To Anjasi, with Love

Dear Anjasi,

God is dead, and my relationship with writing is my most sacred relationship with this world. 

I have been trying to identify what I need. This struggle for clarity surfaced as an inevitability. I struggle to move on from ethnography to a career as a journalist or a creative writer. I aspire to discover the logical objective of my prerequisites. 

I began writing at sixteen and didn't know what I was getting into. As I continued to pen down ideas and observations, the art of writing revealed to me its various forms. Each form could have been utilised to sustain oneself economically in a competitive world and improve the quality of one's life, but I was always more interested in improving the lives of others. I was brought up with very little emotional support and occasional abandonment, and the expectations put on me in return for scraps were extremely high. The only way to get attention or love was to burn out. To perform intensely and see others still dissatisfied was all I ever knew. I wanted others to be happy. I knew I had my reasons. Till now, to be at ease with my abandonment is the way I make others happy. Inquiry or confrontation was met with irritation and anger, so my own satisfaction mattered very little to me. If others were happy, I knew I was safe. None of this was healthy, and I wasn't very good at anything at all. I had a few glimpses of innocence every now and then, but they would soon slip away from me, and I had to be content with that. I was a failure and would eventually become a reject. I was an underperforming, underconfident and incredibly lonely person who had to tell lies and weave stories to get attention and acceptance. Writing revealed to me how far one could come by way of obedience. But life is known to be lived beyond good and evil. 

Originality was of primary importance, and I learnt that there was a method of creating new knowledge called research. But to professionally train in this method, one had to enter a university system of known repute, and this was not easy. Each university had its gatekeeper, and where there was none, a price had to be paid to enter. It is unbelievable that the pursuits of higher education in India are frowned upon, and the pursuit of becoming an administrative puppet is celebrated. Any researcher working under the umbrella of an institution also testifies that if one wishes to be creative, research isn't it. They also say they practically live on scraps, and the opportunities are scarce. A few years ago, when it became evident that there was no way I would meet the high expectations I put on myself, I felt confused and wanted my questions answered. Why did I not do well even with a healthy body, a sound mind, and economic prosperity? 

I learnt that nobody else had the same questions I did, and even if I found the answers to my questions somehow, they would be of no value to others, because they had their own questions to answer. It was rare to find a group of people who needed to find the answers to the same questions I was trying to answer. As part of my experiments with truth, I volunteered for an educational organisation working to educate underprivileged children. When I went there, my first question was, "What about illiterate adults? Don't they need an education?" I had gone there with theoretical knowledge, which proved insufficient for application and unfounded in conditions. Knowledge became bias. The children there belonged to families with little or no history of schooling. How can learning take place without a learning environment? Schools have their own problems, something widely discussed in the field of sociology of education by prominent scholars M.S. Desai, I.P. Gore, Suma Chitnis, Geetha B. Nambissan and Srinivasa Rao. 

I had hit a roadblock when my biases came in the way of my experiments. Without my answers, I was like an irritated toddler. To add to my miseries, a relationship I held most dearly was slipping out of my hands like sand, and at work, I had bullies to put in their right place. I knew I had to educate myself before trying to administer half-baked ideas to real people. 

During my brief experience on the ground, I listed the following systems of knowledge primary subject learners would need access to if they were to use their education to improve the quality of their lives and their society: 

• Hunger
• Healthcare
• Listening Speaking Reading Writing (LSRW)
• Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM)
• Vocational Skills
• Fundamentals of Housing & Development
• Environmental Studies
• Indigenous Knowledge Systems
• Sociology of Education

The objective was to develop a method of teaching and learning centred around the principles of rationality, even though a radical educationist might wonder if it is better to drink the water of a polluted river than to draw diagrams of its pollutants for an education on pollution. 

So, if learners learnt to review literatures from the aforementioned subjects through a critical lens, their application of ideas could be directed to solve real-life problems. Now, why did I emphasise language education? Research shows that developing competence in the language of instruction is fundamental to efficient learning. Similar to linguistic studies, educational studies suggest that both cognitive and social conditions cause learning as well as learning disabilities. As I participated in a formal system of education at a well known central university, the confines of its curriculum did narrow my research down in a helpful way, but due to personal struggles of that time, I could not meet the criterion of success laid out by the university, and the experiment ended as a failure. I did the best I could, and I have no remorse. 

I was at the university after working hard for over two years, but when I was there, I was utterly unable to focus on my studies. I felt dead inside, like my soul had wandered off to a graveyard where old memories were buried, and my brain just wouldn't respond to anything that was taking place around me. So, I suffered academically. When it was time to write the final exams, I would go into the exam hall and keep staring out of the window. I left the sheets as blank as they were handed to me. That was true Tabula Rasa, I suppose. The day I tried to write something, my body stiffened so much that I couldn't even move the pen between my fingers. It felt like I would have a seizure in the classroom. I had been suffering from potent as well as frequent auditory hallucinations, which might have been triggered by the loss of a partner. Tears did not stop pouring out of my eyes. I was severely anxious and would have regular panic attacks in my hostel room, which would only pass with the healing ability of music. I was hyperactive due to an attention deficit and dependent on nicotine for coping with it. The pressure to perform at the university and consequent failure put me in a rotten mood, which resulted in some early signs of a bipolar disorder, or an impostor syndrome, to say the least. As my brain fell to prolonged fatigue, it became difficult to distinguish between thoughts and imagination. The auditory hallucinations had planted the fear of a psychosis in me, and I have to say that I feared I was becoming schizophrenic while smoking cigarettes in the dark, empty corridors of the hostel at 3 a.m. The fear was very, very real. Thankfully, due to psychotherapeutic and mindfulness practices, I was able to cope with it all, but my personality still feels highly disordered and vulnerable to the smallest triggers. It will soon be one year since I last smoked a cigarette, which is a big improvement. 

This learning disability was somewhat similar to the one I had faced due to child abuse. It was identical to what I had faced while transitioning from late adolescence to early adulthood due to the loss of a parent. This was enough evidence to understand the gravity of learning disabilities in education. Research suggested that disabilities like dyslexia can lead to lifelong co-morbidities related to learning because impairment causes diversity requiring inclusiveness. I was never diagnosed with dyslexia, but recently I learnt that there are numerous diagnostic tests for it. For dyslexic learners, oral tasks proved catalysts that facilitated learning. 

I had always believed that for literacy to benefit us, the curricula and pedagogy had to be redesigned. But, it was also predictable that a great power over the resources was needed to make this change possible. So what can a common man do? Initially, the aim was to reduce the burden of learners by reducing the number of things they needed to learn, by emphasising an integrated value-based process of learning that merged knowledge related to society, science, technology, art and emotional intelligence into literature to be read and tasks to be performed. These are being capitalised on by Pratham's STEM and Storyweaver models, whilst benefitting society at large. The idea is to familiarise learners with socio-realistic literature on issues that hinder the progress of their community and enable them to cope with those problems in their search for self-sustainability. It is most important for them to have the opportunity to test their ideas in real life to see if their ideas pass the test or if they fail. This is what I mean by a pragmatic approach to education. 

"From the perspective of education, literary criticism has the potential to 'critical consciousness'. Revisiting our earlier discussion on critical literacy, we will recall Paulo Freire's stress on the importance of reading in constructing critical perspectives of the world. Reading the world, he states, precedes reading the word, and our subsequent reading of the word informs our reading that brings together writing and praxis, text and experience underlies the conception of critical consciousness. Literary works as stylised, material, cultural artefacts provide an entry point into the interpretation of the world. Freire's concept of reading critically is reinforced by Edward Said in The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), where the latter argues that critical consciousness is a necessary attitude to interpret works since the text the writer and the critic are all worldly beings situated in a specific place and time" (Page 151, Language Education, Nishevita Jayendran, Anusha Ramanathan and Surbhi Nagpal)

Table 2.1 of the book Language Education: Teaching English in India (Principles Based Adaptive Teaching) by Nishevita Jayendran, Anusha Ramanathan and Surbhi Nagpal uses qualitative research methods to hypothesise where data does not meet reality and postulate measures for improvement in key areas of importance. 

All of this began with the need for freedom of expression. But what does it mean to be literate? IACAPAP Textbook of Child and Adolescent Mental Health defined Literacy as the ability to derive and communicate knowledge and meaning from written language. 

In Indian policy of education, multilingualism has a three-language formula, and it can at least be traced back to a book called The Three Language Formula: An Educational Problem published in 1992 by Santosh Aggarwal. English is a global language of opportunities. Therefore, interventions in exposure to English cover a massive ground of socio-economic materials for English language learning. Beyond language, policy emphasised nationalism and then skills. Another notable reality is the mechanical nature of policy implementation, which doesn't account for categorical differences in the demographics of learners upon whom the policy applies. So, what does one really need to design a suitable training program that upskills the workforce? Do they need them to be multilingual? Do they need them to be multicultural? Do they need them to be Inclusive? What is the framework of a good in-service training programme? And, why is it important to understand this? What do we think about the nature of modern work that brings us food to our tables?

After working for the government, I learnt that administrators are oftentimes unaware of what works and what doesn't. Why is that? Is it because these are capitalists and authoritarians who care only for their own profit? Yes, the nature of work in modern society is highly capitalistic and lacks free will. But, the problem of administration is that either everything works perfectly on paper, or nothing works and needs immediate diversion of resources. In this grind, humanity has no place. It is hypothesised that democratic decisions require surveys, investigations, and prescriptions for efficiency in design. From an educational perspective, learner demographics are important because who one identifies as reflects how they will perceive the curriculum design. Similarly, from an organisational perspective, a wide range of ideas pertaining to the functions we serve in the organisation, and the organisation serves the public, allow for politics to take unfair control over the frameworks. These are indeed political debates, which are reserved for the upper-class management, while the workers obey in return for scraps. In these conditions of contradiction, do demographics matter? If they do not, then what is the point of basing the curriculum for the development of foundational skills on demographics? In simpler terms, must one know the factors that make up their identity? How does one so easily forget who they once were? Religion has the answers, but religion is the opium of the masses. It is easy to believe that this transition from identity as the learner to the worker is the best a human being can evolve in modern times. Is it true? Is there all there is to modern life? What lies beyond then? Don't you ever wonder?

While reading on curriculum and the sociology of education, a trend that comes up often is known as "decolonising the curriculum", at the heart of which is a phenomenon called Cultural Epistemicide, which is the deliberate destruction of cultural knowledge and ways of knowing. Does that sound like something one should worry about? Is it more important than a pair of luxe shoes? The question is an important one for an individual because there is a method to utilise free knowledge in designing a curriculum most suitable for one's own evolution. My journey to self-fulfilment began with the search for the meaning of life, and in my fight with the corruption of the human mind, I have been reduced to avoiding getting hit by a speeding car on a four-lane freeway as I walk from the office to the metro station. Modern labour caused me great torment, and it is through you I learnt that knowledge can be used to improve the quality of one's life. So, where do I go from here? I study my observations. The primary goal of learning research methods has been to use prior knowledge and form valid inquiries, modes of investigation, methods of assessment, and add new knowledge to existing frameworks. Research methodology is one of the fundamental subjects offered to students pursuing Higher Education. Why is that? It can be hypothesised that the general idea of literacy is to measure how well an individual or a group of individuals can interpret the meaning and the context of their surroundings. Knowledge is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is in learning how to draw valid knowledge that human beings benefit from their being. A formal education keeps the text at the centre of its structure; informal and alternative systems of education place the human body and the aesthetic quality of the human experience at the centre. There is a divide. Which is okay, because human beings have free will, at least adults do once they have gone through the struggle for survival. There is rampant inequality in demographics, which has made the struggle for survival common. Despite passing through years of useless institutionalisation, human beings turn out to be as useless as something useless can be. The most common approach to accessing knowledge is to try and fail, and try again, even if it costs one's life. There are ideological fanatics who choose, of their own free will, to perish for the sake of ideology. From a human perspective, survival seems more important than reproduction. Unfortunately, knowledge and access to knowledge are instrumental to freedom, enlightenment and liberation. In India, education has been a nationalist project aimed at building a nation that coincides with the constitutional values. Politics is always at play in the Indian identity. Needless to say, economic and political factors have played an important role in tearing the structure from the bottom up. Class mobility and intermingling of politics with religious identities have segregated the population into diverse categories, and over the years, there have been several attempts by intellectuals and thinkers alike to make the system inclusive and accessible. But there is a fallacy. The academic effort of building individual citizens tolerant of other cultures and identities is known as building socio-cultural competence. The use of literature (all that is written) in building socio-cultural competence of individuals, along with disseminating subject-specific knowledge, is one of the primary goals of education. The text in the classroom is still one of the most common materials for teaching and learning, even if the learner suffers from a visual impairment. In such cases, it is easier for schools to ostracise the blind than to adopt an inclusive pedagogy. What is the need for a school for special needs if the systems weren't discriminatory? In a multilingual culture, literacy has again been central and core language skills are more important than ethics, logic, reason, and moral value education. There is indeed mass illiteracy. The dependence on language for knowledge dissemination is known as communicative competence. And it is not hidden from any Indian that often an individual passing tenth standard cannot form a meaningful and grammatically correct sentence. I know because I was one such individual. This is where the problem lies, and there are ways to correct it. But the needle on the dial always points to a red flag beyond the acceptable limits of difficulty in grasping the research problem. In creating a multidisciplinary framework, the challenge of fixing the primary entity, similar to the 'primary partner' in a polyamorous relationship, always seems to increase the workload of identifying the legitimacy of delegated functions and, in some way, commits injustice to all. Therefore, the framework must be holistic. Therefore, the integrative approach to accessing valid knowledge seems holistic. Administratively, a multidisciplinary approach is imagined as institutional, which has its own internal working.

To gain the fruits of an Education is just as difficult as breaking free from the karmic cycle. 

Education is deeply integrated into human life. A formal education system is similar to a food chain where one will eat the other and become what it just ate. This is as close to equality dissemination of knowledge gets as it possibly can. There are distinguished entities and complex networks. The whole is a product of the integration. The contributors to the integrated whole are within themselves wholes serving the purposes of their functions, decided by the whole. The whole whose purpose is to limit the concentration of contributors so that the contributors do not overthrow the whole and become a whole integrating various contributors is a variable. This principle of lack of totality contributes force to the law of power.

Take a look at the happiness index of the world, and the dissatisfaction will be clearly visible. Philosophically, the sages and rishi munis have emphasised that the harder the suffering, the sweeter the fruits of labour will be. But exhaustion and burnout are growing common. Frameworks relate academic knowledge to professional experience into a meaningful whole. The framework for training individuals is integrative, but the results are unfortunately negative. The documentation repeatedly emphasises a learner-centred approach, which is akin to a prescriptive grammar approach, but the overall learning environment is flourishing with strains of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. To this, as a movie from a director's point of view, would be to see the learner as an actor playing a character. Since there is no one method for assessing intelligence, it is wrong to call someone a donkey because they failed. These developments shaped the trajectory of my life, and I was curious as to how it all pieced together.

I had been wondering for a long time whether learning takes place in many parts of the brain, and it is scientifically proven that different stimulations exercise and develop different parts of the brain. Some methods make multiple parts work together. Since not every brain functions the same way for some mysterious reason, there is the possibility of a unique response. With the same tasks, some are going to grasp the concept and some won't. Learning aids ensure an increase in the zone of proximal development (See Lev Vygotsky) of the learner's abilities. Learners hypothesise based on failures experienced while testing the application of their concepts. Gradually, it is observed how well a learning strategy performs across levels of difficulty of concepts. In the end, it comes down to how advanced concepts relate to the individual experiences of the learners. Many factors are adding to the layers of individual experience. These factors make up the criteria of learner demographics. These are questions of perception, but also behavioural responses to organisational structuring. Evidence is a phenomenon that coincides with the objectives of a learning process. So, what's the need to grasp concepts that might not have any direct relevance to the learner's individual experiences? The answer is that it enables prediction ability, making learning a cognitive ability.  These are utilised as the prerequisites for further learning. 

So, what is the fundamental philosophy and goal of such a social dissemination of knowledge? Critical Literacy. There is a standard in place at schools and structures similar to those where content and curriculum are laid out in advance, and the methods of assessment are also put in place. Then, group interactions are part of the socialisation of individual experiences and behaviour patterns. Thus, socialisation is extremely important for holistic development. When the learner demographics have a greater variety, and the individual uniqueness of every learner is given room for expression, the complexity of ideas competing for success is also greater, and the challenges make it imperative for learners to overcome individual biases in pursuit of larger concepts. General emotions arising out of the process are also part of natural learning and are given room for recognition and processing. These are some of the fundamentals of inclusive education as well. 

While on one hand, I wanted to capitalise on my privileges by contributing to literacy missions, I was wrong in using the real-life experiences of others to experiment with my own ideas. Yes, there is disparity, but even with access to all the resources, there is underperformance. Thus, the next step is to utilise this critical consciousness for the development of a multicultural, multilingual and interdisciplinary perspective. Literacy missions that aim for social development have to adopt translation traditions in their approach to Language Education. The eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution lists official languages for administrative purposes, and the emphasis on modern languages in Indian culture is easily visible. It is among the duties of the citizens to preserve and protect the cultural and linguistic expanse of the union of identities. Government policies on education and their treatment of languages are mind-boggling since schools will teach learners foreign languages, but do not offer the choice to learn any of the regional languages. This is the tyranny of nationalism.

But why is it that organisations find it incredibly difficult to achieve that? From here on, I'm stepping into an area where my voice will sound rather amateurish. Learners identify language through symbols, don't they? Symbols form a pattern. These patterns work together to form meaning. "Bredo (1994) characterises symbol-processing in terms of three dualisms: language and reality; mind and body; and individual and society" (Page 5, Curriculum: The Case for a Focus on Learning Robert McCormick and Patricia Murphy). In this context cognitive approach was defined as symbol processing with the analogy of abnormalities in "x-ray" to classify and assign labels based on the competence of the database of knowledge. Administratively, a caveat is defined as a notice, especially in probate, that certain actions may not be taken without informing the person who gave the notice.  These ideas again emphasise applying knowledge to gather personal intelligence through interpersonal communication, pointing to the first dualism between language and reality. A reality that can be logically traced with evidence and written documentation. Speaking of symbols, they can facilitate visual learning, auditory learning and kinesthetic (learning by doing) learning. Whereas, the consequences of illiteracy make it urgent for a paradigm shift in adult education from imminent higher learning to an "in-service training" programme. There are other methods of intervention as well. Consider an orientation program, which, when lacking, can make learning for a newcomer to an organisation very difficult. So, maybe there is a method to design an efficient framework for an orientation programme.

1. Develop a knowledge database on the desired function

2. Describe the curricula limiting the function

3. Prescribe materials and methods to serve the function

4. Reiterate the objective. 

Perhaps, this can make learning at the workplace possible, and the workers will not have to listen to lectures by untrained, unprofessional bullies like I did. Coming back to the basic point that one of the aspects of cognitive ability is linguistic ability. Therefore, initially, it is essential to emphasise how one can observe and code the language one wishes to learn. Later, there is an added emphasis on the use of pictorial symbolism to enhance efficient learning. There are ways to do that through formal as well as informal methods of education. 

The real challenge is to define what is meant by 'discipline' with respect to its application in real-life. An accurate definition of discipline will allow for efficient development of curriculum and pedagogy because a disciple is confined to a discipline which exerts its control through a government founded in rules and laws. The mixing of two distinct disciplines due to the necessities of external realities calls for a framework of hybridity and lays a foundation on which the superstructure can solidify.