Back in 2010, it was a sunny afternoon as I sat in the fifth period immediately following lunch. The temperature was so high, I could see the burning sun through the windows of the classroom and feel the heat inside. Usually, the period after lunch was a big deal for us. It felt quite dull, we felt drowsy and tried hard to keep our eyes open. In this instance, it was an English class.
The teacher entered the classroom and announced, today we will read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. Everyone turned to page 15 of class IX NCERT English textbook. One student was instructed to read the poem aloud and simultaneously, the teacher explained the meaning. By the end of the class, that chapter from our syllabus ended and so did our encounter with the beautiful poem. This is how I have been taught poetry in my school. We were instructed to memorise the lines as well as the meanings and explanations of each word or phrase. We were told which line to highlight and what to write; it was even suggested that attempting questions to poems could lead to higher scores in our examinations.
I assume that the situation is similar in most schools in India. Poetry has been and is still a mere word inside classrooms. All these memories intrigue me to question, has poetry somehow disappeared from our education? It has definitely not. But, I do believe that the essence of poetry has disappeared. And for me, it never existed, throughout my school life. Believe me when I say this, my school education, my teachers, never instilled in me the love for poems. If I can recall correctly, my very first encounter with poetry was through these two books – ‘Kya Khoya Kya Paya’ by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and ‘Madhushala’ by Harivansh Rai Bachchan. I saw them on my father’s bookshelf. One fine day, I picked them up and started reading. I don’t remember my age then. I don’t know what sense I made out of those words, but I was fascinated and it was a soulful feeling for me.
We live in such a progressive and advanced world today. Everything seems possible with continuous developments in science and technology. Our classrooms have turned into smart classes and Abacus classes enable children to compete with calculators. Human brains are proving to have no limitations. Nevertheless, with each passing year, the education system is miserably failing to impart the poetry of life.
If you ask me what is poetry, it would be difficult for me to describe it. All I can say is that it makes me feel good about the world around me, and the people I’m surrounded by. It also lets me see how vulnerabilities and failures are equally beautiful and important as successes. It amazes me that there is an infinite number of ways to look at the things and each one is interesting on its own.
I’m amazed at how darkness on one end can be full of sunshine at the other.
As Virginia Woolf has beautifully written,
“Yet there are
moments when
the walls of
the mind grow
thin; when nothing
is absorbed,
and I could fancy
that we might
blow so vast
a bubble that
the sun might set
and rise in it and
we might take the
blue of midday
and the black
of midnight
and be cast off
and escape from
here and now.”
The education system we were all once a part of has crossed so many milestones in so many aspects. Yet, I do feel the system is profoundly lacking in its ability to impart a basic sense of ‘humanity’ in humans. Poetry could be one of the best weapons to teach the essence of human existence to students. I would like to draw the chain of arguments from Aristotle’s conception of a virtuous life.
Aristotle has emphasized that man cannot be virtuous by nature. He has argued, virtue is the result of habits just as excellence is the result of practice. The habit of exercising virtues needs to be cultivated in order to imply virtues in life. He has pointed out that virtuous acts through habit-cultivation and education are immensely important, and both need to be started at a very young age. That’s how we make better moral and ethical beings.
Similarly, we need to start inculcating in children the power and reality of human birth. And, poems could be a powerful source to do that. In my opinion, since we cannot rely on science, mathematics and social sciences to teach children the beauty of seeing the world through a different lens; we need poetry. It could help them to learn to explore their inner soul, to understand the difference between their inner and external world, and to let them invent their own philosophies.
It is fundamentally important to let children understand the nature of the goals they are working towards and what their external world is shaping. It is also essential for them to know that nothing is possible in life until they win their inner battles with their soul, body and mind. If poetry could be used that way, how beautiful a world we would be a part of, where every soul would be able to find their solace in chaos.
I believe that the way poetry is taught in educational institutions is seriously concerning. How can we reduce the power of metaphors to a mere word-meaning format? Is it even possible that a poem can have just one correct explanation? It is like saying the sky is the limit, while we know this limit itself is limitless. Why are scholars so obsessed with speaking the language of Derrida, Marx, and Kant only?
The system has introduced a certain mode of articulation with writing and everyone is supposed to abide by it. We are taught, instructed and habituated to follow a particular framework of rules and regulations while writing. Similarly, it seems like poetry has been included just for the sake of being part of the syllabus. The curriculum is like – four marks for exactly copying the lines, three marks for an explanation with some specific words and zero marks for any creativity – this is absurd. I really doubt children ever understand the hidden beauty in those lines. With time, we are experiencing the slow death of rawness, and we need to keep fighting to erode this.
T.S. Eliot has rightly said,
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Apparently, there is a strange division between science and poetry. School education is so monotonous and so mechanized that it leaves no room to celebrate the culture of learning. The educational processes are becoming mentally exploitative day by day. The grading criteria, the ranking system and the format of marks distribution are causing serious damages to a child’s capability to think and to imagine. We are more on the side of producing human-machines rather than nurturing a child’s brain.
According to the World Health Organisation reports, worldwide 10-20% of children and adolescents experience mental disorders. Half of all mental illnesses begin by the age of 14 and three-quarters by mid-twenties. Where are we heading? Educational institutes should be helping children to cope with pressure, failure, and face challenges, disappointments, which will inevitably be a part of their lives.
Education, especially through poetry, can play a key role in teaching children how to think out of the box, innovate, and flourish creativity. Another challenge that education system faces is the taboo of educating children about death. Why don’t we have death education in schools? We never teach children how natural it is for every human entity around us to die one day and disappear from this physical world. Death is a consistent recurrence. Why are children so fearful about death? Why is birth celebrated, but death is not? Like a sunrise, sunset is equally beautiful, and like birth, death is equally natural. This reminds me of one of the most beautiful movies – ‘Dead Poets Society’ – released in 1989. The movie is based on a boarding school where one English teacher teaches his students the art of living life true to oneself. He teaches them about the beauty of human life through poems and encourages each student to write their heart out. In his very first class, he is heard saying, “believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold and die”. In all of his lectures throughout the movie, he is observed trying different ways in order to explain to students how to find the meaning of life through poems, how to push oneself beyond limits and how to follow one’s passion wholeheartedly.
Poetry can have multiple meanings and can be read with multiple perspectives. Education through poetry must lead to enlightenment; otherwise, everything would become just a matter of consumption. Enlightenment, as the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant describes, is the human mind’s ability to come out from ‘self-incurred minority’. Self-incurred minority means reducing the self to conventional dogmas, depending upon them and embracing the existential crisis. Enlightenment is about the emergence of the courage to question, the courage to see the world through your own eyes, the courage to trust your own judgments and the courage to overcome the dominance of conventional dogmas. Education must create a broader picture in a child’s mind about the philosophy of life, the madness of individuality and the music of life and death. After all, the more we come closer to death, the more we start to live.