'Here' and 'Now' Pedagogy

The teaching and learning process needs fundamental change. With pieces of information and knowledgeable ever-accessible even on move, one does not need to store them in their mind as it is being required so far. Generally, learners need less to memorise and more to develop the power to process information and knowledge. Memorisation and understanding go together but often the former cripple the latter by its sheer weight. Now, with technology,  people can unburden themselves greatly.   

Here, my concern is human beings knowing about humanity and their ways of living. And, the task of pedagogy gets light and simple in this context presently. I feel two major enablers of civility, humanism and rationalism, remain grossly unrealised despite being in play for centuries and hold great promise of further civilizing the human race. The storage of knowledge in mind has been a highly desirable value, and so the tendency to store pieces of knowledge without filtering them for their uses and effects affects the knowledge processing abilities of the knowledge bearer.  They act as coolies carrying a load of knowledge on them rather than being masters of knowledge. Moreover, knowledge overwhelms the instinct and drive of knowing: it subdues the persons carrying it. This can be reversed to bring things to their normal state: an evolutional anomaly can be undone now. 

'Here' and 'now' must be the starting point of the pedagogy and 'being' and  'phenomenal' must be the focus. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Poverty of Pedagogy

Our pedagogy is mostly an exhoration for every pupil to attain greatness. It fails to explain that heroism and heroes are mostly about chances and circumstances respectively. And, it ends up demeaning very normal people, in general.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Freedom Challenge

Our pedagogy shackles our mind. It is the subjection of our agency to our own inferior self. At present, when even the postmodernist philosophising seems passé, we talk and walk the slavish ways we were coerced to naturalise during the millennial occupation. Whatever sparse vegetation could grow amidst the barrenness of our humanist imagination was devastated by the blizzard of Leftism - the ism of death - the death of reason, imagination and of sanity. It was like the outbreak of cholera amidst a famine. The biggest challenge India faces today is to resurrect its intellectual self. The challenge cannot be met by straight strivings as the very forces, which are supposedly meant to guard and advance freedom are arraigned, though largely inadvertently, against liberation. The catch cannot be trickier.

- Niraj Kumar Jha