Religious Mind with a Secular Outlook

The ultimate purpose of human life is not the mere pursuit of fleeting pleasures and egocentric gratifications but the quest of eternal Truth, which is in fact at the core of all religions. It is in the discovery of this Truth beyond time and space that one can experience a sense of vibrant peace, everlasting joy and ultimate fulfillment.
Life is an indivisible homogeneous whole and in spite of being myriad mortals, we are all manifestations of this single imperishable divine reality. After this revelation as a self-discovery we naturally become affectionate and compassionate to all our fellow beings, even while competing with each other for our survival in this increasingly competitive world. After all, we have no choice but to play the game of life in all earnestness, maintaining a sense of detachment at the same time. One has to be serious in all one’s actions but be ready to accept their results in a non-serious lighthearted mood—no matter how gratifying or mortifying the results are. It may sound like a paradox but this is the secret of happiness, which all seek and so very few come across.
There are no problems in life, only facts and challenges. And challenges are there for our own inner growth, as each one of them ends up teaching us something. Therefore there are no successes and failures in life; everything is a matter of experience. And again, each experience enriches us contributing to our spiritual growth. Life intrinsically and almost cyclically follows the pattern of rain and sunshine, day and night, laughter and tears. This realization gives us tremendous patience and a sense of unflinching optimism. And this is what positive attitude is all about.
There is no virtue greater than humility. This humility cannot be practiced, as it comes from the realization in one’s heart of hearts that in the bigger cosmic scheme of things one is not more than a mere speck. However, this humility is not the denial of self-esteem or self-respect. It is only devoid of all forms of egotism and vanity.
It is perfectly all right for us to seek success and pursue our personal worldly interests. But can it be done without causing harm to others? I cannot harm anyone without harming myself, which is one of the fundamental laws of life. When one lives each day of one’s life with this profound understanding, then adherence to a particular set of values or conformity to a rigid social and religious structure becomes superfluous. In such a state of mind one is deeply religious and yet secular in one’s outlook. Blessed is such a being!
Hareshwar P Singh

Case for low-cost teaching aids

Case for low-cost teaching aids Hareshwar Prasad Singh There is a paradigm shift in classroom pedagogies used by teachers around the world. Conventional teaching-learning methodologies are fast giving way to newer, innovative and efficient pedagogies. Chalk-and-talk though not fully redundant, has become somewhat obsolete and is considered pitiably inadequate in the contemporary educational scene. All over the world teachers are innovating new teaching aids to make teaching-learning processes more interesting and effective. While in the developed industrial nations of the first world pedagogy innovations are centred around capital-intensive newly emergent information communication technologies (ICT), in capital-deficient developing countries growing attention is being accorded to developing low-cost teaching aids. As implied in their nomenclature low-cost teaching aids involve minimal or nil input costs as they are made from household waste and discarded items or from materials readily available in our immediate surroundings and natural environments. Developed and produced on campus, they help institutions become self-reliant and reduce costs of education. Incremental and selective use of low-cost teaching aids makes the process of teaching and learning more varied, interesting and effective. Mary Anne Dasgupta, author of Low-cost, No-cost Teaching Aids (National Book Trust, India), has successfully used low-cost teaching aids in many charitable schools in Kolkata. Likewise Lalit Kishore — a science teaching expert of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan which runs the highly successful 928 Central government sponsored Kendriya Vidyalaya schools — has experimented with a wide variety of low-cost teaching aids while working with a KVS-sponsored project at the Rajghat Besant School, Varanasi in the 1980s. His book Let’s Put Things Together (co-authored with Anwar Zafri) is the result of his experience there. Moreover workshops on the use of economical teaching aids have also been conducted at Eklavya Institute of Teacher Education, Ahmedabad. Another Bhopal-based NGO of the same name — Eklavya — has also done pioneering work to promote the use of low-cost teaching aids in schools. Its first school programme, the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme was started in 1972 and is operational in 16 middle schools of Hoshangabad district, Madhya Pradesh. Additional resource support is provided by Delhi University, TIFR, IITs and several colleges in Madhya Pradesh. Arvind Kumar Gupta, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and currently employed at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics Children’s Science Centre, is perhaps the greatest crusader and champion of low-cost teaching aids. "The Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme in India though inspired by the Nuffield philosophy, had to reinvent all the hardware to suit local conditions. This programme covers over 1,000 schools in villages in Central India. The idea was to critically look at local resources and find possibilities of doing innovative science teaching using local, low-cost, easily accessible material. The Matchstick Mecanno is used successfully to learn geometry and three-dimensional shapes. It also used little bits of cycle valve tubes and matchsticks to make an array of 3D structures. Likewise, a Film Can Balloon Pump was made using a piece of old bicycle tube, two film cans and bits of sticky tape for valves. With this pump children can inflate and pop a balloon. This pump is low cost, fun and exhilarates science learning," writes Gupta in a web article ‘Learning Science through Activities and Toys’ (http://www.iucaa.ernet.in). Low-cost teaching aids can be used in nursery, primary, middle, secondary and senior secondary schools. Of course, the type as well as number of aids to be used in a given subject would vary from one class to another. But broadly speaking, primary and middle school students can be engaged in making simple items with rudimentary materials such as bits of paper, cardboard and thermocole using scissors, glue etc, whereas senior school students could develop teaching aids using metal, wood, plastic, rubber etc. Low-cost teaching aids can be used for supplementary and illustrative education in the sciences as well as the humanities. However, they are most suitable for subjects like science, geography, mathematics and art and crafts. In a resources-starved economy such as India where the masses need to be educated about how to properly dispose household waste and used items and huge piles of garbage and trash is dumped on roadsides and street corners, low-cost teaching aids made from household waste and trash serve a particularly useful purpose. With a bit of creativity and imagination, scraps of metal, wood, plastic, rubber, paper etc can metamorphose into valuable items, which can be used as effective teaching tools. System-wide use of low-cost teaching aids will not only boost teacher/student creativity and involvement, help institutional budgets go a longer way, but also serve to keep our immediate environments clean. (Hareshwar P. Singh is a project leader (teacher training), Federation of Jain Educational Institutes, Pune)

Let Education Shape a Global Mind

What is education in its broadest sense and what is its fullest scope for students in this volatile world? One cannot deny that the basic function of education is to impart the bulk of knowledge to learners and equip them with the skills which are vital for their survival in the contemporary competitive world. Without such educated professionals the ever-widening needs of society and the commercial world cannot be fulfilled. However, this cannot be the only or ultimate purpose of education. A holistic education, especially at school level, must strive to create a new mind which refuses to function in the narrow grooves of racial, nationalistic, linguistic, and sectarian sentiments. Can our education help students cultivate a mind that has a global perspective and is therefore not constrained by the stifling confines of caste, colour and creed considerations? If educational institutions fail to accomplish such a task, then they are merely training and instructing their students rather than educating them in the broader sense of the term.

Some of us with a narrow perspective on education may question the desirability of expanding the frontiers of education to such a lofty and sublime extent. Let us not forget that in the last century mankind went through the trauma of two world wars followed by a long spell of cold war during which we saw the ugliest faces of international diplomacy and murky politics. Equally traumatic and tragic were the regimes of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, proxy war and more recently militancy and terrorism. Where does all this ghastly disorder in the world emanate from? Certainly it is not the uneducated and illiterate simpletons among us who create this chaos in the world. All this mischief is the handiwork of the so-called educated and civilized humans—whether they are statesmen, bureaucrats or scientists. Apparently, man has been able to amass an enormous amount of knowledge about just anything and everything under the sun. Yet, as it turns out, the greater the amount of our knowledge about external things the deeper is our ignorance about our own ‘self’.

Unfortunately and ironically, our quest of external knowledge lends us a convenient escape from the painful task of knowing ourselves as we are. A great 20^th century educational thinker, the late J. Krishnamurti, rightly said, “Education is not merely gathering information from books; true education is learning about oneself by oneself.” It is this self-knowledge through self-awareness that can bring about a radical change in the thought and behaviour of a student. An educated person with such a self-illumined mind knows how to act (rather than react) in the most trying and challenging situations of everyday life. If our education cannot concern itself with fostering among students a profound sense of self-enquiry that leads to one’s total transformation, then it is futile to dream of a world as ‘a better place to live in’.

It is heartening to note that there is an increasing awareness of the need to make school education more comprehensive and holistic by integrating human values and practical life skills into the curriculum. Human values, based on the fundamental principles of humanism, inherently have a secular approach and they alone can create a truly disciplined member of society as well as a law-abiding citizen of a country, who possesses a global outlook at the same time. Even if there is no formal provision for such a holistic curriculum in a given school, teachers with his/her own initiative and an innovative approach can find ways to inspire students to enquire into the deeper significance of life and gain a wider perspective on the whole panorama of human existence on this planet.