R is for Religion

            We had a puja  in our school last Saturday, a veritable Satyanarain katha with a hawan (a telling of the story of the god Vishnu, with a fire sacrifice). It was an off-day for students and only the teaching and non-teaching staff attended. The occasion was the beginning of the new academic year, to humbly commit ourselves to do our best in all our endeavours, and to grow and prosper through our hard work. In Hinduism this is called a Sankalp, a resolution. 

 

            The ceremony was rather charming with its bright colours, flowers, fruits, banana leaves, gleaming pots and platters, camphor, basil, an array of pastes and powders, milk and water, and the sacred kush grass tied around the jajman's (sacrifier or patron's) finger and offers of all the food, milk and water above repeatedly to the deities. 

 

            The deities were more charming still in their aestheticism: a Ganesh made of rice and betel nut, a Lakshmi made of a coconut, a Vishnu who was a round, smooth stone, the shaligram. They were duly welcomed and their feet washed and cooled. They were offered flowers, scent, fruit, drink, betel leaves, and all propitiations of hospitality. They were our guests. 

 

            The priest was young, educated, smart. He read and recited well and kept our attention. His narration was familiar, the story of various humans who had misjudged and erred, and were then made aware that they could simply worship Vishnu, listen to his katha or story and do a simple ceremony such as we were doing. The kata is a slice of the history of Hinduism in the many chapters of which different deities vie with each other to assert their status among the laity. The priest, priding himself on his modernity, gave a twist to the story several times, connecting it to the present, such as the merchant being advised that his goods' "market value" would increase if he only worshipped right. 

 

            In short, the priest, as a proper messenger of the gods, conveyed that every individual, of whichever caste or class, could achieve success if they made the sankalp or resolution to do so, and also hosted the gods periodically with wise hospitality. The school itself, similar to an individual, would benefit in its work. 

 

            The question in today's post is the possible value that 'religion' could have for children. I began with our own puja to suggest (somewhat slyly) that as long as institutions are run by humans, there can be no escape from 'contamination' by the need for faith, ritual, philosophy and morality. Our teachers are thoroughly secular, yet all of them voted for the puja, including the non-Hindus, when we thought of a ritual to articulate our commitment to hard work and right action. 

 

Nor can there be an escape from religion if you socialize and if you educate, that is, if you expose your child to any knowledge at all. It may sound like a great idea to save your child from conflictual and adult preoccupations, to somehow bring up children all pure and innocent of the troubling concepts of "the other," Heaven and Hell, sin and punishment. And truly they are adult preoccupations. As are the very concept of God, or Gods, of sacred place or temple, of sacraments and rituals, of praying and confessing, and of right and wrong. 

 

            Like everything in the adult world, however, children have to be taught all this, and like everything, they can be taught it better or worse. The better way is when they are taught religion as a "cultural system." A term coined by Clifford Geertz, a silver-tongued anthropologist, it means more than it suggests. A cultural system is complete and self-explanatory in itself. It uses its own logic that is as impeccable as any other system's. All cultural systems are equal in their logic and complexity. All cultural systems are random and arbitrary. All include a common sense, an epistemology, an ethics, a mythology (or several), and a cosmogony. 

 

            Think of the riches available. Children wonder at everything and need to know how anything and everything came to be, how it works, how it ends (the Brahma, the Vishnu and the Mahesh—for Hindus). And what would happen if something bad happened. And how wonderful everything is, but also how fragile. How scary and how delightful.  

 

Teachers need to mine the mythology of many religions, as much as they can handle (and work on increasing their capacities all the time). They need to distance themselves from their own faith when presenting it, and others' faiths, and teach the processes of doing so. Thus they can achieve three valuable ends with the help of religion. One, to draw the children into academic excellence by using vast storehouses of stories teeming with fascinating characters. Two, to use religion to further Critical Thinking, a job done for the Rama story by many, including Narendra Kohli with a Marxist interpretation, Ishan Shankar with an interpretation that addresses children's questions, and our own NIRMAN's "Ramlila Project" that taught environmental consciousness. Three, because this will be done for many religions, children will actually learn to become tolerant and civic-minded. 

 

            Our school puts in its Calendar the celebration, called "Party", for the major festival(s) of six religions: Hinduism (Holi, Diwali and Dasehra); Christianity (Christmas and Easter); Islam (Id ul Fitr and Moharram); Sikhism (Guru Nanak Jayanti); Buddhism (Buddha Jayanti) and—the religion of Secular Nationalism (Independence Day and Republic Day). We are happy partying and learning enthusiastically the whole year long.  

 

            R is for Races. Neither the belief in Races, as in Negroid, Caucasian, Mongoloid, and so on, nor the practice of Racism based on these divisions, is familiar to Indians. No paperwork in India asks for one's 'Race' and no identity politics is based on Race. Nor are  there signs, thankfully, of the concepts or politics appearing in the Indian public sphere, as do many of the least progressive practices of the West.  

 

            There is another kind of Race, however, that Indians believe in whole-heartedly,. This is the race with the age cohort. Right from Pre-School, parents want their children to be 'first'. The practice of establishing ranks of first, second, third is an entrenched one in academics, and it spills over into every other terrain. If a Progressive School tries to eschew competition, all but a few parents will break with the school.  

 

            Nor can one wholly blame them. The careers of adults have to be built on one competition after another, starting with the race to get into a course of study, moving on to succeed in the degree, getting through the exam for a service, vying for a top position….and on and on. Newspapers in India are full of advertisements for how to run the race for success, and cityscapes bristle with billboards and posters for the same. 

 

            Since a school cannot change all of society, and certainly cannot fight it singlehandedly, it has to tread a fine line between teaching children to be rooted in worthwhile work for its own sake, and giving them a momentum to excel in whatever they are doing by looking over their shoulders at others.  

 

            R is also for Roald Dahl and Reggio Emilia, two stalwarts in children's imaginative worlds. Dahl has created characters who battle the adult world, and he draws no lines in insisting that children are the smarter, wiser, and more gifted of the two. Indeed, his adults are satirical commentaries on all that adults do with children that is wrong. His books, particularly Matilda, The BFG, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, among many others, are classics and also huge Hollywood productions. Matilda has just re-appeared as a classy Musical that is a paean to childhood and good schooling. 

 

            Reggio Emilia, a town near Rome, Italy, has set up a powerful model of the use of art in children's education. Amazingly, the Municipality of the city showed the perspicacity to go all out in exploring the world of children's imagination in both philosophy and practice. One is humbled on reading about their use of design, ateliers, the respect for environment and their belief in the verbal and non-verbal languages of children, and in children leading their own growth. Our own school can only strive to follow the Reggio Emilia philosophy to a small extent, as we can with Montessori and Dewey. Their values, in the words of their founder Loris Malaguzzi, bear repeating. 

 

"To make a lovable school, industrious, inventive, liveable, documentable and communicable, a place of research, learning, re-cognition and reflection, where children, teachers and families feel well - is our point of arrival." 

 

  

 

              

Nita Kumar

Hon. Director, NIRMAN

N 1/70 Nagwa, Varanasi, India

Brown Family Professor Emerita of S Asian History

Claremont McKenna College, CA 91711

Read my blog! https://nitakumar.wordpress.com/