In the past weeks, I have written about two school-education insights that ended up as orthodoxies—‘constructivism’ and the ‘whole language’ approach to reading and writing. Both followed the same arc: a useful partial explanation was declared as the whole and sole truth, with children bearing the brunt of the consequent misguided approach to education.
Beneath these two arcs lay a substratum on which both rested and from which both drew their moral authority. This was the dogma of ‘joyful learning’—of learning without burden.
Let me first state emphatically and without qualification what is true. School education in India became—and in most places remains—a burden on children.
The grind of it is joyless: the crushing school bag, fear of examinations, drone of dictated notes and overstuffing of curriculums, apart from the fear of knuckle raps. The Yash Pal Committee’s report of 1993 was titled ‘Learning Without Burden’ and it was a timely rallying cry.
Much of the joy that learning could give had been drained out of our schools. To make learning as joyful as possible is a worthy goal and this column does not deny it.
Yet, we can observe a familiar slide. What began as a goal and principle became an all-encompassing foundation—the substratum of what I will call the progressive consensus in education. I use the phrase carefully and without sneer, for we are all progressives in one sense: we all want education to progress, to be more humane, effective and just.
The consensus I mean is narrower—the settled cluster of ideas that came to define ‘enlightened opinion’ about schooling, within which subsidiary doctrines found shelter.
The dominance of constructivism and whole language over our curriculum frameworks and teacher education was not on account of its efficacy, but their alignment with the substratum: any method that promised joy and lightness was presumed to be good, and any that involved instruction, practice, memorization or effort was presumed to be part of an old oppressive regime.
The dogma of joy was the filter through which everything else was seen, and it gave the other dogmas their glow.
The trouble is that the substratum itself is a part-truth about learning. That learning must be engaging is not in question; engagement is close to a precondition for learning and the teacher who cannot interest her class in the subject at hand is not effective.
But engagement is not the same as effortlessness and joy is not the same as endless pleasantness. Anyone who has actually learnt anything worth learning—a language, a concept, use of an instrument or a craft—knows what the process entails: effort, fatigue, confusion, failure, a plateau where nothing seems to move, frustration that precedes the light of understanding.
None of this is some kind of regrettable residue of bad teaching. It is the nature of learning itself, because learning is the reconstruction of one’s mind and minds do not reconstruct themselves without strain.
The deepest joys of learning lie on the other side of this strain—the joy of having climbed, which is unavailable to those who were never allowed a hill. An educational approach that treats every moment of difficulty as a symptom of oppression only makes it that much harder for children to learn, without liberating them from any burden.
John Dewey, whose views form the fountainhead of all colours of progressive education, saw this being done in his name and protested. In Experience and Education, he rebuked his followers for setting up a new dogmatism against the old, for believing that a rejection of external imposition meant rejecting all structure, guidance and demands.
The rebuke went unheard in America. So too in India, though years later.
The slogan had escaped the insight. And slogans once let loose do things that the core insight cannot control. ‘Joyful’ and ‘burden-free learning’ seeped into everything—curricular design, teacher education, training modules, long-term planning, the mark of an enlightened educator, and more. No longer as goals to be pursued with judgement but as tests of purity that everything in education was put to.
In too many schools and key components of the system, this gave a licence to the unstructured, unguided and near-chaotic, all of it wearing the virtuous badge of progressive education. We ended up with a weird toxic mix—the dogma of joy fuelling the approach and principles of education combined with the reality of education’s burden held in place by cultural inertia. The worst of both worlds.
Children paid for all this, most of all the disadvantaged. The child of educated parents experiences education as something that demands effort and assessments of learning, irrespective of what the school does. These homes also have social and educational resources to support the child.
In contrast, children in or near poverty have only the school to rely on. When policy and curriculum withhold the demand for effort in the name of joy, it blocks the only path she has to education. This is not virtuous.
The goal is what Yash Pal said it was: to lift the burden that crushes students, while demanding all effort for learning—because these are not the same thing. The wisdom of teaching and education lies in telling them apart.
Joy in learning is real, no doubt, and it is precious precisely because it is earned. But a joy that must be guaranteed in advance, at every moment and to every child, is not joy. It is merely entertainment, and the country’s children deserve better.
The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.