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Natural Learning Process - by Jinan
While I was in the process of developing exercises and activities to help children learn pottery, I was intrigued by the way with which the master potters arrive at a form. I wondered how the things they make could be so beautiful. I was keen to know what guides them to arrive at a particular form. Mulling over it for several days I realized that there is a biological assistance that guides our sense of beauty. People undefiled by modern ways are far more open and receptive to this biological guidance.
This internal capacity and the external natural systems collaborate in some manner to produce a distinct aesthetic quality to their lives. The rural, tribal or non literate communities seem to act holistically endowing an aesthetic quality to their every act. What we understand as culture is a result of this collaboration. It is clear that in modernity this cultural distinction is totally absent. Therefore the modern artist, architect or a designer anywhere appears to be creating with a uniform and almost regimented aesthetic sense.
This insight opened up a complete new dimension in my search to understand the traditional and indigenous knowledge systems. In fact, delving a little further into the biological aspect of knowledge, I soon realized that all the games children play in the villages is a kind of a response to their biological needs. The idea of developing a curriculum for the children itself stood challenged. That is when I stumbled upon the do nothing training method. This method accepts the fact each child is creative and intelligent and therefore the need is only to initiate a process by which the trainees get inspired to use their subdued potential in creating and unfolding what nature has in store for them. Children in natural learning cultures are similar to any newborn living being and nature has its own precious pace to make them grow.
Senses therefore play a very important role in the process of learning and are a sort of a reciprocal device that helps creation establish communion with the inner self. All the games children play in these communities has to do with sensitizing the senses, planning, balancing, guessing, developing the mathematical sense etc.
This is the process of knowing the world.
In the traditional societies every situation is a learning situation. Here to live means to learn. It was a rhythm followed from birth to death. If we consider knowledge to be a biological response to sustain life, then the present level of estrangement between man and nature is unimaginable. How could knowledge and destruction go hand in hand to the extent that the very survival of the earth now edges on the brink of cessation? Knowledge, devoid of the biological content fostered the grounds for depredation. As I closely observe the primal ways of the indigenous people I find every connective tissue an extension of nature. Their dwellings, their artifacts all seem sprouted from the earth. Inspiringly concordant like the bird - the branch – nest- the twigs. It is imperative that we re-institute the traditional knowledge systems and restore the earth its pristinity.
The more I reflect upon, the more I see the diametrically opposite direction in which education has led us from nature. ‘Western’ no longer confines to the west. The ripples of western knowledge have far reaching consequences. Their world view or the lack of it has proved catastrophic to the entire humankind.
In a particular region with specific climatic, geographic and ecological conditions a particular life form emerges and survives. Similarly knowledge must evolve naturally without any external thrust of shammed theories and counter theories. The fundamental difference, in the evolution of knowledge systems in the modern and traditional cultures is about revering nature in its totality. Indigenous cultures have for generations honored nature’s sanctity and their quest for knowledge was armored with tools of intuition, sensitivity and creativity which bestowed a sense of un-intrusive and peaceful existence to every pulsating entity.
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