Wealthy people place their valuables in a bank locker for safekeeping. At the other end of the spectrum, individuals who’ve fallen on hard times often live out of public places and restrooms. Did you realise there’s a third category of inbetweeners who seek a slightly different type of refuge, in a different type of place altogether?
Children. Even and including those who belong to ‘decent’ families, reasonably well-to-do backgrounds. For many amongst them, what they earn, their personal currency, their spectrum of emotions, feelings and sentiments, owing to a set of unsavoury circumstances that doesn’t allow them to feel ‘whole’ at home; deposit their respective emotional-chests, at school!
While we as parents, teachers and caregivers wax lyrical about steps to make schools safer, more secure, less prejudiced places; the aforementioned group of children has already, being unaffected by the pervading school environment, invested all of themselves they can’t elsewhere, at school.
These are the children who secretly long to reach school, and given a choice, remain!
Now let us add another layer of current reality to this situation. There is a desperate need for what we broadly understand and term – social emotional learning. This is irrespective of the type of child, and their circumstances. Especially from a future standpoint, the more deeply individuals are self-aware, have formed identities they are proud of, love, and are unique and differentiated, the better their chances at surviving and thriving in an uncharted upcoming global landscape that is almost impossible to estimate with any accuracy.
With these few different directions and reasons that are making a strong case for ‘education’ to be much more ‘emotionally inclusive & evolutionary’, perhaps it is time we questioned some core fundamentals & constructs, rather than trying our current approach of retrofitting & retrofitting?
Ironic. When I teach Essay Writing as part of my communication skills classes, I suggest to students that as far as possible, and particularly when they raise a problem in their respective pieces, they should also try to provide potential solutions/suggestions. I find that having presented what I see to recognize as a very real reality, one that needs urgent and probably paradigm-altering solutions, I do not myself have any to offer!
Having realized, for myself at least, that retrofitting the existing mainstream schooling systems is not proving particularly effective, residential schools also falling into similar traps, not to mention their own existential crisis; I do have a certain thought. It is a radical thought. One that will require a leap of faith, and redefining several vital facets of mass-standardized education. But when has catering to a completely new/different set of needs ever been easy!
The way I see this. A possible solution could be in the form of a hybrid model of education, that combines a Gurukul-style physical micro-school that will bring together a modest cohort and unite them with a mentor who will address holistic values, spirituality, self-exploration & awareness, and building identity, purpose and morality. And this will co-exist with a completely technology & AI based customised academic/scholastic learning solution that each learner will also attend on an everyday basis, from home itself, encompassing the bulk of what students today physically visit schools for.
To my mind, this system could present numerous advantages. In addition to the obvious merits stated above, for instance, gurukul would return children to nature, s key suggestion being strongly put forth by many in the mental health & wellness space, for good reason. Furthermore. Why, for example, can we not embrace and compliment education with allied services from AI, instead of waiting for our fears of AI making human teachers redundant, to actually take place? Similarly, why not, rather than retrofitting the current schooling system with diluted elements of SEL, turn it on its head, and take a few systems from the current that are good, and bring those to a revivalist-gurukul. In my school for instance, aside from our headmaster and housemaster, we had tutors. In other schools, a similar role was performed by people called house-parents; only the nomenclature changed. Individuals who’d be quasi parents, emotional supports, pastoral carers. Bolster gurukul with these roles and evolve the rest of current schooling’s academic duties and obligations and make it AI led.
Is it not in any case observed in as many sectors and realms of life; there comes a point on an evolutionary cycle, that we reference, draw from, reconstruct past/historic systems and values. The gurukul system, so deeply embedded in our culture and conditioning, could just present what we, rather what children at this point need.
Nobody has the elusive magic-mantra to educational success. Trial and error, just as good teachers advise their students, is a process that we as alleged education-leaders must also adopt. It is the only way. The right way. So the E in that word is equal Education & Emotion.
Kartik Bajoria – Founder Driveway Devi Life Guidance
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