Trustees of the canvas

Premlata Puri

"And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
-The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

The child is a clean slate on which parents, teachers, society write his destiny. The teacher is like the potter who can mould the child's personality as the potter makes pots from clay.

However, it is pertinent to note that the design and shape of each piece of pottery is dictated by the quality of the soil (raw material), the traditional designs, motifs and cultural aesthetic norms of the region (history and environment), as also the size of the wheel and the speed at which it rotates and the temperature at which the pottery is baked in the kiln (science and technology). Thus the potter has only a limited but important role in the final production.

Many cliches about the relationship between child and teachers are true to some extent. Where does a state of being a child begin and end? The child has all the feelings, emotions and characteristics of a mature being such as love, anger, remorse, warmth, jealousy and tolerance. Some of these attributes/characteristics are inherited through biological genes, and I strongly feel, also through the circle of births and deaths - through the accumulated Sanskara. Some are acquired, assimilated from the family, community and the immediate social environment of growing up. Some are developed through education and some are the choice of the young adult.

Photograph courtesy Centre for Cultural Resources and Training

Though education begins in the womb, however, let us start from the time of birth. Health care of the infant must provide the foundation for his life-long physical, emotional and spiritual health.

The child's first response to tactile sensory perceptions is an important stage in its education where all the emotions are felt and subconsciously all the values imbibed along with physical sustenance. Modern scientists have also accepted this ancient wisdom that not only the health but the thoughts, the feelings of the mother are passed on to the child at this stage as well as when he is in the womb.

At the same age and also at a later stage, the family - mother, father, siblings form part of childhood learning to communicate, to share and accept. After this stage, the child steps out into the community, the physical environment, the streets, the parks, the market place, and learns to deal with other human beings as well as nature.

The relation between culture, environment and education cannot be studied in isolation. The educational system should make the young aware of the social environment in which they live and their obligation to become useful, productive citizens.

Photograph courtesy Centre for Cultural Resources and Training

Scholars have advised that learning with the arts helps to teach a unit of the curriculum. For example, in the unit on the freedom movement in India, the traditional school text books describe certain key events and dates that put the freedom movement in our historical perspective. Most likely the text may include speeches of freedom fighters and nation builders. The teacher collects the texts of songs of that period and these songs, when taught create bonds - between the past and the present through an artistic activity. Learning through the arts is also a successful means of teaching whereby, in the same example given above, the speeches of the freedom fighters can be dramatised as also some events of the freedom struggle can be recreated by the children to help them express their understanding in a vibrant form.

Integrating arts with education has a positive affect on increasing the self-esteem of a student. Learning and teaching become more enjoyable as students share their works and ideas thus achieving more in the allowed time to study a particular discipline.

Arts also encourages team work leading to abilities to live in harmony with, first the group and then the community.

The discipline which is required in creating art work gives a sense of empowerment to students and teachers as, the conscious coming together of faculties and emotions, dedication required in creating art works, provides skills for working independently and interpendently.

Photograph courtesy Centre for Cultural Resources and Training

The arts in education also deepen the teachers awareness of the children's learning abilities or disabilities thereby providing a variety of methods for teaching as well as assessment. For example, a child who often shows aggressive and harsh tendencies towards his classmates may be encouraged to take to music or poetry writing where the tenderness of his spirit which was being suppressed is given freedom to flower, changing his personality.

In the Indian situation, the arts in education also reflect the cultural diversity and plurality of each locale or region making the child understand the reasons for diversity. Teachers see the artistic manifestations of a particular region as a core element to develop curriculum. Students can be introduced to voices, images, feelings and ideas of a group of people. As the "arts" lend themselves to self-expression, they can be integrated into curriculum disciplines to study dramatic struggles, achievements, celebrations and complexities of people living on this earth.

It is amazing to see how students start to communicate first with the teachers who use creative and innovative methodologies for integrating local artistic traditions with curriculum teaching. The concept of extra curricula is what needs to be looked into. This term was introduced in the colonial period as foreigners could not understand that, to an Indian, art and culture are interwoven into his daily chores and express moral, ethical, physical and aesthetic values. It was presumed by the Britishers that "Art" is peripheral to life hence, when you have the spare time you may "indulge" in these "leisure time" activities. It is only in the recent decades that the educational system has taken cognisance of the fact that creative activities in classroom education and learning arts and crafts to provide a cultural component in curriculum teaching not only achieves the desired goals, for the development of the human being but also improves communication skills, increases the concentration span and sharpens the intellect - all of these which help in the allround improvement at the academic land.

Photograph courtesy Centre for Cultural Resources and Training

An important method of creative, innovative teaching is the use of storytelling forms and other local narratives for audio-visual communication in the classroom. The original audio-visuals are perhaps India's painted scrolls, the stories of which are narrated through sound and movement - each region having its own particular mode of communicating such stories. These narrative forms, use a certain language of gesture and music to enthrall audiences continuously for many evenings or nights involving them in the story content. The technique of traditional narration has proved to be a useful teaching aid, where the teachers and children collaborate to write story content, prepare visuals and narration relevant to either a school discipline or issues related to environmental degradation or social evils.

One of the most intriguing features of India is the great harmony between man and nature. The attitude towards the study of the environment, both natural and manmade, has resulted in living in harmony with one's inner self.

Children need to be informed of the concern for the environment in Indian culture. In many parts of the country, before felling one tree the community will plant 10-18 trees to the accompaniment of music and dance. Each day one tree is planted.

Educators today realise the role of education for fulfilment of the cultural needs of mankind. Into the syllabus are woven the study of the environment and its influence on creativity form part of formal and non-formal education.

Photograph courtesy Centre for Cultural Resources and Training

The oral traditions, or the non physical aspects of culture comprise the whole body of literary and performing traditions which are passed on by word of mouth even today. Studies from the epics of heroes, mythical figures are dramatised, sung, danced and narrated by traditional storytellers, geneologists and others and are even sculpted and painted on walls or scrolls.

Today, these traditional forms of communication are being used as aids to education in schools. Modern concepts in education need to be taught by using traditional methods which have in them inherent aesthetic qualities and a message to communicate, usually based on social and moral values. These traditional media are region specific and are familiar to the child of the locality.

Mothers also have a major role as transmitters and disseminators of culture. They have taught moral and aesthetic values in the community. In the formal education and literacy campaigns, girls have lagged behind in many developing countries. This can be remedied if women artisans and traditional performers are brought into the schools as instructors. Teachers should identify such women in their localities and bring them into the fold of the formal education system. This will also encourage girls to attend schools where, due to social or cultural barriers they are not allowed to do so, specially where there are only male teachers.

One would like to suggest a study into the -
- methodologies and innovative ways of education
- means of developing the inner being of the young,
- use of creative energy of the young for moving onto a more fulfilling young adulthood,
- provision of the environment which allows one to develop the skills and techniques that help in the integrated growth of the person (spiritual, emotional and physical).

As a person who has worked with students from all economic and social strata with physical and mental abilities of varying degrees, one has found that as far as interactive skills, creative talents, etc. are concerned, there are no children that could be categorised as better or worse in creativity. The imagination, the ability to create and the wonder of the degree of stylisation, sophistication; lies hidden in every young being. In some, it may have been suppressed due to environmental circumstances so it takes a good teacher, time to scratch the surface and bring to light the talents that lie just below the conscious level of the child. In rare cases, the child has been suppressed to a degree where he becomes so passive that it takes great effort to make him communicative his creative ways.

Take a child with a small bamboo in his hand - it becomes a flute, it becomes a support for the old man he is imitating, it becomes the horse that he holds between his legs and starts galloping - in his imagination the child creates the whole world out of practically nothing, and in this creativity his intellect, his communicative skills, his introduction to "art" begin to grow. It is only the culture of the mechanised battery toy that has suppressed the child's creativity and today it is largely the inert unthinking passive young that sit before the television which, produces programmes that do not involve any intellectual or creative capacity of the child. This leads to the complete suppression of the growth of the inner being of the child.

The Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT) is a premier institution which has done a great deal of research, field work and evaluation for cultural inputs in formal and non-formal education.

Ajay Lall

In the first instance it was at the advice of experts and scholars to orient in service teachers to the new dimensions of creative and innovative teaching methodologies; to use artistic and cultural manifestations as a base for integrating various disciplines of the schools for creating an understanding and appreciation of the beauty and aesthetics inherent in cultural traditions prevalent in all parts of the country; to use the creative expressions to enhance classroom teaching.

Simultaneously reaching the child directly through camps, workshops, using all possible means to bring them out of the classroom, and use the cultural and natural environment for imparting education has worked wonders for the child. Workshops/ camps which would bring out the creative talents of children have successfully been organised.

For example, while teaching a particular craft, the child discovers his inner potential to be able to design, create and produce an object of beauty of utility and, while doing so, the child understands from the teacher how this act of production is part of his heritage.

Working with students all over the country conducting painting competitions, one has noticed that certain issues related to pollution, natural calamities such as earthquakes, floods, or other common themes in painting show certain similarities even in style. However, any other work done by children are very region-specific influenced by the local environment and lifestyle.

The large number of young students that has been covered under the programmes of CCRT and other such organisations have proved that much of our cultural activities are as relevant today as they were many centuries ago. These teaching and learning centres outside the schools which provide a wider spectrum of knowledge inculcate in the child a sense of fulfilment in learning.

To take a child or a group of children to the museum which was previously only considered as a storehouse of artifacts is an experience which can be fulfilling and fruitful if both the museum and the school come together as partners in the imparting of education. In the museums, the children select particular objects displayed and come up with a variety of exercises such as poetry writing, writing descriptive scripts to enact the stories told by the objects displayed, or of the period in history from which the object is being shown; use body language and gestures to express the emotions expressed in the object; take pen and paper or clay to draw or sculpt what they have seen - these are only a few of the exercises or activities that lead the child to understand the multi-disciplinary approach in creative expressions and how there are integrated into curriculum teaching.

Dilip Sinha

As a follow-up the same children work with the economically or physically deprived students and motivate them to express their creative talents. Thus bringing together the youth of different social strata in learning and teaching situations. There is no joy greater in the life of a child than interaction with his peers.

Certain institutions specialise only in the education of children with hearing, speech or visual disabilities. These children require special attention according to their needs. The experience of working with children of certain disabilities has been in itself a learning experience for people like us. Through movement, mime and visual rhythm one has been able to take the hearing impaired out of their silent world to learn to communicate with as much joy as any other child. Using the mudras of Indian dance forms such as Kathakali, Bharatanatyam, the gesture language has imparted a new vocabulary for communication.

The other important centres of learning are the historical monuments strewn all over the country which leads one into the past and brings alive whole dynastic rules and stories related to the particular monument. The study of architectural style is also intriguing to the students and again, since this is an excursion trip out of the school, the learning experience has far greater impact.

The child today is aware of his surroundings and it is only with the efforts of a good teacher that children can be brought together to understand the evils that have crept into society and how they can be eradicated. Today's youth when motivated, have taken up the mission to fight for social evils. In my personal experience children who have been inspired have immediately gone home and influenced parents and elders on such issues.

Let us all - teachers, adults, parents, social workers bring the child face to face with his Divinity, let his inner being vibrate to the music and sounds in nature and in the cosmos, and then wait and watch for the young mind to unfold to all that is good and beautiful in the world. Let him reach out to the stars and experience the wonder of the universe.

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