in his own words, the 'victims' of an alien education system foisted on Ladakh. He was also instrumental in the launch of Operation New Hope in 1994, a collaboration of government, village communities and civil society to introduce reforms in the government school system. In an exclusive in-depth interview with K Yatish Rajawat, Wangchuk talks extensively about his new experiment, the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL) and the challenges that confront Indian school and higher education. Excerpts from the interview.
I believe that schools of today with all their answers on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, above everything else, take us back to the industrial revolution in time, when people thought that nature could be conquered and consumption or production could be unlimited. Today we know that this is not true, we see the mess we have landed ourselves in. The air is unsafe to breathe, water undrinkable and temperature unbearable. If we do more of the same, we will get more of the same results. If a patient is sick because of sugar, the first thing to do is stop sugar and then you may think about giving him healthier food. Secondly, this system is also based on the assumption that some parts of the world will be rich while others will be poor and serve the rich, providing little space for equity. If the whole world is equally rich then we will need several planets. Gandhi once said and that is not possible and perhaps in a lighter vein, this is what Elon Musk is trying with his efforts to populate Mars. The use-and-throw philosophy we use on earth is now being extended to use-and-throw of planet earth, which is laughable. I believe that education should be about healing the earth and dealing with the crises that we are in.
Climate change, environmental and the social breakdown as seen in the west, where old people live in old age homes and depressed, children in kindergarten are lonely and sad, where children need elderly and elderly need children, it is sad that India, which can pride itself on the Vedas and Upanishads, is following the same broken system. That leads to more and more misery. India's lead in education was based not on fulfilling more and more desires but in conquering those desires. Education was not about consumption, but about contentment with less and less. This is what Buddha taught and this is what the Vedas say. Buddha once said, for a human being it is a greater achievement to conquer a single desire than to fulfill thousand desires. But today it's about fulfilling thousand desires, rather than to conquer one. Today's youth needs an education to teach them to be happier with less and less rather than chase shadows. Therefore, I believe that our ancient system of human or spiritual evolution is, once again, needed more than industrial revolution. Spiritual evolution over industrial revolution is what I think ultimately our schools will have to give priority to. If we want to keep this planet for the next generation, we have to groom our children differently.
Yes, higher education is also in a big mess. Not just because we churn out graduates who are not employable, our higher education is like our schools where it is all about putting young people in classrooms away from real life, making them memorize pages from books, listening to lectures for hours, without any learning from it. I believe humans have not evolved to learn sitting in classrooms listening to lectures and scribbling on papers. Humans, over tens of millions of years, have evolved from engaging with real life, taking on challenges in physical and dangerous situations. Our young ones have always been shoulder to shoulder with grown-ups, learning on the job in the field, facing challenges. They were never designed to sit and listen or scribble. When we educate our youth like they do in factories, putting them in rooms for eight hours, forcing them to sit still and silent, well, this is not what we are designed to do.
Nature has gifted our young ones, particularly teenagers, with lots of energy to learn through action. This gift of energy, when they are made to sit without providing an outlet to their energy, comes out in ugly ways, which is called teenager rage, rebellion or depression. That leads to other social challenges like drug abuse and so on. Higher education for teenagers needs to become more engaged, more real and connected to real life. It should be about solving real problems. Give them the challenges they need and the satisfaction of doing something. Contributing to the society and the resultant respect that they require, are all locked out in the current system. It makes them feel useless and does not prepare them for real life and also leads to unemployability. Therefore, centralised uniform universities don't make sense. Each university should be unique in addressing the challenges of the area and the context they are in. Apart from the contextual, it should be a more engaging experience. We need to be influenced more by our evolution for millions of years rather than the impact of the industrial revolution in the last 300 years.
In Ladakh, we have a big problem, because there is no university there. As a result, tens of thousands of youth go to cities like Jammu, Chandigarh and Delhi to get their higher education. What they learn in these places is not relevant to high mountains. They come back as misfits, becoming a problem for the place rather than providing solutions. But even if we had a university in Ladakh, it wouldn't mean much if it was merely a copy of what was done in London, New York or New Delhi. My belief is that universities should respond to the needs of the environmental contexts.
Therefore, Ladakh should have a mountain-focused university, where the solutions will be very different from what universities in Mumbai or Delhi offer. Hence, we are working on setting up what we call an alternative university, one with a mountain focus where young people are engaged in finding solutions to the problems of mountain people. It could be about applied ecology, trying to find solutions to climate change, frequent droughts, frequent flash floods, glaciers' melting and so on. It can be about applied entrepreneurship or sustainable tourism. Mountains almost always have high tourism potential, but local people need to be educated and enlightened about how to sustain the benefits of tourism without destroying the place. These are the issues that the university should address and equip local people with. I don't understand why higher education has to be so passive, where young capable people are made to sit and listen to lectures and charged hefty fees, which only a few can afford.
Higher education must be more engaging, more action based. Such young people in their 20s could generate a lot of wealth for the university and that wealth could pay for their education. What we hope to do in at the HIAL is to have young people, engage in real life projects. A school of sustainable tourism would run projects like home stays, farm stays, high end hotels, ice tourism and so on and students can actually plan and execute such projects. Hotels and home stays will earn revenues for the university, which would be self-sustained and where students would not have to pay a fee. In other words, they pay in the currency of their sweat and imagination rather than rupees and dollars, which only some can afford. What it means is that higher education is made equally accessible to all. This is an experiment, which we would like to try and fail rather than never try.
Wangchuk got Ramon Magsaysay award on Aug 31, for his community-driven reform of learning in remote northern India
Due to our colonial past, we tend to follow the flock. Our herd mentality leads to social branding - what everybody likes we must like or else there is something wrong with us. We don't think originally or critically for ourselves. We follow the head. I think we have both succeeded and failed because of this mentality. Successful because we are producing the so-called successful products that command high premium in the job market and also because I think the best brains are extracted by brand value. I am not sure, other than the students and the facilities, the faculty are so much different at IIT. The kind of students it attracts ensures that its products finally also sell. In other words if the same students went into any other technical institute, I think the results will not be very different. Some of the best brains in the country in a classroom will do well, no matter whether they have teachers or not. But the failure too is because of this branding. In our country, IIT has become a symbol of prestige more than a source of education. It has become a craze for every family.
Every year, many young people want to be at IIT; it has become like a label and people will do anything to get that label, even if they do not really want to wear it. And that is the reason why it is has failed to serve the nation. Despite all the expenses that the government incurs on these institutions, very few actually serve the nation as engineers. Half of them leave the country for more prosperous nations. A poor country like India can ill afford to subsidize its high- end engineers. It doesn't help taxpayers in India to export our much-needed high-end human resource to these countries. Secondly, even within India, IIT students go into business management, administrative services and finally very few actually take up engineering jobs. Now you could say that management and administration are also important. Yes, but we could have done with some useful courses instead of blocking space in an engineering institute, which is supposed to produce technologies. The sad part is that our society pushes our young people and parents pressure their children to join an IIT, irrespective of what the child really wants. The child may want to become a painter, but the parents push them to become an IIT-ian with all the coaching, facilities and wealth at their command.
Unfortunately, the world loses a great painter and because this painter occupies a seat in a technology institute, the world also loses a great technologist. The sad part again is that the painter becomes a bad engineer and the engineer becomes a bad soldier and therefore we have everything that is bad. If the painter was made to become a painter, perhaps he or she would be the world's best painter. And the soldier would be by the world's best, but because of the herd mentality we have created for ourselves, nobody is happy. The painter becomes an unhappy engineer and true engineer becomes an unhappy soldier. In the short term, I feel that IIT and engineering institutes should change the way they select students.
Currently, it is just answering some objective-type questions and you could be selected in the best institute based on answering those objective-type questions, which is really not difficult if you have the facilities and coaching. It doesn't take aptitude skills orientation to write such exams and a true engineer without the coaching may not succeed in getting in one of them. While objective type questions are good at short listing from among hundreds of thousands, it's not a good way of selecting the final students. You need to test students on their aptitude, their track record and on their interest in engineering to select the final list. So, if in the final test of the last 10,000, rather than objective type questions, if you had an objective way of testing aptitude and interest, disassemble and reassemble and the time you take and the reasons you explain as criteria for admission, will best reveal who is truly an engineer.
Parents actually need to encourage children to explore, rather than just sit and memorize readymade answers. I believe the entrance test must first change and the rest will change itself as soon as people know that these are what it takes to get into the IIT. Parents will follow suit and encourage their children to inculcate that aptitude and exploring, experimenting and innovating would get the encouragement that is needed. In the school, there is need to assess the track record of a student in solving problems in the locality. This would encourage aspiring engineers to come into an IIT and will take care of the complaint we often hear from professors at IITs that students are just not interested in coming to classes for studying and so on. Such students finally want to become a manager or an administrator and are mostly interested in the label and therefore are not interested in the classes. This, however, is the short term solution.
In the long term, our society's mindset will have to change. We will have to become more original in our thinking, come out of the herd mentality and respect every child and young person for what they are truly interested in. If they are interested in carpentry then so be it. Carpentry is as important as any other profession and chances are that someone interested in it will become the world's best carpenter. Similarly, a painter is respected to become a painter and a happy painter. If this mindset changes in our society, there will be no parents pushing their children, irrespective of whether they want to get into IIT or not. Nor will they be pushing students to commit suicide. Therefore, things need to change not just at the IITs and universities, but even at the level of society and in the thinking of people at large.
While it is true that new innovations will change the way we learn with all the freedom that digital online possibilities put on offer, I feel universities will still be relevant. A system like universities, even for a short period, where students get to meet and mingle with other students and interact with different kinds of faculties, are options that the internet cannot offer. The human touch, experience, the engagement, the application and most importantly, learning how to learn, are vital. I think digital learning will become very important for the universities of the future; teaching young people how to learn on their own using digital sources. So, the relevant of physical centres of learning will always remain; human touch cannot be replaced by internet alone.
If students are truly educated, are original in their thinking, self-confident and understand what is good and what is not, then they should definitely not go by brand names and if they don't, chances are that evolution in the higher education space will happen and newer ideas will blossom. Any mutations from the current regular brands will need a fertile ground to evolve into something big and that fertile ground is people with their own analytical mind to see the goodness of new things. If an unbranded institute comes up with a very creative innovative higher education concept, which has no originality, no critical mind, it will die a natural death because there won't be any takers. But if there are takers who spot creativity or newness in a new institution, then things that start as alternatives, can take over the mainstream. But that will depend very much on the originality of thought in the young people and therefore, I would say, go not by name, but by what they offer based on ones' critical analysis.
I agree with the idea that the world is not just about stem. Actually, much of the problems in the world today are because of our emphasis on standalone and therefore humanities, social sciences and liberal arts are very important. Ashoka University is doing a great job of showing this path, but I also think that we need to have more confidence in our own heritage of knowledge and wisdom. We need to wean off from this blind following of Oxford, Cambridge and Stanford and so on. We should take inspiration and pride in ancient Indian arts, skills, knowledge and wisdom. In India, as I said in the beginning, the art of rising above chasing desires to the contentment of the heart and mind through other practices, are relevant even today. Realms of spiritual evolution and meditation should be explored more in Indian universities and India should be leading the world in this exploring of the inner world and not just the outer world. Asia was a leader in this and it's time we show the world that we can lead again.
HIAL aims to engage youths from multiple Himalayan countries in Research & Development to tackle the issues faced by mountain people, especially in the domains of education, culture, and the environment
