TEACHER AS AN INDICATOR.
Posted by bmhegde on 1
“You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw.
“Art,” wrote Henry David Thoreau “is that which makes another human being’s day”; that which, in some measure, enhances the quality of the day for the other person. On the contrary, Gurudev Tagore, in his American lecture series, (compiled and published posthumously) goes into the depths of the question as to what art is all about. In the bargain, he gives his own interpretation and brings in the old cliché “art for art’s sake” into the broad definition of art. Both are right. Art could have as a wide a definition as is the expanse of the human imagination! The fine art of teaching is, therefore, an effort to make the “day” for the student: to stimulate, to motivate, to encourage, empathizing and cajoling the latter to learn for himself/herself. The student should eventually deliver; the teacher should only act as a midwife facilitating that delivery. It is time for us teachers to search our hearts and see if we fit the bill here. Most of us, most of the time, deliver (lectures) ourselves in the class!
Having been brought up in the conventional teaching-learning experiences that we all, per force, went through, thanks to the Macaulay type of education, we had to suffer labour pains of our own delivery. We deliver lectures, mostly, copied from the textbooks. Most of the books are planned with a hidden agenda. Recent revelations showed that medical textbooks in the west are written with drug company money. Naturally those books will make the doctors “disease mongers”. Some of us teachers remain the same all through our lives. Our personal notes, many of them in print, written years ago, serve as the basis of our teaching! God help those students of such illustrated teachers. Every teacher should grow. Real growth is change with experience. Learning by experience is called Anubhooti, a fascinating word in the Sanskrit language that denotes real growth. A teacher needs to have anubhooti and not just anubhava. The very definition of life in the Oxford dictionary is ceaseless change until death. If that were so every teacher has to change for the better everyday, learning en route from his/her experience.
On a personal note, although I had learnt a lot from my parents and teachers, I have been learning a lot more from my students and patients, in the last five decades. They have been teaching me things that I had never had a chance to learn from books, teachers, or even the literature! I am much better off, thanks to the latter. I shall narrate some of my experiences in the following few lines. I have always tried my best to keep an open mind on everything and never be judgmental. That has helped me a lot. I used to teach the conventional way in the beginning but soon realized that students were learning the right way in spite of me. Then I concentrated only on the methodology without wasting much time on factual data as the latter change very fast anyway. As per the Medline figures new information pours in at a phenomenal rate of seven per cent per month in the medical field through some forty five thousand odd journals. Naturally the textbooks are out of date before they leave the press! Then I went into the jungle of medical and science literature. I soon realized to my dismay that the world of literature is like a wild jungle with, of course, the rose woods sprinkled in the midst of millions of dead wood and useless timber along with deadly snakes and predators. I needed some one to guide me there and many of my mentors were there to give a helping hand at the right time. I had to learn the hard way but many books also helped me enormously. To cite only a few that still linger in the association area of the brain, here is a sample.
* Talking Sense by Richard Asher.
* Limits to Science by Peter Medawar.
* Role of medicine by Thomas McKevan.
* The Lives of a cell by Thomas Lewis.
* Textbook of Medicine by Sir William Osler (1905)
* Talking with Patients by Prof. Calnan.
* Science without Sense by Steven Milloy.
* Anatomy of an illness by Norman Cousins.
* Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich.
* Chaos-a new science in the making. James Gleick.
* The new Paradigm by John Bockris.
* In search of Schrödinger’s cat by John Gibran.
* Occult Chemistry by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant.
* Flanagan’s Version by Denis Flanagan.
* The Republic by Plato.
* On Doctoring by John Stone et. al
* Tao of Physics by Fritoff Capra and many more.
Every teacher, I feel, should be an indicator, one who could point out the faults in any system and try to highlight the same for the benefit of the students. Student is a novice who tries to get into the jungle of information in his area of interest and will find it almost impossible to get to the rose wood and the teak in that jungle. He might, instead, get lost in the dead wood and the textbooks masaala to somehow get the degree that seems to be the be all and end all of education in the present scenario. Indicators could share their joys and sorrows with the novice learner to guide him smoothly and quickly to the rose wood without having to waste his/her time among the dead wood. The teacher also should learn to take the wheat from the chaff in the world overloaded with information where knowledge seems to have taken a back seat and wisdom (attention to one’s own brain) seems to be missing! Of course, it is not easy. “Free man is, by necessity, insecure: thinking man is, by necessity, uncertain” wrote Erich Fromm years ago and this seems to be an eternal truth.
“Knowledge advances, not by repeating known facts, but by refuting false dogmas” was Karl Popper’s certain view. Indicators should be able to point out the myths to be demolished for the progress of human knowledge and wisdom. Every field of human endeavour abounds in myths, teaching science and medicine is no exception. The powers-that-be in every country seem to have a blind faith in anything that is labeled as science. Society seems to have given science a clean chit due to the worldly comforts that emanated from early scientific discoveries. Telephones, electricity, transportation modes, building capacity, rockets and missiles, nuclear bombs and many other wonders that came from science made science respectable. Consequently, no one dared to question the basis of present day science, least of all the science teachers. Science teaching has become dull and monotonous. It is time for science teachers to be indicators as there are many areas where science, with its connections to money and power, has brought misery to mankind. The environmental pollution, dangerous wars, ingenious methods of terrorism, iatrogenic deadly diseases, unemployment in many areas, and even poverty, to some extent, have some indirect connection to the so called scientific development.
Let us examine the present strong pillars of science to see how strong and solid they are. The Big Bang, origin and evolution of the human species, the relativity theory and, quantum mechanics are those four pillars. Reductionism and statistics are the pillars of medical science and biology. Darwin’s theory of evolution is found wanting in many areas. Evolution inside a species is different from evolution of a new species; a bird from a fish, for example. The latter needs thousands of biochemical reactions that individually will have no survival advantage when the ultimate new species arrives by accident.
The relativity theory, first developed by a German physicist,
Lorenz along with the French mathematician, Poincare, had a significant contribution also from the famous Irish mathematician, Fitzgerald. Albert Einstein, the deified guru of physics, had very little to do with it. Einstein, however, had contributed immensely to Brownian movement, photoelectric effect and movement of ions in solutions. Einstein giving away his Nobel Prize money to his first wife, whom he had divorced by then, gives credence to the view, held by some close confidents, that the original Nobel paper of Einstein did have his wife’s name as the first author, which must have disappeared later. Many have doubted if he had plagiarized her work!
The assumption in the theory that there is same velocity of light independent of the direction of measurement with respect to the motion of the earth has recently been found to be inconsistent. The jewel in the crown of physics, the quantum theory, does not seem to have much connection to reality. We still do not have answers to questions like a) what is a wave function? b) In the Schrödinger’s equation what are the waves “of” and what are the waves “in”? and c) what is an electron?
The basic problem in the theory of evolution would be, if we accept that there is no design and there is no teleology as sold by the scientific establishment, it would be difficult to explain the prior existence of the DNA! The accepted laws of chemistry need chance collisions between simpler constituents. Darwin’s book Descent of Man makes it mandatory for us to discount any design. Richard Dawkin’s book The Blind Watchmaker makes an effort to whitewash these questions! Lamarck must have had his last laugh in his grave when he came to know that rats developed diabetes following destruction of their pancreas by drugs: they then passed the disease on to their offspring’s-evolution through inheritance of acquired characteristics-Lamarckism.
Statistics and linear laws of deterministic predictability have failed medical science so badly that a recent audit in the USA showed the medical establishment and its interventions as the first and the leading cause of death in that country, followed by cancer and heart attacks in that order. “Time has come”, the Walrus said, “to talk of many things”.
Teachers must wake up to get into the dense jungle of science and try to get the best out of it for their students. Teachers should be indicators for education to change. Students should be encouraged to develop the scientific temper, the ability to organize one’s curiosity to unravel the mysteries of Nature with logical skepticism. Blind faith in anything is superstition and should be shunned by students. This is more urgently needed in the field of science teaching although it applies equally well to humanities. Whatever man does, science or no science, should not hurt mankind. Long live the sacred institution of teaching and learning.
“No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson.”