Help Create A Revolution In Education

Even though the children of Village Hurlung are residents of the city of Jamshedpur, none of them had visited the Tata Steel Zoo in the city. Rural parents, unlike the uraban ones, do not take children for an outing. Thus their world is the village they grow up in.

Hurlung village is not located deeply in the interior. It just borders the town, and yet none of the children ever went to the zoo. So when their teacher, Shilkha decided to take them for a picnic to the zoo, they were are beamng with excitement.

The children were accompoanied by their other teachers Priyanka, Sunita and Jasomati. Handling a pack of 30 kindergarten children is like taking a zoo along with you :-)

In an age where man has lost contact with nature, the zoo serves as a medium to conect with animals of the wild. Even as an adult of 42 years, the zoo always holds an interest for me. Seeing different life forms sharing planet earth alongside us, albeit in very different ways, always sparks a wonder and mystery for creation.

Industrialization has made man's consciousness akin to a machine where the intellect reigns supreme. The intellect with its penchant for classifying, naming and acquiring reduces all life to objects, either to be acquired or put at a distance. When man lived in the wilds, hearing the chirping of birds, the calls of cows, goats and roosters, bathing in the ponds and rivers, ploughing the fields with bullocks, he shared an unameable kinship with all creation. There was a sense of sacredness for life. Mystery, rather than knowing and knowledge was the beat of his exisence.

True to man's march towards industrialization, education in today's world has come to prize the intellect and it's obsession with knowledge. Children today can calculate the distance bewteen the earth and the moon through equations of physics. They can dissect flowers and name their parts. They can define the chemical and physical properties of water. And we fawn over all this knowledge and the control it gives us over nature.

But education does not teach a child to look at the splendour of the crescent moon, the miracle of colours exploding in the flowers, the joy of feeling the river water trickling under your feet. These do not make a child successful in the world. They do not help him get a job and earn any status, reputation or standing in society. For unlike knowledge, these feelings cannot be measured, weighed on scales and prized. Like knowledge and certificates, these cannot be bought and sold on the market.

So a visit to the zoo was an occasion for children to become one with the wildreness, to the vast immeasurable mystery of creation, even if it wwas for a few moments. The claws of modern civilization would claim them back again. Hopefully this chance encounter with the simulated wild would linger in their consciousness and perhaps one of them would grow up and have the intelligence to turn his back to this civilaztion and live the mystery of the immeasurable.