A Manifesto of World s Next Education System (Nikita Inc.

Lo) Don t aim at success- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue , and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one s surrender to a person other th an oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to l et it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscienc e commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Th en you will live to see that in the long run-in the long run, I say! - success w ill follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it. -Viktor E. Frankl In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is imp lied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine i nterest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests a man com es to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack o f integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of coordinat ion between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society where the two are not knit together by the force o f objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not suff er from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not real ly separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instincti ve union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found. -Bertrand Russell

A Wrong Beginning (?) The above two quotes have not been included by accident. These two quotes succin ctly depict our deepest values regarding what we, the members of WNES, want out of life and correspondingly want to realize through our organization. What it me ans will be presently discussed. Let us look back at the generation one-step behind us, that is our parents; we f ind that they strove to provide for us the best education they were capable of p roviding. The best education in our country culminates in English medium schools . We never knew why we were attending these institutions and in fact, only few peo ple know even now. Many, in fact most, will rationalize that agonizing experienc e as a necessary step towards a good life, a better job, a better home, a better car-typical dreams fed by the advertising industry. With all the palliatives provided by our society, we fail to realize that we had been living a life, which philosophically can be said to be an alienated life . In fact, our life took a wrong turn right at the beginning. It is no wonder that the best memories of our schools that remain with us are th at of our times spent with friends and teachers, i.e. humanistic relations; not with the pleasure derived from learning anything. In fact, there is not a single memory that is associated with the pleasure of learning. This pain can be rationalized with no pain, no gain . However, it must be pointed o ut to those defenders that they did not choose the school. They were made to go there. They rationalize the experience because it is very painful to acknowledge

that the bulk of their lives took a wrong turn right at the beginning. As if that is not a tragedy enough, the alienation of life does not end with the e nd of school. It only grips us in all spheres of life, slowly but surely, like a sarcoma that remains with us until we are dead. A faint but delicate sense of u nhappiness, pain, frustration, and purposelessness haunts us throughout our life as it haunted the character Faust in the epic poem by Goethe or as it did Franz K. in Kafka s classic novel The Trial . Being so haunted, the best of us seek solace in good grades, a good job, a secur ed life, a happy family, and the worst of us in alcoholism and other forms of in toxication. As we near death, we realize that our life has not turned out to be as we dreamt it would be and so we project our unfulfilled dreams and aspiration s to our children thus renewing the cycle of alienated life again. However, we are straying from the topic; the point is that we receive education the wrong way and we use it for the wrong purposes, one of them being solely ear ning money. The U-Turn (?!) Are we, then, a bunch of anarchists mocking the institution named school, perhap s because our school life was not to so sweet, as some might suggest? No. We are not anarchists. Moreover, we definitely are not mocking the school. H owever, we are deeply concerned with the above cycle of life. We are here to take a u-turn and to teach others to take a u-turn too so that th ey begin to live an un-alienated life at least in the sphere of education and lear ning. The question is what is wrong with the present system? Let us see if we can find out the answers: Present system of education starts with no goal in mind. Thus, the kid has no id ea why he is learning these myriads of facts. (S)He learns only in expectation o f rewards or in fear of punishments. In fact, reward and punishment is the only way to motivate people when they have no idea of the intrinsic worth of their ac tivity. Moreover, when people have no idea of the intrinsic worth of their actio n, when they cannot relate to the material emotionally, they will only feel unin terested and in that case reward and punishment is the only system to keep them moving. This system seems fit to motivate a cow to plough a land, the significan ce of which it is unaware. To use another analogy, one fine morning, the kids ar e taken at the bottom of a pyramid and they are made to climb it to the top by m eans of reward and punishment. They do not know why they should do it but carry on nevertheless only to find that at the top there is little time left of their life and in the final days they seek compensation for the lost time in money, wi fe, and children. Present education system teaches us to use our knowledge as a means for earning money-not to learn, not to explore. Question might arise: what is wrong with tha t? Is not money necessary? Yes. But, and here it will become clear why we spent a long time explaining the concept of alienation, the kids earned the education in an alienated fashion, i.e. something not related to their emotional life, and so when they grow up they use the education solely for earning money, their cre ative faculties being totally numbed by that time. Uninterested knowledge spent in an uninteresting way. Exploration and research is left to specialists and pro fessors while the kids, now grown up, keep working like cows. Present education teaches us to be self-centered. Right from the beginning of sc hool, we are made to need to compete -in grades, in conduct, in attitude. This s ounds more like a large-scale industry where the teachers are the quality contro llers; the students are the automatons, and the job market the buyer of the auto matons. The teachers ensure that automatons with the right attitude (competitive ness, self-centeredness, obsessive), with the right grades and the right conduct (docile, unoriginal in thinking, numbed) are produced, ready to be dragged by t heir nose by illusions of happiness in self-centered activities. Present education system nurtures no feeling of curiosity-the driving force of h

umanity and provides no enthusiasm for the learners, no urge to drive humanity f orward. Present education has no connection with prevailing social reality or with the s tate of the world. The learners have no idea where their society is or where it is going. By the time they finish their institutional education, they have no id ea where in the world they stand. In confusion, they run for security in a job. If a person is not aware of where his society is, has no adequate sense of reali ty, he cannot contribute anything for the progress of society to take it further towards next stage of social evolution. Present education system is here to maintain a status quo of existing social sys tems. Therefore, if we look into the psyche of a grown-up person nurtured in the prese nt education system, we will find a self-centered, insecure individual restlessl y in pursuit of activities which (s)he thinks will make him/her happy. (S)he stu dies hard, attains good grades, finds a secured job, acquires a spouse on equal financial terms with him/her, procreates and finally rests in peace. Was this in dividual happy? According to the above quotes, and therefore according to any hu manistic philosophy, no. Why? Because they did nothing to relate to humanity, le ft no legacy for humankind, spent all their life looking for happiness in the wr ong places, and died seeking compensation in money, luxury, and vanity for the l oss of right to live as a human being. As can be seen, the present education imbues us with values, which are in direct contrast to the values expressed in the above-mentioned quotes. The objection might be raised that Viktor Frankl and Bertrand Russell cannot be the sole autho rity on dictating what a happy life consists of. The answer is that, these quote s have been used because they express with the perfect words what great minds ha ve been shouting to us from all corners of the globe. Rabindranath Tagore in his book The Religion of Man , Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 , Spinoza in his Ethics , and Erich Fromm in his To Have or To Be echoes the same message. Why Are We Here (?) Our Core Values Learning by doing/ learning practically by top-down approach Learning on the basis of the learner s interest Learning the final limit of knowledge acquired by humankind in a particular fiel d Carrying the knowledge forward through research, invention, or improvement of so mething existing in WNES laboratories Learn the most pleasurable way A word of caution: the core values are our guiding star but we have to implement it in every way. Because, ultimately the content of the core value does not mat ter much; what matters is that how consistently we are implementing the core val ues. They should constantly keep us on the move and we must keep improving in ev ery possible way by Kaizen thus preventing us from degenerating. These are not just random statements. Rather these five core points will be the guiding star of this organization for the next 100 years. To aim for 100 years is not a utopia. Our plan is to extend the above five point s to all disciplines such as physics, telecommunications, geology, space researc h, computer science, economics, sociology, mathematics and so on. These are not just sterile subjects. The limits of knowledge will keep advancing and so will o ur plans to introduce them to the learners. Besides, building state of the art l aboratories for all disciplines is also a challenging job for us, which surely w ill prevent us from declining into a moneymaking organization. Rather, as Bertra nd Russell put it above, we will be in touch with humanity. Methods of teaching which will provide pleasure will also be a matter of researc h for us and thus keep us on the move always. Most importantly, we will create generations after generations of learners who w ill learn with the utmost pleasure what they are interested in, who will learn e verything practically, and who will (with their originality and creativity) crea te something in our laboratories, which will be the final frontier of their fiel

d. They will truly be happy citizens of the universe and creating generations afte r generations of happy citizens of the universe is our way of relating to the worl d and humanity at large.