Let us raise a Question…

Dr. Janardan Ghosh Education Officer, Madhusthali Vidyapeeth, Madhupur, MCKV Group of Institutions

The Sufi saint says; let the words die for us to live….

Words have never been sufficient to meet our need to express the truth as it is. Moreover, Communication has subsequently been a perpetual bewilderment in human existence, generating confusion, chaos, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, wrong belief systems, and so on. So, I am apprehensive of its consequences whenever I wish to start a dialogue. Moreover, with all certainty, one shall receive what one did not deliver! However, we are writing, talking and listening incessantly. Why?

We can try to approximate the truth of a conversation by merging some pieces of the given with some fragments of the receiving, thus fostering meaning in the process for both the giver and the beneficiary. With this apologia let me begin the beginning….

Once upon a class, there was a boy. He sat under an apple tree. Apples dropped one after the other, and the boy started collecting them. Time played squash as the teacher revised gravity. Learning waged a war, and report cards were printed.

This seems to be a surreal image of a modern schooling system flawed by the practical techniques of virtual images of apple trees with a shedding spree in a classroom to demonstrate gravity where the students do not question the falling but rather delight in the collecting jive and the teacher finishes his syllabus. Furthermore, interestingly, Learning does not happen. Like the melancholic apples, the students collect and store heads full of morbid information, stale and dry. They qualify for the starting line in the run to make money and curate comfort. They fail to be true learners for their entire lives and end up being a ‘sick sack full’. Why?

Learning commences when you ask, when you become an enquirer, and when an essential enquiry sprouts out of an individual like an undaunted sapling solid and daring. In the Eastern traditional Learning System, a student was known as a Jingyasu, an enquirer. He was encouraged to ask questions incessantly until all enquiries sank into a deep understanding of the subject. The Gurus would always provide curious opportunities and provoke the comfort-prone minds to raise the issue like a question mark. Therefore, we come across Nachiketa, who could initiate a tête-à- tête with Death, and Shaunak, who could jam with Rishi Angiras on a spiritual rock and roll. The inner non-conformist self is always on its mark to refute all that is ordinary and would ritualistically rally for the original, the unique, and the truth. So learners of yore would outrageously voice their doubts again and again and question.

Nevertheless, now, the day when we hold batons passed by the teachers of the ancient enquirers, we stub the learners into cerebral dwarfs, allowing a limited dance of the wit. Wisdom takes a back seat while the students are fervently fed with information alone. Holy heads are turned into dump grounds of intellectual debris. So now…

There is no time to wait until all questions are buried into an unsung grave, so let us retrace our questioning path and nurture a full-blown garden of inquisition. Let the science class happen under any ‘damn’ green tree, a cherry, a guava or a mango; apples are not mandatory. In that very class, we need to discuss not the gravitational constant or the laws of gravity but the inquisitive mind of Newton, which did not deter him from questioning why it fell.

Let us remember that ‘A question is more consequential than a statement!’