Education and Mindfulness

Almost without exception, people vouch for education per se as the panacea for all challenges, personal or social. Yet, education as a mere formality, a reliance on form over substance, rarely helps. The critical component lies in its content and method of delivery. And herein lies one of humanity’s most persistent challenges: the inability to distinguish between education and indoctrination, or between cultural carry-forward and cultural curation.

This pedagogical and epistemological conundrum can be substantially dispelled when educators learn to scrutinise inherited givens and develop the knack for identifying and nurturing possibilities. At its core, education is about enabling minds so that individuals genuinely own their minds rather than unknowingly letting others control them.

Regrettably, courses on pedagogy and epistemology themselves often turn out to be abstruse, dispiriting, rigid, and nearly unworkable. Instead of enabling learning, they inhibit it. To be an educator, then, is to assume a sui generis role, one that demands responsibility, imagination, and presence. This calls for serious attention.

Niraj Kumar Jha