Resourcefulness and self-drive against adversity are 2 key parameters for one to act as an innovator. Common examples could be mothers who are resource constrained in terms of energy, time, money, facilities, and so on, but the love and desire to take care of the family surmounts these challenges. The outcome is an innovative environment that is dynamic and evolving. A similar but rarer example is that of jugaad or bricolage or resourceful engineering, practiced by certain people who are desperate to attain a certain goal but don’t have the conventional resources to do so. The antithesis of this is the comfortable life, devoid of resource challenges and adversities, and hence devoid of opportunities to grow resourcefulness against adversity. Why is this peculiar character important? Does this have a role in the education of a young mind? How is this relevant to life in general?
The strive for a comfortable life is the norm in today’s India. Everyone wishes this for themselves and their loved ones. We want to get into good educational institutions, get good degrees, make good money, and eventually have a good settled comfortable life abundant in material resources and comfort. That is the dream. No one likes discomfort, we hold such innate disgust for discomfort that we wish to remove it from our lives altogether. A person experiencing discomfort is looked down upon someone who either needs help, or pity, or worse it is seen as a punishment for wrongdoings of the past or karma! Most of our culture is focused on helping people in discomfort to transform their environment into bodily and mental comfort, be it the role of technologists or psychiatrists. People who face discomfort on a regular basis are considered as losers, failures, intellectually challenged, less privileged, lower in social strata of all kinds, and so on. Our educational systems and culture focuses on intellectual growth without bodily or mental discomfort in the process. Kids are raised so that they don’t experience discomfort and could rather focus on ‘better’ things.
As we all grow in the overwhelming culture of anti-adversity, are we loosing something crucial here? In this culture, prevalent in the middle class and above, we train ourselves to run away from adversity, to demean it. And in this process we lose the skills needed to engage meaningfully with adversity. Why is this important? For one, life is not so comfy, ask anyone who has lived more than 20-30 years. Adversity is the big big elephant in the small room. Yes, technology helps in a great way cutting out nature’s adversity as well as people’s adversity from our cocooned lives, but nature, people and personal health issues sneak in anyways. Despite the medicines, despite the latest gadgets, we are faced with emotional, mental, physical degeneration and ultimately death. If adversity is the norm, then why aren’t we talking about healthy engagement with it? Why do we always have to bring in a technological, or cultural barrier in between, only to postpone the facing of adversity? Why are we fooling the kids in the name of education?
Our education institutions have become hotbeds of mollycoddling and spoon feeding sub-standard content to uninterested minds. Trust me, I realize I have also been doing that! It’s only when one steps outside and asks the simple fundamental question – what is the actual relevance of education to the life of a student placed in a very localized context? If the only answer is get jobs and do survival business with no relevance to the content of the years of education, then that is a pathetically shameful answer. Every teacher may consider this as a reflection of one’s work. Heck, I didn’t and now I am in considerable pain as to what is education if not helping a kid towards becoming an autonomous, self-driven, adversity tolerant and sensitive human being. And mind you, no amount of simulation of adversities can replace facing real adversity, real challenges. The good thing is life is full of it, only if you can remove comfort from education, a little bit.