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Democratizing Learning English Language and Literature in India

Horace's dictum was that poetry should “delight and instruct.” If the word 'poetry' is replaced by the word' education', nothing would be lost. Education has to delight and instruction that comes through delight stays with the instructor and the instructed. Eden, which means “delight” and Paradise, was the unlikely place where Instructor and instructed first met in the unlikely time of twilit evenings for delight and instruction, proving that Life can be Paradise when it is a constant process of education where delight and instruction revolve around each other and are one in a continuous harmony that forms a circle. The delight that mastery of anything gives leads to the desire for more instruction, till gradually the mediator of instruction recedes into the background so that the ‘active receptacle’ can become an adept and even a new mediator in his turn, if so inclined.

What should concern prospective ‘professional’ educators, teachers, facilitators and theorists is, however, not just the definitions and the points of origin or the aims of education, but the process itself. It is constantly undergoing change and therefore needs to be monitored because it is the part of education that consequently has the least light cast upon it from the detached and meta-cognitive perspective of thinkers and practitioners who critique and analyze education. No amount of attention paid to the process of education can be too little if education is to constantly improve.

Jane Sahi, in the chapter “ Correlation as a Pattern for Sustainable Growth” in her book Education & Peace, borrows from Gandhi his metaphor for education; something Gandhi took from Nature, of plants being nurtured by a loving gardener. Taking a leaf from Jane’s book, the metaphor for me concerning teaching& learning lies in the parable of the Sower and the Seed in the Gospel of Luke (ch.8:v.4-15) with three or four of its possible explications connecting it to the topic at hand.

If it is looked at as a parable about the teaching –learning process, it offers us a rich mine of pedagogical and practical possibilities. Apart from the explicit metaphors of farmer-seed-ground(singular/plural) and guru(spiritual preceptor)- gnana(wisdom) –shishya (spiritual adept){singular/plural} three other implicit metaphors are man- seed-woman, teacher-vidya-student(s) and last, but not least, the triad of <> This last reading where the parable is seen as a metaphor for inwardness wherein a mature learner should apply it to himself as a student and use it as a checklist to see if he has gone past the first three stages of learning and gone on to the fourth one, is the most exciting of the hermeneutical options available to the reader. But in practice, it is an arduous task possible only for students who have the patience and application of an archer like Ekalavya.

The interesting thing about the three metaphors I have touched upon here briefly; the primal Edenic situation, the Gandhian gardener with his cherished, well nurtured plants and the New Testament farmer and his field is that all of them speak of education indirectly but per se, in its real sense and context which is real life.

These metaphors do not use the monstrously structured approach and jargon that schools and universities adopt that has arisen out of the latter’s masses –oriented struggle to pass on education. These three metaphors overthrow the ‘banking theory of education’ that Paulo Freire strongly objected against in his memorable Pedagogy of the Oppressed and they also ‘deschool’ society as Ivan Ilyich wanted to because the context is widened to include everything around you and the teachers in these situations have to work hand in hand with the benign natural forces around them, with the full co-operation of the students.

Adam was innocent and WANTED wisdom, the plant has IN IT “a force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and the field will yield good fruit only if it is like “a good heart that has prepared itself “ for the seed. This is holistic education at its best where there is a mellifluous melting together of content, context, mediation, mediator and the mediated. It is a-contextual learning in that the mediator needs the skill, knowledge, understanding, discernment and wisdom to decipher the student’s real needs and act/react with ‘auchithya; scientifically, creating the contexts suitable for him in which he can learn.Such behaviour on the part of the mediator does not automatically ensure success, because the mediated has to also actively participate in creating the conducive atmosphere to growth in which he creates and maximizes his learning potential to its zenith. What consequently takes place is not transference from one vessel to the other but collaborative discovery – slanted and inventive.

Anita Rampal in her essay “School Science in Search of a Democratic Order?” (1997) addresses the issues of the present as a pragmatic educationist in the forefront of the battle to make education a matter of quality for the students of the rural poor in India in the twenty-first century. Her success lies in the precision with which she writes of many matters, making the essay a catch-all for an amazing number of ideas so that it easily transcends its aim as given in the title, to include facilitators of the non-scientific community like me who teach the urban rich. She ends her essay with a definition of constructivism; one of the parts of the essay that helps me tackle the question of how to adapt and apply her insights to my present world of teaching- learning.

In a nutshell, she states that science as it is taught today in the West and consequently in India, is monolithic in its definition, methodology and aim. It encourages elitism in its search for the ‘genius’ scientist rather than have the ability to make itself useful and understandable to all the members of a democracy in sharp contrast to alternate versions of science like that of Rev. Dawes’s “science of common things” that attempted to give prominence to applied sciences and took into consideration the cultural context of the labouring classes in a genuine effort to make the children of the poor into street-smart scientists. The Vigyan Shikshan Karyakram that brings to the financially and economically lower rungs of a section of Indian society the kind of pedagogy usually available only to the rich in private, international, national and public schools in urban centres, a pedagogy that is student-friendly and of modest aims and hence able to meet its requirements, besides being low-cost in its technological inputs and eco-efficient , goes against this elitist notion of pure science.

How does Ms Rampal’s essay speak to teachers who come from disciplines other than the science subjects? Her points can be reasonably replaced, for instance, by someone like me, thus:

1. English literature is taught in India as if it is the centre whereas the centres of attention should be weltliteratur, national literature and regional or local literature. The texts could be in translation. English literature would naturally come in if the medium of instruction is English but not at the expense of the considerable wealth of other literatures.
2. Englishes and the polymorphous literatures in English, still very much a necessity because of the fact that in the discourses of power and technology all exchanges are made in ‘English’, need to be taught in a student-friendly manner. Japanese texts are a good example of how English could be taught in a very different way from the methodology used in India whereby the child’s multilingual abilities are fostered creatively instead of him being forced to opt for excellence in one target language alone, whether it be the mother tongue or a national language or English or some other language.
3. The approach taken towards the teaching of language should not aim merely at theoretical, critical and analytical returns but creative, literary and vocationally useful output. Reading a poem that ends in the student writing his own ‘good’ poem should be rated, to give just one example, equal to its capable exegesis.
4. Refining the skills of painstaking reading, writing, thinking, speaking, (re-)presenting, communicating, expressing, listening , criticizing and analyzing being integral to any discipline , language teaching and literature appreciation holds a very important place in any curriculum. A more radical approach than Ms Rampal’s would be actual democratization that would include students too in choosing the syllabus and textbooks, teaching, documentation, self and peer-assessment etc.

For all this to be possible one needs to find the golden mean between the realist and the constructivist positions mentioned by Rampal. “….the realist viewpoint …perceives reality as a stable configuration of objective facts , open to the identical inspection of all. Constructivism , on the other hand, is the belief that reality is personally negotiated so that each enquirer perceives a world depending on her (or his) preconceptions and where agreement , which constitutes factual knowledge, is a specific collective negotiation, with an often limited temporal validity. “(Rampal 255). The constructivist definition given by Rampal is of course not hers, but borrowed from cognitive psychologists like Jean Piaget, but she deserves notice in that she states it succinctly.

The Realist Position.

I teach a syllabus with prescribed textbooks and a written exam the students have to take at the end of the year, by which their "performance" will be assessed. At the parent-teacher conferences and some of the staff meetings and through feedback I have received from some of the more voluble students, I have come to realise that for most parents, for the majority of (Western/national) universities and for ninety-nine percent of the students what "really" matters is grades. There is also a "vast" syllabus to "finish/off" with only limited time to do it in. Added to these issues is the cumbersome paperwork connected to the Western idea of intricate documentation which has its plus and minus points, if looked at objectively. These are my job’s constraints. I can also call them, if I so wish, factors securing/offering security to the students, teachers, parents and school managements..
As for the children themselves, while the constraints irk them they also impart a certain sense of safety to them because of their strongly felt need for a "clear" structure. Can constructivism provide the balance? One would have to give a double-edged answer; yes and no. Two schools of thought ; one that believes in subverting the system gradually and the other that thinks of just getting rid of it lock, stock and barrel and ushering in the new in a revolutionary coup d'etat are both theories that yield mixed and not entirely satisfactory results in actual application. Facilitators like me who have moved through three positions, including the traditionalist one, (keep things as they are and make them function to peak levels in efficiency-) will understand what is meant. Another school of thought, meanwhile, opines "give the students what they want". There is a mélange or a Babel in theorizing on pedagogy, nowadays!

The absence of a cut and dried solution is “our” strength. As long as reflection and review goes on of the entire pedagogical process and things are in a flux there will be a vibrancy to our attempts to better quality education. It will ensure that we see ourselves as learners first and foremost and as facilitators second rather than as all-knowing teachers or “edu-actors”, always keeping us on our toes.

Solutions That Raise More Questions Than Answers.

When we think of major educators and thinkers India has had in the recent past like Gandhi with his metaphor of the gardener and the plant, Nehru (the three language formula), B.R. Ambedkar (abolition of caste inequality), Rabindranath Tagore (humanism) and J. Krishnamurti (choiceless awareness) and of the democratization of education , an issue that was felt to be of the utmost importance by all the afore-mentioned giants, one also thinks of the topic at the personalized level of one's own professional practice. It seems obvious that one has to work on two fronts. One front has to be broad, group activity that would include revamping the curriculum and the syllabus including the textbooks. The other front would be narrow, considering how to apply these things at the miniscule levels of giving attention to individual students and the varied need-based groups that we call 'classes' at present.
As far as English - an international link language that is also one of the nation's own languages (our window to the world, as Nehru called it) - is concerned, its democratization in the curriculum would have to include certain new drives in the latter’s framing. The curriculum being too vast a topic to handle here, I shall concern myself more with the syllabus.
Suggestions could be listed thus: a) The students should be consulted as to what they think their needs are and then drafts can go into the written form of the syllabus being prepared.
b) The syllabus must offer freedom to the teacher to teach in more than one language if it fetches results. This applies especially to ESL . This would be an option and not a must.
c) The rewriting of textbooks that such directives would result in must be rigorously tested for quality and their ability to interest the learners.
d) Where literature is concerned, the choice of texts must include international works of repute - in translation -, works from Britain in English, works from another English like American , works from IWE, works from Indian literature and local/regional literatures – (in translation or English.)
e) Another option would be choosing short pieces making the coursework light for the students, but taking into consideration different genres and forms and including different ideologies and cultures. A syllabus like this would teach some forms/types of poetry, a short story, a personal essay , a drama - preferably, a short one-act play-, a novelette and an essay (dealing with critical theory, theory or criticism) to be taught over a period of two years. The learning objectives would be limited to sound thinking, speaking, presenting, listening, writing and ‘reading’ practices by which I mean advanced literary and semantic ‘appreciation’ skills.
f.) Assessment would be entirely revamped. While grades and marks would need to be retained, perhaps, for the sake of the "system" the emphasis would be on effective thinking skills, creativity, innovativeness, effort , presenting, listening and writing skills and attainments collectively. Critical analysis would be as important as producing creative output, with both being weighted equally. Getting published in reputed ‘journals’ would fetch extra marks.
g.) The output of another “new” language-oriented paper besides the already existing papers on language and literature would be aimed at vocational use somewhere down the line so that teaching skills like writing CV's by introducing a subject called “Functional or Communicative English” would be a must. This paper would take into account new skills like translation, medical, legal and other kinds of transcription, technical writing, business English, creative writing, media savvy presentations, news reading, copy writing, script writing, reporting for journalisms –on radio, TV, film, print, web - editing, making publisher's choices, criticism, reviewing, research and scholarship, introducing teaching at school and college levels and other job-oriented vectors of language use.
Practical Application.

The real challenge for the facilitator is in the "class". It is possible to come to an assessment of a student which is accurate and easy to help him in such a way that he doesn't slip back but true democratization would include the satisfying result that each student actually improves in his skills over the period of time that he works with you. This is the real challenge. He should not go away feeling that he was taught well but, more important, there should be a clear difference brought about in his ability to learn and do. His potential to be a 'mover' must be tapped and maximized. This is an area fraught with possibilities. I feel the answer definitely lies partly in constructivism. It also lies partly in allowing contemporaneity, by which I mean working with what the student knows of the present and is interested in, and the latest advances of technology adapted innovatively to mesh with the latest teaching techniques. This, along with the radicalization that could be brought in by ensuring greater student participation in "all" the activities the teacher considers his forte at present, is a possible solution.

An example: In my class while teaching poetry I took some students over to the computer lab and showed them a few hypertext poems and hypertext fictions and this set them thinking about the difference in the forms of poetry and fiction when it is 'written' down and 'programmed' in. They became aware, to some extent, of concepts like interactivity, hyperlinks and lexemes and consequently of the complicated changes occurring historically in the two above mentioned forms without my having had to bring in the academic jargon connected with such modifications which might have ended up confusing them, as they are only in the beginning stages where literary theory is concerned.

The democratization of English and the teaching of literature in this beautiful language has, to sum up, to concentrate primarily on the objectives of ensuring that Englishes and the “new” dialects & registers (SMS English, the influence of the keyboard and the use of icons in chat language, Manglish, Hinglish, the polyphonic jargon of literary criticism and theory in English) are encouraged as much as British English and that this is not done at the cost of other languages or of quality in the target language. Literary appreciation has to deal objectively with real-life students and actual situations in a graphic and interesting way so that true democratization takes place whereby all the students are enthused to love languages and their infinite possibilities and go away considering the learning of Language to be a " poetic experience" that ignites their love for the ‘logos’ and the ‘mythos’ of language in a teleological way, as in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, so that the memory of it will be one of progressive instruction and mastery gained through delight as Horace wanted it to be, and as Edenic as life's first learning experiences like breast feeding.
The only peaceful war “we” facilitators need to constantly wage, therefore, is one whereby there is a ceaseless effort to keep closing the gap between our notions of perfection and our consistently and constantly evolving ways of professionalizing our teaching and facilitating practices and strategies. This has to be done while continuing to sound each other out in the process of learning from each other. This may temporarily create the meeting point between real and constructivist teaching.

A Select Bibliography
Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970.
http://www.english-test.net
Illich, Ivan , Deschooling Society, 1971.
Rampal, Anitha, Democracy and Education in India, Radiant Publishers, New Delhi, 1993.
Sahi, Jane , Education and Peace, Other India , 2000
The Book of Genesis, The Bible, New King James Version.
The Gospel of Luke, The Bible, NKJV.
Thomas, Dylan M, 18 Poems, 1934

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