Narendrapur in the next 60 (by Biprodas Bhattacharjee)
[This article, written for the 60th Anniversary of the RKMV School Magazine, was recently updated, as per popular demand from my students. The links within this article were just added a few days ago for further reference, but the books recommended remain the same. Enjoy! Biprodas Bhattacharjee]
And just like that, Narendrapur has turned 60! When the first bricks of our Vidyalaya were being laid, our founding fathers could have hardly imagined the kind of prominence, respect, and adoration we command today.
Graduates of our school walk far corners of the world running businesses, flying aircrafts, engineering bridges, and saving lives. We continue to attract the best minds, provide them with a launching pad to illustrious careers, and remain the envy of our peer institutions.
Sir Isaac Newton, in a moment of self-reflection, once remarked, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.
Narendrapur could not have come this far if it weren’t for great men — monks, teachers, gardeners, cooks and caretakers alike — dedicating their lives for the blooming of our Mission.
Our buildings may have aged, but RKMV Narendrapur remains youthful and vibrant. The scale of our achievement is astonishing. Our legacy, indelible. That is the good news.
The bad news is that the future we are hurtling towards shall be drastically different in ways we cannot fully comprehend. The dizzying pace of technological progress is disrupting societies everywhere. Japanese researchers recently built an artificially intelligent (AI) robot named TODAI that successfully passed the country’s top-ranking University of Tokyo’s entrance examination with flying colors.
Our long enchantment with rote learning has finally led to this startling reality — unintelligent machines outperforming intelligent humans. We labor away under an education model forged for the Industrial Revolution. Like a factory system, our education model is rigid, inefficient, and uninspiring.
Our graduates, despite their impressive score cards, are grossly ill prepared to face the challenges of an advanced job market. Yet, while the chimneys and smokestacks quit hissing long ago, the school bells of an antiquated learning system languidly chime away.
We desperately need a paradigm shift. Merely producing pass outs and conferring degrees is not enough. Instead, we must start nurturing them as entrepreneurs of a creative economy.
A creative economy thrives when inspired participants from vastly different fields collaborate freely at the crossroads of arts, culture, business, and technology to unlock hidden potentials.
Ride-sharing app Uber is an excellent example. Taxis have been around for half a century. But when someone built an app to call a ride, a billion-dollar industry was born, seemingly out of nowhere.
Experts predict similar untapped potentials at intersections of different technologies will give birth to whole new industries in the decades to come.
Going beyond mere State-board requirements, Narendrapur must start equipping kids with tools that will help them thrive in such a socio-economic landscape. Instead of begrudgingly adapting, Narendrapur should enthusiastically steer our way to a more promising future.
Connecting the dots
What shall we steer towards? The first order of things would be to move away from focusing on individual “subjects” and towards a holistic view of knowledge.
Yes, on a sweltering summer day, physics lab diagrams may seem worlds apart from the next period’s history notes. But “subjects” exist so that students can be tested through “exams” at regular intervals.
Such rigid demarcations hardly serve society. In the real world, all “subjects” and “fields” are crying out to come together. In fact, discoveries happen when different fields collide in new, exciting ways.
Here’s an example — satellite remote sensing technology made tremendous progress during the turn of the 21st century, helping cosmologists peer into remote parts of our vast universe.
Following that progress was historian Sarah Parcak. She wondered if such exciting developments in an entirely different field can aid her own fieldwork. So, she turned those same satellites to ancient archaeological sites.
Boom! Like a modern-day Indiana Jones, Sarah is now unearthing some of the greatest archaeological discoveries in a century — from Viking battlefields to the hidden chambers in Egyptian Pyramids. The best part is her job title: a “space archaeologist”.
How can a tailor and an astronaut collaborate to design a better spacesuit for Mars? How can a marine biologist help a shipbuilder to lessen the impact of oil spills on large bodies of fish? How can a climatologist work with an architect to design the tallest buildings in the world? How can medical teams work with the Coca Cola Company to deliver medicines to remote parts of the world during times of a health epidemic?
Pursuing strange questions like these and finding ingenious answers to them is a prerequisite for flourishing in the creative economies of tomorrow.
Narendrapur should encourage its students to pursue such seemingly insane passions. We must train them to be daring, inspired, creative, and above-all, broad-minded.
Branching out beyond the STEM
Painter Pablo Picasso once noted that “every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
Students are naturally different and diverse. Their different talents take full flight when they allow self-expression in a culture of diversity.
Yet our education system is built on the opposite principle — conformity.
We design tests that measure our kids on a very narrow spectrum of achievement. Kids whose talents fall outside the bandwidth of our partial tests remain invisible. We squander their natural creative urges and inclinations.
Most of these kids’ talents fall outside the STEM subjects (Science; Technology; Engineering; Mathematics). Yet we force everyone to pursue the science subjects with the wild wish of future glory. Unwilling but bewildered, many kids trudge along.
The result? Lifelong mental insecurity, bitterness, and a deep sense of failure. A desperate mismatch of “what they do” with “who they are”.
STEM subjects are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. A real education must give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, and physical education. The future will bring tremendous opportunities beyond just the likes of computer coding and heart surgery.
Rigorous intellectual thinking, as imparted by the humanities, will be in great demand in a society where AI will soon take away not just menial jobs (calculations), but also complex repetitive tasks (through robotic process automation) and predictive work (like stock market bidding).
Global thought leaders like Fareed Zakaria and billionaire Mark Cuban are urging students to pursue social science subjects. Their advice to the leaders of tomorrow — learn how to think creatively, in the rigorous Socratic school.
Narendrapur, with its rich cultural heritage and philosophical roots, can easily nudge students into “thinkers” beyond the logical thinking patterns of STEM.
From ‘Command & Control’ to ‘Climate Control’
Above all, we must create an environment of curiosity. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Teachers can go a long way towards engendering such curiosity in students. Great teachers stimulate, provoke, engage, and dare the students to dream big. They do not treat teaching as a delivery system.
Rather they create lessons at the intersection of unstructured play and imitation models. This provides students precedents to build on, as well as the goal of refashioning it creatively. Students are thus forced to look outside the box, and for novel solutions.
Unlike school exams, not every problem has one right answer. Great teachers inculcate a culture of creative risk-taking in students and help them explore multiple possibilities for problems. Real learning happens in self-reflection. Not in classrooms. It requires the right environment to flourish.
Narendrapur must dissociate itself from a mechanical system of education of command and control. Instead, it should be creating a climate of possibility.
We should also upgrade our libraries. We should acquire books that kids are reading around the world and create study programs to exchange knowledge amongst various grades. That way, kids expand their knowledge beyond their immediate concerns and learn to see the world through other people’s eyes.
Since students live on our campus for the better half of a year, it should be within our means to deliver on such a climate.
Bodies, not just brains
From time immemorial, physical education has been an essential part of development. From the Vedic societies to the city-states of Rome, every ancient culture prioritized strong bodies. For the first time in our history however, modern schooling has limited the space for physical expression through movement.
This springs from the misguided attitude that a sedentary desk career is of the highest stature, and any physical exertion to make one’s living is non-cerebral, low-grade labor. In other words, intelligence is simply verbal and mathematical reasoning. We make students sit in benches for long hours and discourage them from moving a finger!
We are paying the price of our folly with not only stunted growth and chronic physical pain in younger generations, but also hampered learning, emotional breakdowns, and shortened concentration span. Health costs have quadrupled globally since the 1950s due to bad diets and lack of exercise. Heart disease, early onset of Alzheimer’s, and diabetes are burgeoning.
Physical education, sports and general movement is the pulse of humanity. Sport and recreational activities can help restore joy and stability in troubled lives and ease the tensions in schools disrupted by violence and bullying.
New scientific studies are challenging outdated concepts of achievement and showing the transformative power of movement.
Narendrapur has long stressed the importance of sports, physical fitness, and recreational activities. It should continue to do so.
Our verdant lawns, lush green tress, and wide-open fields set us apart from the dingy classrooms and crammed spaces of most schools. We should utilize our infrastructure and let our kids be kids!
Back to the future
Boarding schools were originally conceived in a different age. Its purpose was to act as a constant test-prep center for admission to specific colleges or universities, pursuing a unique curriculum in a regular fashion, away from worldly distractions.
Narendrapur has already excelled at this model and it continues to deliver on that promise. But merely following this won’t do for the future, whose demands have altered. We must go above and beyond, despite the relative backwardness of our education boards. We must prize diversity of talent in our student bodies, make sure they excel at more than cracking standardized tests, and prepare them to become entrepreneurs on their own right.
A famous saying goes that there are only two lasting bequests that we can hope to give our children — roots and wings.
In the first half-century of our existence, Narendrapur has spread its roots far, wide and firm. Thousands of alumni call our Vidyalaya their true childhood home.
Now that we are rooted, it is time to fly in the next 60!
Postscript
To (fore)see the future, read far, wide and often. Here’s a good start:
Gladwell, Malcolm, “Outliers: The Story of Success”, Back Bay Books, 2011
Kahneman, Daniel, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013
Robinson, Ken, “Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education”, Penguin Books, 2016
Zakaria, Fareed, “In Defense of a Liberal Education”, W.W. Norton & Company, 2016
Selingo, Jeffrey, “College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students”, Amazon Publishing, 2015
