Growing up in India

The latest report from UNESCO says that our education system puts a lot of stress on children through its unrealistic expectations. I’m sure what the UNESCO report meant was with reference to the schooling, and not education, per se. The recent excitement in the media circles about Mr. Satya Nadella’s success story drove home one point, that our system has greater advantages. This isn’t very different from what Anita Raghavan touches upon in her book The Billionaire’s Apprentice.

I grew up in an educated middle-class family. My father was a Ford Foundation scholar, one of nine children (two of whom died in their infancy), had lost his father in his formative years, studied under the street lights and made his way to becoming a director of an Insurance company. My father’s story isn’t very different from that of many others of his generation. He made sure my story was different!

Growing up in India is a wholesome experience. Education is in every aspect of life, and what one learns in school, only a fraction of it. More often than not, one grows up in the midst of people from atleast two different generations and has the advantage of gaining from them all! My grandmother knew her multiplication tables in fractions of half and quarter and one-eighth, something she taught me, too. And my great-grandmother, in all her senility, would discuss the building of bridges and dams! I, on my part, learnt to respect and care for the elderly. The large Indian family experience exposed me to the culture that I was a part of; I learnt dance and music and played traditional games of ‘palanguzhi’, ‘gilli-danda’ and ‘parcheesi’ as well as I did basketball or badminton. I spoke English fluently and by the time I was twelve years of age I knew five languages and seven by the time I was seventeen. Since my father’s career took me to different places in India and abroad, it added to my education. The only downside was that I never learnt to build relationships outside of my family, as by the time an acquaintance marinated into becoming a good friendship, it was time for us to leave. It added a facet to my personality that I am not proud of – being detached.

And so, education involved aspects of (formal) schooling and (informal) home-schooling. One simply had to be the best at everything – debating, writing, academics and the arts. Sure there was a pressure to be so, but I never felt I was inadequate if I wasn’t the best, simply because I took with me a lesson from every ‘failing’; if one member from the large extended family was ready to admonish me for my failures, there were always many others who negated that with their encouragement. This developed in me a spirit of competitiveness and a desire to be better the next time. Shakespeare, Maugham, Dickens, Wordsworth and Nehru were discussed in the same frequency as traditional Indian texts and learning from these was as important as the teachings in The Gita.

According to studies, the young brain is far more amenable to learning and influences than the older brain and the speed at which a brain can process information reaches it’s maximum by the age of fifteen. This would imply that the period from age three to age fifteen is crucial in learning as this is the optimum time for the absorption and assimilation of information. The more the information fed to the brain during this period, the better. This is why many of us face rather embarrassing situations when a child quotes something it has overheard, out of context!

The Indian system believes in a whole lot of information being fed during these formative years and it is this information that is recalled later in life. The system does seem rigorous and very high in its expectation from the children, but if the brain does, indeed, reach its maximum in processing information by the age of fifteen, should it not be pushed to increase those limits? While the brain is at it’s absorptive best during the period in question, it is also as susceptible to developmental problems. The emphasis should, therefore, shift from the content to the method by which the information is dissipated to the children. I think the UNESCO report shows only one side of the mirror, when it has two faces!

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Raga Bairagi