TOPIC
DECEMBER 28
School, what a word! Just utter, visualise or think of it, and most certainly, it usually evokes a great place to learn new and wise things.
Besides, if you are a parent, you are blissfully convinced that your kids are learning, and they are learning beautiful life skills: they now know math, science, computer, history; they even know the difference, for example, between stationary and stationery, both in spelling and meaning, and you are proud of their sprucing up of the international language. The principal is also happy because her pupil can tell the difference between principal and principle or can pronounce air and heir correctly.
The world, however, forgot long ago - long, long ago - that 'school' had a radically different, perhaps better sense, and one may not immediately like to accept it: school meant 'leisure'. Now, school implies a place where one goes for learning, and not for leisure. And one is cracked up to learn serious 'stuff' there, hoping to make a name, give a meaning to life, make fortunes, become a cultured person or a cunning politician - today's "business" schools just produce too many of the latter! - pursue a career of their predilection, dispel ignorance and bask in wisdom, compete in the crazy job market, and even deal with the school of the hard knocks!
Why a school obliterated its own glorious 'leisure origin' remains an enigma. Leisure too could have offered better moments of learning, and learning with fun and freedom, with ease and relaxation, and, of course, in the company of good teachers. Imagine closed classrooms, with draconian disciplinary laws imposed by the school administration, and boisterous students always defying them. And leisure, not schools, would have perhaps produced a better 'educated lot', that would have perhaps created a better world order, at least free of viruses and wars!
Arguably, a noisy school replacing a calm leisure is a sad historical transition. Leisure, nowadays, is merely a pale onlooker, staring at schools - its long-forgotten siblings - from a distance and asking: why have you become so stressed out and serious entities, whereas I am laid-back as usual? Perhaps it's time to get down to brass tacks and allot more leisurely time to both teachers and pupils, where, for example, they are likely to learn more on a live, blooming rhododendron tree or on why a water buffalo knows everything about a swimming pool, than when they are shown related clips and pics on a cold screen.
Then, someday, pupils and students both may reminisce more dreamily about 'old leisure days in nature' than about 'old school days in confined spaces'.
A version of this article appears in the print on December 29, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
