The first thing I wish to do is correct a little bit Pawan Bhai's introduction of me. He said something to the effect that 'we are against schools, and children going to school.' And that may be true in practice, but I think it is because of what schools are today. I want to stress that you can't think about schools in an ideal sense, in terms like, "This is a place where people come to learn things that they are interested in and can develop their potential and get to relate to one another in co-operative ways." These are idealized images of what schooling could be, and they are used as a justification to say that all children should be in them, participating in them, and that parents are committing a crime if they don't send their children to them.
What we actually tried to focus on more in Shikshantar is something called 'the culture of schooling' some of whose features are:
1. "Labelling, ranking and sorting human beings; creating hierarchies; producing elite classes of highly educated and a large, large class of failures." For instance, there are people today who introduce themselves as, "I am a 12th class fail" or "I'm a 10th class fail". Your schooling status becomes your label, alongside your name. So what does that do to the self-esteem, the psyche of human beings?
2. "Uniformity, standardization." Everyone should and must go through the same syllabus, the same curriculum, the same program. And diversity is a problem. In fact, it is very explicitly stated in many government documents that one of the things that stands in the way of universalization of basic elementary education is diversity. Diverse human languages, cultures, knowledges: these things are problems if we are going to try to get everyone into standard schools. So, therefore, we should try to eliminate them as much as possible.
3. "Spreading fear, insecurity, violence and silence." The culture of silence is embedded in schooling. There is no or little scope for asking questions, much less dissenting.
4. "Widespread and cutthroat competition." I think this item on the list is pretty obvious, as is the next about "examination, certificates, jobs, being the sole assessments and outcomes" of learning in schools. The effect of these on children and families and society has also been pretty well documented.
5. "Commodifying human beings, nature, knowledge, social relationships," is also important. The assumption is that everything we have should have a price tag on it. And in today's market economy, preferably, a dollar value. We should be able to say that this tree, or this acreage of land, is worth this much money; this kind of knowledge is worth more than the rest, especially if it's modern science (which is usually given a much higher price than any other form of knowledge). Basically, everything should be able to be bought and sold. Of course, once everything is packaged, it can only be bought and sold by a select few.
6. "Fragmenting and compartmentalizing knowledge, and de-linking knowledge from wisdom, practical experiences and contexts." I think that the Multiversity idea is really addressing this, in terms of getting away from rigid disciplines and controlled structures, which say, "Only this is what constitutes knowledge," and opening up the spaces from which to glean knowledge and the number and kinds of knowledge available to humanity.
7. "Separating rationality from emotions and spirit," is linked to the above point, since the dominant model of knowledge only considers rationality, and other human connections, emotions, our feelings, values, our spiritual perspectives - these are not really valued in the culture of schooling.
8. "Literacy is privileged over all other forms of expression." This not only devalues the many other ways humans express themselves, through music, art, dance, stories, etc., but it also determines our sources of information. Once literacy takes supremacy, it is only through textbooks, or newspapers, or television, that we get our information. However, again, these are controlled by a particular apparatus, a particular elite.
9. "Reducing spaces and opportunities for human learning by funnelling them through a centrally controlled institution." This idea of a funnel, a single source or space of valid knowledge, is very important and I would like to speak on this in a little more detail. We have been told that there are only certain people, certain places, certain ideas, certain books and certain kinds of sources that you can go to, to actually become educated. This is a great myth, which has been propagated vis-à-vis modern institutions, particularly schooling. Along with the sense of dependency that has been created alongside that. The myth says, 'If you are not in touch with those people, those places, those texts, then you cannot become "educated".' This means therefore that you have to always find yourself the expert, the institution, the key text that will give you the knowledge that you need to become part of that elite group. I think it's something the Multiversity should really make sure it avoids. It shouldn't set itself up as the next funnel, after schools and universities, but instead support other spaces and opportunities of learning. How we actually grow and connect to those, I think, will be a very important challenge for us.
10. "Devaluing the dignity of labour." Definitely revaluing the learning that takes place through the labour of manual work will also be very important to the Multiversity.
11. And lastly: "Breaking the bonds of family and community and making people more dependant on the nation-state, governments, science, technology and the market." This dependency is not only related to peoples' livelihood, in terms of how they're going to survive, but also for their identity, in terms of who they are today. So I am a 'citizen', I am a 'consumer', I am a professional - those are my identities, and all the other forms and ways in which we understand ourselves and each other, as parents, as children, as siblings, as creators, as questioners, etc., those are discounted or made irrelevant.
So, this culture of schooling manifests itself in many, many different ways, and I would never limit it to just schools. You can see many of these elements through the mass media; you can see many of them in the way the government relates to us as human beings, or the way we are taught to relate to nature and also, obviously, in the market and corporate sector.
So whatever we do, we need to be sure to understand the link to a larger system. We must be extremely critical and extremely conscious of that system, and not try to create a vacuum for ourselves, because we are obviously still a part of that system, to some extent or another. We have to continuously see how are we working to subvert that, resist that, as well as generate and regenerate other kinds of possibilities.
I also want to share a little bit about what we've been trying to do in Udaipur, with Shikshantar, and what kinds of processes we think the Multiversity can engage in, with us and through us, in Shikshantar, to see where else we can go.
The first one - and these are parallel, I wouldn't say they are first and second - is around unlearning, decolonizing, resisting, questioning, challenging… I think these words go together, in terms of facing the kinds of assumptions, institutions, systems, values, knowledge, before us. They relate to understanding the glasses that we have been wearing, the various kinds of lenses through which we have been looking at the world, to begin to question and expose them. In and of itself, this is a process of dismantling them. Coinciding with this decolonizing and unlearning are processes of self-learning and co-learning. In other words, how do we actually connect with one another or even reconnect with ourselves, our spirits, our emotions, our experiences (particularly), and our expressions? This form of connection and reconnection can ultimately enable us to generate other kinds of possibilities for learning and knowing and doing.
In Shikshantar, one distinction we often discuss is the difference between implementation and co-creation. A lot of the work in education has been around implementation. Somebody comes up with an idea, typically from somewhere in the US or Europe, and then we in the South all work very hard to implement it, to make sure it comes out just right, just as planned. But in the role of the implementer, you are essentially a slave; that is, you are a mental slave, and sometimes even a physical slave. And this role cannot really do much to generate other kinds of ways of learning and living, or critiques of the larger system. So at Shikshantar, we focus more on a process of co-creation. Co-creating means engaging lots of people, of various ages, various backgrounds, various kinds of interests, and letting them together unfold a process, whether it's a learning space, whether it's a kind of media, whether it's a dialogue… There has to be quite a bit of patience, and there has to be time. Which means there also has to be the absence of planning and control, because co-creation really depends upon an organic unfolding of ideas and experiences. It can't be dictated according to a certain time constraint, or a certain funding constraint, or certain performance goals, or all of the things that characterize development and education today.
I'm just going to share a couple of examples of some of the things we've done in Shikshantar, to give you a sense of where else we can go with the Multiversity. There are some African students in India, in contact with us, who are preparing this publication called The Counter Renaissance. You may know, there is a plan right now in Africa called 'the African Renaissance,' which is being pushed by elites in South Africa, as well as various technology corporations and development agencies. Some of our African friends, who have been interacting with us, unlearning and trying to question the model of development, decided to share their own experiences and ideas, and the ideas and experiences of other African intellectuals, poets, activists, etc., to counter and expose this Renaissance and recover other, Africa-based ways of living and learning. They are trying to do this through writing and by creating their own media. This is one example.
Another example is our work
with Mewari, which is the language of Udaipur and the region around Udaipur,
called Mewar. This work is sort of related to local media, but it is also related
to language and to the significance of people's own learning experiences and
expressions, especially storytelling. This book, Kani Ke Re Kagla, is a collection
of Mewari stories, and it has been shared in Udaipur and surrounding villages.
Though we have only printed 1,000 copies of it, it has been going around from
home to home and has reached an estimated 5,000 homes. From what we understand,
it has actually helped to revitalize the local tradition of sharing stories,
which has been under attack and on the verge of extinction, because of schooling
and television, and also because of an economic structure which prioritizes
Hindi and English. Elders and adults in Mewar are beginning to share some of
their stories with their children again; families, grandparents, are sharing
stories again. People are also trying to write stories in Mewari. So this is
one example of regenerating learning through local language.
One important thing about this is that we have not tried to standardize Mewari
in this process. Instead, people write in various forms of Mewari. They use
different words for the same object, or different sounds for the same word,
but we have not tried to 'correct' peoples' language. The idea is that you should
be able to express yourself as you like.
Sharing stories has branched out into sharing songs as well. Mewar is also very famous for its proverbs (it's the best translation I've come up with in English), and these too are being shared through local media. The work is centred around how we generate, share and grow more these oral traditions, and link them together, because there is tremendous amounts of wisdom in these stories, proverbs, songs, etc
There are a couple of other research series that I won't really get into right now. But I want to talk briefly about a process in Udaipur called 'Udaipur as a Learning City', which we are very heavily engaged in, which is attempting to do many things at once. Our work with Mewari is part of it, as are different kinds of unlearning workshops with children, with youth, inter-generational workshops with adults and seniors, and even with teachers, if and when they are interested. Udaipur as a Learning City also involves different kinds of community media and community discussions. For instance, recently, children from the Narmada valley had been on a 'Jeevan Yatra' ('life trip'), visiting from city to city, to share what was happening in the Narmada valley. They came to Udaipur, and we hosted them. They held discussions with various citizens of Udaipur, in which different people prepared their own reflections on their experiences, and on Narmada-like issues in Udaipur - for example, on the kinds of crises we are facing vis-à-vis the marble industry or tourism. So the community discussion involved making a connection to the struggles happening because of Development in different parts of the country, by also making a connection back to Udaipur, and to the kinds of lives city people are living. It involved understanding how cities contribute to and experience this kind of crisis.
The last thing I shall share is our work of collecting young people's unlearning stories, their stories of resistance. A lot of young people out there are not happy with the system; they are not satisfied; they don't want to go into it. They are standing on the fringe, and yet they don't see any other options. Therefore, we decided to collect and share with them the stories of different people who made choices, who have found or created other options. These stories show how such people began to understand the system, how they began to de-link themselves from it, how they began to question it, what kinds of processes they are currently engaged in, how are they helping to further unlearning processes for other people, and how they are working to create a more harmonious existence, a more ecologically balanced life, a meaningful life, a fuller life. The process - of sharing one's story, one's experiences - has been wonderful, and the sheer diversity of experiences that people have had, to question and challenge these systems, has been remarkable. We're hoping to begin to disseminate those soon. Right now, we're working in two languages, English and Hindi. We're seeing how it goes and hopefully will extend this self-reflective process further.
PAWAN GUPTA:
I will concentrate more on what can be done rather than what went wrong but let me first start with what we feel is essentially wrong with our education system and I think that basically what it has done is that it has crushed our self esteem and closely related to that is self confidence which come from within and not by comparing myself to the other, what in Hindi we call as "Sapeksh Atmavishwas" or "Nirpeksh Atmavishwas". I am talking about Nirpeksh Atmavishwas, self confidence, which really comes from within. It has crushed that and it has reduced the spaces of solidarity.
Now the problem is how do we restore the self-confidence, the self esteem, how do we find the spaces of solidarity once again.
In the last twelve years since we started doing this work in education, I have been trying to meet various people especially those who are doing things differently. In our tradition, we say that education, is divided into two broad spheres: one is called the para and one the apara. Now that in easy terms would be para we have defined as that which we understand and then we do. That education which helps us to understand and then from that understanding stems our behaviour.
The other is the apara that is the skills mode, we keep on doing and the more we do the more we learn. And the present education confines itself by and large to this mode where we keep on doing and by doing like I'm speaking to you and maybe if I speak ten times then I speak better.
Our present education system does not at all or largely touch the other side. The way we understand has been taken over by the system. I mean we have been told that there is that object that we have to understand which is out there and I am the one who is understanding it. The reality lies only in the object. And so my education tells me, shows me different ways of understanding that object in exactly the same way. All of us have to understand it in exactly the same and till we come to that understanding, we are uneducated. So that's how the control begins. The reality, it has been told lies entirely in the object that is seen.
But again in our tradition we have a third thing called the dhrishti. In English, the closest translation that I know of is perception. Now in this traditional understanding we say that there is the object, I am the observer and I always understand through the dhrishti. So my reality is the reality that lies in the object plus the dhrishti, these two, combined, makes my observation. And that is always there. The only difference is that sometimes you are aware of the dhrishti, of the perception, sometimes you are not. You assume that it's not there and that's what our education keeps on doing, science keeps on doing. When the entire emphasis is on understanding the object, which if I have to understand the object, the reality is multidimensional, but when I am told the reality only lies in the object in the way education is telling you, the multidimensional character of reality get reduced to a few dimensions which are shown by the text books, etc, there are various means to do that, so we end up seeing only that which is in the interest of the systems that be.
The assumption behind the act of doing is that we will derive some kind of happiness. It's not maybe at the conscious level but it is there somewhere. What the modern systems have done is that they have defined certain objects as if they will give us that happiness. So in a way in a restrictive sense, certain means have been projected as if they are the objects. Object is happiness but then the means have replaced the objects by saying if you acquire this knowledge or that object, then you will become happy so, in a way, the object has been completely side-lined. This is again a way of control, the market basically runs on this.
We did some research a few years ago on what people feel about education, how do they see education and we asked them broadly two questions. One was: "Are you going to send your children to school?" and by and large everyone from rural to urban areas said: "Yes, we want to send our children to school." There were very few who said we don't want to send our children to school.
When we asked them what is a good school according to you, they gave us broadly the same picture as it exists today in India. I mean a person from an urban, high income group would draw a public school picture, a person in the rural area will draw a slightly different kind of a picture, but by and large it was the same thing which is going on but when we asked the same thing in a different way, that is, "are you happy with the products of this education system?" most of them said no, we are not happy. In the rural areas, they used a word barbadh ho gaye. Barbadh in English means that they've been ruined and when we asked the same question in the urban areas they said that our children have become bigad gaye, that means that they've been spoilt by the education system. So they are not happy with the out come, yet they all want to send their children to school.
This kind of a conflict was there everywhere and when we analyzed it in this frame, we felt that the present system by telling us that the reality is out there, is moulding our beliefs in a very restrictive fashion. And therefore we tend to believe that schools are good and we cannot do without schools. But we cannot help the experiences, the experiences are multidimensional, so the experience always mismatches the reality as it is being shown as reality. So this kind of a mis-match between experience and the beliefs that have been created was there everywhere.
Now, what we have been trying to do in SIDH especially in the last four or five years, is to take cognisance of the fact that there is a dhrishti all the time with us. And when we take cognisance of this fact, my reality is a created reality. Therefore I become an active player in this whole process of creation. I am no longer a passive observer, a kind of a part in the whole machine of development where I have to only play a certain role that has been defined by the others for me, but I can also change the reality according to my own understanding.
We do a lot of questioning, we do a lot of introspection, we do a lot of self reflection and I think to some extent we have succeeded.
YUSUF PROGLER:
This is an ideal time in history to be talking about education. There is a global argument going on now about education and this is an important time to interject new voices. I think that the educational system that we are all talking about is basically a western educational system that came to us through colonization in different times and places. The uniformity of this system is astounding, from India, to where I am now in the Arab world, to the United States, it's uniform but at the same time there's an uncertainty about the future of that uniform system.
Sometimes this system is called 'factory schooling.' Factory schooling was designed to produce factory workers. It thrives on fear, boredom and obedience, but now people are saying that factory schools are outdated, that we need something for a 'post-industrial society.' So now schools, under the rubric of being 'reformed,' are adopting the ideology of consumerism so they are replacing fear and boredom with fun and games and they are replacing obedience with forms of disobedience, with the commodification of transgression as an educational act. Within this movement, there is a wedge being driven between the factory schooling system that we all know and love or hate and this new consumer oriented educational system, and no one is quite sure what the result will be.
My question is, why do we continue to follow these fads and trends when they come at us through distant experts, or through people who go to the West for training, when those in the West are unsure of themselves right now. But the West, which really gave us these things that we are trying to undo, is unsure of itself. And it's trying to retrench or re-define itself and get everybody else to join in, even though they don't know where they're going. It's an ideal time to take a detour, to slow down, to stop, to ask questions, to come up with something different, so I'm very excited about being around this group of people at this particular time.
In response to this consumerist kind of education we can see schools that are now emphasizing games, fun, toys, balloons, candy bars, cartoon characters, all in effort to do something about the excruciating boredom that the factory system foisted off on children for a century.
But now people feeling that kids aren't learning anything with fun and games so now there's an attempt to say, 'wait a minute, lets' go back to the factory system, bring it back in, but this time it will be called the new standards movement.' It's coming out of the United States. OBE - Outcome Based Education -- is getting adopted in places like South Africa, coming from Australia, Aotearoa, the UK, the United States, retrenching the factory system under a new guise called 'outcome based education.' They don't know where they're going, maybe we don't either, but I think we should take this opportunity to build something different, make workable models on the ground like these people are trying to do.
One of the things that has to happen is I think we need a form of adult education or perhaps re-education, because parents are the ones that are sending their children to school, and so we can't just focus on what we are going to do with the kids or what we are going to do with the students. We also have to focus on the people who are actually seeing that educational system as somehow useful or valuable and in the absence of something else on the ground, they are going to opt into it so there needs to be a form of 'back to school' for everybody. We need some kind of re-education program for those of us who thought that we finished school.
Another thing that has to happen is we need to broaden the discussion beyond curriculum, because a lot of the discussions on education focus on what to learn, curriculum. I think this falls short, I think that there are two key areas that we need to discuss when designing a new model of education. What's the relationship between education and vocation, or work, or something that you are going to do with your education. Do we still need to define education as book learning or as training for middle-level management, bureaucratic positions like the old colonial system, or can we link education as a concept to things besides that old outcome, becoming a factory worker or middle-level manager of sorts, or some kind of technocrat. So what is really the relationship between, let's say, education and vocation?
With vocation, there's good work and there's bad jobs; the factory system largely trained people for bad jobs. Can we design an educational system or a model, or a paradigm that is going to centralize the idea of good work as opposed to preparing people for bad jobs? The second thing, other than curriculum, that needs to be focused on is what values does the educational system, the concept of education, the paradigm, whatever you want to call it, what values does it centralize? I think that we need to focus on values, not just cultural values but also things like an environmental ethic. Somebody once said that all education is environmental education. What they mean by that is that one way or another, you're learning how to relate to your environment through the schooling that you obtain. Even if you don't know it, it's teaching you a way to relate to your environment and it's largely a destructive way. It's the Cartesian, Baconian, materialistic, competitive, consumerist way that modernity has trained us to relate to our natural environment, something to be killed, used, exploited, but without saying it that way. Instead, we say that it's progress, it's development, it's all this other stuff. So can we centralize an environmental ethic as part of the value system at the centre of a new program of education?
The third thing that I think has to be thought about is what do we do with the existing system? Do we work within the system or do we work without the system? I think that probably both have to happen. Within the system, there are some interesting things happening along the lines of interdisciplinary education, trying to break the compartmentalization of knowledge and recombining it into different ways, breaking this sort of hegemonic grip of the disciplines on knowledge construction and recombining them. We can call this interdisciplinary education. I think that's a good place for those of us that are working within the system. We should be emphasizing that as a subversion of the compartmentalization of knowledge because interdisciplinarity is something that's to a certain extent still accepted in the academy.
The second area to subvert, if you will, is to rejuvenate or salvage what's sometimes called in the West the 'ethnic studies' programmes, what might more recently be called studies of indigenous knowledge, not as a little sort of decorative fluff that they put in departments but something that is centralized in an academic institution, the idea of 'ethnic studies' is using a kind of 1960's jargon but some now call it 'indigenous knowledge.' Make more places for that in the institutions that we are in, as a subversive tactic within the system.
And that's related to the third area, to work within the institutions and bring people into our institutions who have their validity from outside of the institutions. Don't reproduce the system by only inviting other professors as invited scholars or as consultants or whatever, but bring people who have their validity from somewhere outside of the educational system.
These are some ideas for working in the system of institutionalized education. As far as working outside of that system, I am more at a loss here because I'm still institutionalized myself. But I've seen some interesting things happening. In New York City, where I have worked for a number of years, they have this thing called 'City-as-School', where junior high to high school age students spend only one or two days a week in the traditional school setting, where they do some reading/writing/arithmetic kinds of things, but the other three or four days they are out in the city, because the city is the school and they work in community service, they work in apprenticeships, they do research projects, they do work in soup kitchens, public service, all sorts of different things as a way to explore life, to explore vocation, to try to find who you are and where you fit into the world. And they have one or two days a week where they're doing traditional school stuff, book work or what not, stemming from those experiences.
So that's something I thought was really fascinating and interesting. City-as-School, which began in New York City, and which can work in different models, but the idea is a sound idea, spending time outside the traditional setting but keeping the link to what we might call spaces of solidarity, reclaiming those existing collective spaces called 'schools' and connecting them to life. In other words, we might not want to completely destroy the institutional solidarity that can happen from something called schools and that's what this City-as-School thing is doing, they're taking away a good part of the time that students spend in school but they are keeping some of the benefits of having an institution with infrastructure and things of that sort. That's one thing I've seen. This is the idea of having less school and more time for living or learning to live life, and learning to relate to your community.
And we've got to do something about the age segregation of public schooling. I think that's a barbarism in human history. What happened to intergenerational communication? Is there a place in our project for what we might want to call intergenerational communication? Instead of lumping all the seven year olds together, and giving them a certificate so they can move on to the eight year old slot or whatever, can we mix that up somehow? I think that traditional wisdom has always been passed on as a form of intergenerational communication and I think we need to bring that back.
DISCUSSION:
CLAUDE: I'd like to ask a question regarding the issue of certification. The whole of education today has degenerated into certification and how much do we achieve if we disassociate and disconnect certification from education. How much will we succeed? Are there any efforts in this?
YUSUF: That's a tough one, do you want to dump the whole thing right away or not? I don't know. That's why I'm saying if you work in the system we need to try to subvert that system. If people are still going to pursue PhDs, lets try to create PhDs in areas that don't exist now, at least as a way to break the model of disciplinarity while still keeping in mind the insecurity that we have of working without certification.
All traditional educational
systems have some way to certify people when they've learned something but it's
the western way that we've all adopted, the way in which you get assigned a
rank. There's a piece of paper and it's formalized and it's depersonalised,
but I mean, think about it, if you're in a craft guild kind of thing, you get
certified to some extent by being able to produce the craft or the art that
the elders who taught that to you can do well. In religious colleges in the
Islamic world they have ways of certifying people but it's more linked to individual
communication between people than it is to abstract degrees.
Now the hard thing about this is that the western system travels very well right
now. That was their real achievement in this, that they give you a piece of
paper and then they create a global system that basically accepts that piece
of paper wherever you go. And that's going to be a tough one to crack. Without
another system that people can step into and function somehow I don't really
know if we want to abandon that right away. I am sort of on the fence on that
one
CLAUDE: Take computer education, not computer education in terms of me going to a computer institute and getting a degree. But you take the way people have learnt to operate computers today. You take the way mothers and grandmothers and all sorts of people are sitting today with computers and they've mastered it and people who use manuals, none of them are certified. The only guys who are certified are those who go in for software programming and so on but the entire computer education that has been going on all over the world if you talk about the general public, the ability to handle a computer and ordinary computer programs and the self learning that is going on with no certification involved. How did that happen?
SHILPA: I would say that I disagree with Yusuf, that I am not on the fence at all about this. I don't think that there is much use for maintaining a certification program in the Multiversity, because 1) whenever you have it in front of you, it reduces everything you do to obtaining the certificate. So opportunities for creativity, opportunities for being innovative, for thinking outside of that system, get greatly reduced. This certification question is really a question about evaluation, which I think is what you are getting at. And then the question becomes, who gets to evaluate who? and why? and on what grounds?
When we say we want evaluation, I don't think that it's a problem in and of itself. Of course, there has to be some space for self-evaluation, peer evaluations, and for different kinds of people, who are engaged in the process, to discuss the what kind of work you in the Multiversity are doing. As members of the Multiversity, we can see if our work actually meets the kinds of standards we've decided to set up as a collective community. I think of it as something like the standards of a community of craftsmen or artisans. There, you are evaluated quite quickly, by whether or not people like your products. Do they think you are preparing something worthwhile or not?
In academia, the problem is there is little scope for anyone, outside of the boundaries of that discipline, to evaluate one's work. So many people can produce whatever they want, and it doesn't matter whether anybody likes it or not, because there is still this boundary, this strange kind of value of 'knowledge for knowledge's sake' - whatever that means. In academia, all one has to say is, "I am contributing to the body of human knowledge," as opposed to saying, "What I do has value in relationship with people, and in connection to communities or with contexts." The question again is, who gets to evaluate? For whom? And for what?
I think that the certification question can be very easily bypassed in many ways. For example, we could say that it is all nonsense and make it so. We say that if you have to certify one thing, then you should just certify everything, which then degrades the value of certification. Or, you could take another stance and say, "I should be judged by the value of my work and my contribution, but there are many people to judge it." Portfolios are one approach that has emerged, in which people share their writing with other people, who give feedback, which goes into their portfolio. These 'evaluators' are usually peers and/or non-experts, who do not belong to a central agency. There is also self-assessment, which often is even more valuable, because people themselves must cultivate self-discipline and a sense of value.
Today, for example, resumes or skills are given much more value than degrees in some situations. That is, if you can demonstrate how you can use this particular tool, say, a computer, or if you can demonstrate that you have experience working in these different ways, or you know how to engage with these different kinds of people, or you've done this kind of writing - in many fields, that actually has more value than a degree. So I'm not on the fence, because I think supporting a certification process will actually end up undermining the other goals of self-motivation, self-discipline, creativity and regeneration, because it will once again bind us to control by this external authority.
MAKARAND: I think that the real issue is if we can market this idea of doing away with certification. As I see it, there are two types of people that we're dealing with: one kind, who has the initiative or who has the creativity or who has the gumption to survive no matter what, so I don't think we need to deal with that. They break through the system, the system can't break them in, they can't destroy them, they are always rebels, they are transgressing and somehow they survive and sometimes they are crushed also by the system. We know so many creative people who become alcoholics and die. This is a typical sort of story.
But what about the normal kind of person who goes to the system in order to get a job at the end of it, what do you do with that person and it seems to me that without creative alternatives to the system, if you just throw out certification, then you're not really giving people the wherewithal to build their lives.
Now I know of only two experiments where they've tried to build alternative systems. One is Gustavo Esteva who hasn't come here. I had a long chat with him and what they have done is in that particular community, they've empowered people who have gone for this alternative certification. So suppose you've got somebody who wants to become, say, a car mechanic, what Esteva does is he gives that person a kind of curriculum which is really going to help that person, not give them books to read or things that are not going to help them fix a car. And then they go and do an apprenticeship with an actual garage at the end of which this person becomes a very competent mechanic and knows how to fix all the cars that are running in that particular society and this alternate University gives this person a certification saying that this person is now a qualified mechanic at the end of which he can go and get a job in that community to fix cars, rather than how we do it today where the person goes off to an ITI or some other place and then they get some kind of certificate which is totally useless when it comes to fixing cars and they are back on the streets as it were. So that's one system.
The other system I know of where they have done this is in this swadhyaya system where in that tathvagyan vidhyapeeth where they only take people who have ten acres of land, so the guy is not going to starve. And then they decide not to give the person a degree because if he/she gets a degree they'll go to the city and try to become a clerk or do something else. So they say, no degrees, we make you unemployable in the mainstream so you have to go back to your farm, then they call it rishi krishi, they give them an alternate curriculum. But that seems to work because these people are not anxious to get jobs, they know they have a farm to go back to, they want to mind the farms and then they get a kind of value oriented education with traditions and outlook and world views and that sort of thing and then they also get a so called technical education which will help them become better farmers at the end of the day.
But other than that, what else we can do I'm not sure. I mean whether you do away with certification, and then what happens to these people whom you say well certification is no good and then they go out and they have no jobs. So I'm not sure whether we can say, ok, do away with it, I mean, yes as an idea, it's an illusion as you said, but what do you place instead of it, I think that's what is important and for multiversity. Suppose we say that this person in addition to having gone to JNU or wherever is also certified by multiversity or has gone through the multiversity program. What does that mean? Or if somebody in this world goes out and says, I've got a degree from IIT or I don't have a degree from IIT or wherever but I have this multiversity thing - certificate, diploma, whatever you want to call it, what does that actually mean, what can that translate into? This is for me a crucial question.
SAILEN: Unless this system can produce people who are so confident that they can do well anywhere. But can you produce batches of students like that
SHILPA: I think that if we get into the same mind frame, that we are going to have one system for everyone, then I think we've already defeated the purpose of the Multiversity. Because then you demand standardization, you demand certification, you demand an external authority, you demand a market economy that those graduates are going to feed into. So if we're talking about that, then I think there are a few different conversations going on at once. If you're thinking about mass-produced graduates for a mass economy, then you have to fall into that trap of certification. That's exactly the trap it created for itself, to make it indispensable. So if you're going to buy into the paradigm of the techno-industrial economy, then yes, you need certification.
If we're questioning that paradigm - which I think is part of the purpose of this process - then I think we have to be able to question not only certification, but even this idea that some people are intelligent and some are not, some people are capable and some people are not, some people have potential and some people don't. We have to be willing to question something that is highly indoctrinated in us, the belief in IQ. That too is based on the same kind of nonsense.
ASHIS: I would like to point out in the case of India that according to available data roughly 70% of Indians are engaged in agronomy of various forms which does not require certification. Another 18-20% are involved in artisan crafts which do not require certification. Three to four percent do not do anything even in the traditional system. So I would suggest that if 95% of India can do this without this bloody certification, we should have some space for surviving without certification too. So let's keep both options open.