Narain Shiv Ji might not be aware about what I am trying to say about him. After almost decades it looks like a fading memory of a man that was unusually mannered unexpectedly knowledgeable and had a flare of keeping up to the values like commitment, loyalty, dedication and integrity.
It was very unusual to see someone working in federal govt department branch office as a cleaning and washing in-charge with these unique characteristics for me and I had a feeling of respect and appreciation for a man with values in those days.
Unfortunately people took him like just another janitor or a cleaning man and treated him the way a janitor is treated here in the society. They kept their safe distance and never dared sharing a meal or tea, even shaking hands was not acceptable.
I used to wonder why we still cant discover the real meaning of life and humanity in this century and I used to laugh at their behavior towards this man.
I was an early bird in the office and arrived at the time when Narain was sweeping the office and the air was filled with dust. I just walked past that dust quietly, never letting Narian know I am there and went inside my room and stayed there till Narian finished and sweeping and the moping the floor.
One day he asked me after finishing his morning job, when did I come into my room as it was all full of dust and no one dared walking past into the office during the cleaning time. I said I walked passed him earlier but he was busy and I didn't want to disturb him and he was shocked. He said everyone asks him to stop for a while so that they can walk past him into the office but only I was the one who never told him to stop. It was never a problem form me to do that everyday. But Narain was surprised and when I stood up hugged him and shook his hand and asked him to sit on the chair he was overwhelmed. He told me with his teary eyes that it never happened to him in last 30 years of his job. No one even want him to sit on the chair and no one ever stayed close and long enough to talk to him about him and his life.
After talking to him for a while I discovered that I found a man with dignity and integrity holding on to the typical sub continent cultural values and traditions like my own forefathers. Afterwards I used to sit with Narain Shiv Ji during my free time at work and after working hours. Learning those traditional ethics and family values, respect of elders and relationships. How they transferred those wonderful values of life heart from heart and sat down with their children on regular basis telling them stories of their elders and ancestors, letting them know who they were and how they used to cope with life. They gradually made their offspring learn those moral values and manners along with the family trade. No one was looking for work after growing up to the age where a man is required to be making a living for himself and the family because they learned the trick of those values like commitment dedication time management loyalty and justice from their forefathers true stories and learned how to become a great professional as well and joined family trade from an early age.
Rest of the people at our work place were surprised first, when we sat down on the floor, talking and sometimes in the backyard grass for hours sipping tea. Sometimes we shared meal as well and gradually others started joining us in our conversation.
They disagreed with the concept that there was no need for the education in schools, colleges and universities specially for the purpose of becoming a money making machine.
It was very unusual to see someone working in federal govt department branch office as a cleaning and washing in-charge with these unique characteristics for me and I had a feeling of respect and appreciation for a man with values in those days.
Unfortunately people took him like just another janitor or a cleaning man and treated him the way a janitor is treated here in the society. They kept their safe distance and never dared sharing a meal or tea, even shaking hands was not acceptable.
I used to wonder why we still cant discover the real meaning of life and humanity in this century and I used to laugh at their behavior towards this man.
I was an early bird in the office and arrived at the time when Narain was sweeping the office and the air was filled with dust. I just walked past that dust quietly, never letting Narian know I am there and went inside my room and stayed there till Narian finished and sweeping and the moping the floor.
One day he asked me after finishing his morning job, when did I come into my room as it was all full of dust and no one dared walking past into the office during the cleaning time. I said I walked passed him earlier but he was busy and I didn't want to disturb him and he was shocked. He said everyone asks him to stop for a while so that they can walk past him into the office but only I was the one who never told him to stop. It was never a problem form me to do that everyday. But Narain was surprised and when I stood up hugged him and shook his hand and asked him to sit on the chair he was overwhelmed. He told me with his teary eyes that it never happened to him in last 30 years of his job. No one even want him to sit on the chair and no one ever stayed close and long enough to talk to him about him and his life.
After talking to him for a while I discovered that I found a man with dignity and integrity holding on to the typical sub continent cultural values and traditions like my own forefathers. Afterwards I used to sit with Narain Shiv Ji during my free time at work and after working hours. Learning those traditional ethics and family values, respect of elders and relationships. How they transferred those wonderful values of life heart from heart and sat down with their children on regular basis telling them stories of their elders and ancestors, letting them know who they were and how they used to cope with life. They gradually made their offspring learn those moral values and manners along with the family trade. No one was looking for work after growing up to the age where a man is required to be making a living for himself and the family because they learned the trick of those values like commitment dedication time management loyalty and justice from their forefathers true stories and learned how to become a great professional as well and joined family trade from an early age.
Rest of the people at our work place were surprised first, when we sat down on the floor, talking and sometimes in the backyard grass for hours sipping tea. Sometimes we shared meal as well and gradually others started joining us in our conversation.
They disagreed with the concept that there was no need for the education in schools, colleges and universities specially for the purpose of becoming a money making machine.
The real purpose of this education system, as Narain Shiv Ji would say, was to create workers and slaves. With the mind set of getting up at specific time and learning the ways of having a well controlled and harnessed time schedule bound environment that would also influence their minds to believe that they are born to be employees of the imperial lords. They must learn the ways to please them and they must adopt their ways of life and stay under their commend and understand that they are nothing without their imperial lords.
I, however discovered the truth later with more research on the concept authenticated by Alvin and Heidi Toffler , world-renowned futurists, whose work foreshadowed the sweeping effects of rapid technology development on people, businesses, and governments.
The Tofflers are known widely for their global bestsellers, including Future Shock, The Third Wave and Powershift, all of which have been translated into dozens of languages.
Alvin loves to speak about the education system that is shaping the hearts and minds of our generations from a long time now. When he was asked,
I'm roughly quoting Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who said, "We don't need to reform the system; we need to replace the system."
Why not just readjust what we have in place now? Do we really need to start from the ground up?
However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.
Let's look back at the history of public education in the United States. You have to go back a little over a century. For many years, there was a debate about whether we should even have public education. Some parents wanted kids to go to school and get an education; others said, "We can't afford that. We need them to work. They have to work in the field, because otherwise we starve." There was a big debate. The same debate we still have here in our region.
Late in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, business leaders began complaining about all these rural kids who were pouring into the cities and going to work in our factories. Business leaders said that these kids were no good, and that what they needed was an educational system that would produce "industrial discipline."
What is industrial discipline?
Well, first of all, you've got to show up on time. Out in the fields, on the farms, if you go out with your family to pick a crop, and you come ten minutes late, your uncle covers for you and it's no big deal. But if you're on an assembly line and you're late, you mess up the work of 10,000 people down the line. Very expensive. So punctuality suddenly becomes important.
You don't want to be tardy.
Yes. In school, bells ring and you mustn't be tardy. And you march from class to class when the bells ring again. And many people take a yellow bus to school. What is the yellow bus? A preparation for commuting. And you do rote and repetitive work as you would do on an assembly line.
Answering the next question:
How does that system fit into a world where assembly lines have gone away?
Alvin Said:
It doesn't. The public school system is designed to produce a workforce for an economy that will not be there. And therefore, with all the best intentions in the world, we're stealing the kids' future.
Do I have all the answers for how to replace it? No. But it seems to me that before we can get serious about creating an appropriate education system for the world that's coming and that these kids will have to operate within, we have to ask some really fundamental questions.
And some of these questions are scary. For example: Should education be compulsory? And, if so, for who? Why does everybody have to start at age five? Maybe some kids should start at age eight and work fast. Or vice versa. Why is everything massified in the system, rather than individualized in the system? New technologies make possible customization in a way that the old system -- everybody reading the same textbook at the same time -- did not offer.
We are talking about customizing the educational experience. Any form of diversity that we can introduce into the schools is a plus. Today, we have a big controversy about all the charter schools that are springing up. The school system people hate them because they're taking money from them. I say we should radically multiply charter schools, because they begin to provide a degree of diversity in the system that has not been present. At least diversify the system if you are not ready to replace of shut it down for good.
In our book Revolutionary Wealth, we play a game. We say, imagine that you're a policeman, and you've got a radar gun, and you're measuring the speed of cars going by. Each car represents an American institution. The first one car is going by at 100 miles per hour. It's called business. Businesses have to change at 100 miles per hour because if they don't, they die. Competition just puts them out of the game. So they're traveling very, very fast.
Then comes another car. And it's going 10 miles per hour. That's the public education system. Schools are supposed to be preparing kids for the business world of tomorrow, to take jobs, to make our economy functional. The schools are changing, if anything, at 10 miles per hour. So, how do you match an economy that requires 100 miles per hour with an institution like public education? A system that changes, if at all, at 10 miles per hour?
It is tough very difficult to replace, teachers who are good and well intentioned and smart, but they can't try new things, because there are too many rules. They say that "the bureaucratic rules make it impossible to do what you're suggesting for the education system revamp.
So, how do we bust up that?
It is easy to develop the world's best technologies compared with how hard it is to bust up a big bureaucracy like the public education system with the enormous numbers of jobs dependent on it and industries that feed it.
We spend a lot of money on education, so why isn't all that money having a better result?
It's because we're doing the same thing over and over again. We're holding millions of kids prisoner for x hours a week. And the teacher is given a set of rules as to what you're going to say to the students, how you're going to treat them, what you want the output to be, and let no child be left behind. But there's a very narrow set of outcomes. I think you have to open the system to new ideas.
So, that's another thing: Much of what we're transmitting is doomed to obsolescence at a far more rapid rate than ever before. And that knowledge becomes what we call obsoledge: obsolete knowledge. We have this enormous bank of obsolete knowledge in our heads, in our books, and in our culture. When change was slower, obsoledge didn't pile up as quickly. Now, because everything is in rapid change, the amount of obsolete knowledge that we have -- and that we teach -- is greater and greater and greater. We're drowning in obsolete information. We make big decisions -- personal decisions -- based on it, and public and political decisions based on it.
The idea of a textbook in the classroom is obsolete
I'm a wordsmith. I write and I love books. So I don't want to be an accomplice to their death. But clearly, they're not enough. The textbooks are the same for every child; every child gets the same textbook. Why should that be? Why shouldn't some kids get a textbook -- and you can do this online a lot more easily than you can in print -- why shouldn't a kid who's interested in one particular thing, whether it's painting or drama, or this or that, get a different version of the textbook than the kid sitting in the next seat, who is interested in engineering?
When I was a student, I went through all the same rote repetitive stuff that kids go through today. And I did lousy in any number of things. The only thing I ever did any good in was English. It's what I love. You need to find out what each student loves. If you want kids to really learn, they've got to love something for that purpose you need to bring in the home based education that includes people a kid loves to listen too and loves flossing their footsteps. Parents, elders and people around them who would become mentors, nurturing them in morals values and manners first. These mentors then take them towards their professional education letting then into the real world.
Like real life, yes! And, like in real life, there is an enormous, enormous bank of knowledge in the community that we can tap into. So, why shouldn't a kid who's interested in mechanical things or engines or technology meet people from the community who do that kind of stuff, and who are excited about what they are doing and where it's going? But at the rate of change, the actual skills that we teach, or that they learn by themselves, about how to use this gizmo or that gizmo, that's going to be obsolete -- who knows? -- in five years or in five minutes.
Alvin tells us about the school he would like to be. What do the classrooms look like? What are the class sizes? What are the hours?
He says, it's open 24 hours a day. Different kids arrive at different times. They don't all come at the same time, like an army. They don't just ring the bells at the same time. They're different kids. They have different potentials. Now, in practice, we're not going to be able to get down to the micro level with all of this, I grant you, but in fact, I would be running a twenty-four-hour school, I would have non-teachers working with teachers in that school, I would have the kids coming and going at different times that make sense for them.
Not like the schools of today, essentially custodial: They're taking care of kids in work hours that are essentially nine to five -- when the whole society was assumed to work. Clearly, that's changing in our society. So should the timing. We're individualizing time; we're personalizing time. We're not having everyone arrive at the same time, leave at the same time. Why should kids arrive at the same time and leave at the same time?
Alvin says, I think that schools have to be completely integrated into the community, to take advantage of the skills in the community. So, there ought to be business offices in the school, from various kinds of business in the community.
That's what a home based education is, it begins at home and then the child is handed over to or I should say taken over by a mentor specializing in the skills of life just the way Narain Shiv Ji used to tell me.
If we are not going to replace the existing education system with the original ways of educating a child we must at least customize and revolutionize the system the way Alvin Toffler suggested.
The role of a teacher must change. Teaching shouldn't be a lifetime career. It's important for teachers to quit for three or four years and go do something else and come back. They'll come back with better ideas. They'll come back with ideas about how the outside world works, in ways that would not have been available to them if they were in the classroom the whole time.
We must be advocating for fundamental radical changes.
I, however discovered the truth later with more research on the concept authenticated by Alvin and Heidi Toffler , world-renowned futurists, whose work foreshadowed the sweeping effects of rapid technology development on people, businesses, and governments.
The Tofflers are known widely for their global bestsellers, including Future Shock, The Third Wave and Powershift, all of which have been translated into dozens of languages.
Alvin loves to speak about the education system that is shaping the hearts and minds of our generations from a long time now. When he was asked,
You've been writing about our educational system for decades. What's the most pressing need in public education right now?
He said: Shut down the public education system.That's Sounds pretty radical.
I'm roughly quoting Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who said, "We don't need to reform the system; we need to replace the system."
Why not just readjust what we have in place now? Do we really need to start from the ground up?
However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.
Let's look back at the history of public education in the United States. You have to go back a little over a century. For many years, there was a debate about whether we should even have public education. Some parents wanted kids to go to school and get an education; others said, "We can't afford that. We need them to work. They have to work in the field, because otherwise we starve." There was a big debate. The same debate we still have here in our region.
Late in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, business leaders began complaining about all these rural kids who were pouring into the cities and going to work in our factories. Business leaders said that these kids were no good, and that what they needed was an educational system that would produce "industrial discipline."
What is industrial discipline?
Well, first of all, you've got to show up on time. Out in the fields, on the farms, if you go out with your family to pick a crop, and you come ten minutes late, your uncle covers for you and it's no big deal. But if you're on an assembly line and you're late, you mess up the work of 10,000 people down the line. Very expensive. So punctuality suddenly becomes important.
You don't want to be tardy.
Yes. In school, bells ring and you mustn't be tardy. And you march from class to class when the bells ring again. And many people take a yellow bus to school. What is the yellow bus? A preparation for commuting. And you do rote and repetitive work as you would do on an assembly line.
Answering the next question:
How does that system fit into a world where assembly lines have gone away?
Alvin Said:
It doesn't. The public school system is designed to produce a workforce for an economy that will not be there. And therefore, with all the best intentions in the world, we're stealing the kids' future.
Do I have all the answers for how to replace it? No. But it seems to me that before we can get serious about creating an appropriate education system for the world that's coming and that these kids will have to operate within, we have to ask some really fundamental questions.
And some of these questions are scary. For example: Should education be compulsory? And, if so, for who? Why does everybody have to start at age five? Maybe some kids should start at age eight and work fast. Or vice versa. Why is everything massified in the system, rather than individualized in the system? New technologies make possible customization in a way that the old system -- everybody reading the same textbook at the same time -- did not offer.
We are talking about customizing the educational experience. Any form of diversity that we can introduce into the schools is a plus. Today, we have a big controversy about all the charter schools that are springing up. The school system people hate them because they're taking money from them. I say we should radically multiply charter schools, because they begin to provide a degree of diversity in the system that has not been present. At least diversify the system if you are not ready to replace of shut it down for good.
In our book Revolutionary Wealth, we play a game. We say, imagine that you're a policeman, and you've got a radar gun, and you're measuring the speed of cars going by. Each car represents an American institution. The first one car is going by at 100 miles per hour. It's called business. Businesses have to change at 100 miles per hour because if they don't, they die. Competition just puts them out of the game. So they're traveling very, very fast.
Then comes another car. And it's going 10 miles per hour. That's the public education system. Schools are supposed to be preparing kids for the business world of tomorrow, to take jobs, to make our economy functional. The schools are changing, if anything, at 10 miles per hour. So, how do you match an economy that requires 100 miles per hour with an institution like public education? A system that changes, if at all, at 10 miles per hour?
It is tough very difficult to replace, teachers who are good and well intentioned and smart, but they can't try new things, because there are too many rules. They say that "the bureaucratic rules make it impossible to do what you're suggesting for the education system revamp.
So, how do we bust up that?
It is easy to develop the world's best technologies compared with how hard it is to bust up a big bureaucracy like the public education system with the enormous numbers of jobs dependent on it and industries that feed it.
We spend a lot of money on education, so why isn't all that money having a better result?
It's because we're doing the same thing over and over again. We're holding millions of kids prisoner for x hours a week. And the teacher is given a set of rules as to what you're going to say to the students, how you're going to treat them, what you want the output to be, and let no child be left behind. But there's a very narrow set of outcomes. I think you have to open the system to new ideas.
So, that's another thing: Much of what we're transmitting is doomed to obsolescence at a far more rapid rate than ever before. And that knowledge becomes what we call obsoledge: obsolete knowledge. We have this enormous bank of obsolete knowledge in our heads, in our books, and in our culture. When change was slower, obsoledge didn't pile up as quickly. Now, because everything is in rapid change, the amount of obsolete knowledge that we have -- and that we teach -- is greater and greater and greater. We're drowning in obsolete information. We make big decisions -- personal decisions -- based on it, and public and political decisions based on it.
The idea of a textbook in the classroom is obsolete
I'm a wordsmith. I write and I love books. So I don't want to be an accomplice to their death. But clearly, they're not enough. The textbooks are the same for every child; every child gets the same textbook. Why should that be? Why shouldn't some kids get a textbook -- and you can do this online a lot more easily than you can in print -- why shouldn't a kid who's interested in one particular thing, whether it's painting or drama, or this or that, get a different version of the textbook than the kid sitting in the next seat, who is interested in engineering?
When I was a student, I went through all the same rote repetitive stuff that kids go through today. And I did lousy in any number of things. The only thing I ever did any good in was English. It's what I love. You need to find out what each student loves. If you want kids to really learn, they've got to love something for that purpose you need to bring in the home based education that includes people a kid loves to listen too and loves flossing their footsteps. Parents, elders and people around them who would become mentors, nurturing them in morals values and manners first. These mentors then take them towards their professional education letting then into the real world.
Like real life, yes! And, like in real life, there is an enormous, enormous bank of knowledge in the community that we can tap into. So, why shouldn't a kid who's interested in mechanical things or engines or technology meet people from the community who do that kind of stuff, and who are excited about what they are doing and where it's going? But at the rate of change, the actual skills that we teach, or that they learn by themselves, about how to use this gizmo or that gizmo, that's going to be obsolete -- who knows? -- in five years or in five minutes.
Alvin tells us about the school he would like to be. What do the classrooms look like? What are the class sizes? What are the hours?
He says, it's open 24 hours a day. Different kids arrive at different times. They don't all come at the same time, like an army. They don't just ring the bells at the same time. They're different kids. They have different potentials. Now, in practice, we're not going to be able to get down to the micro level with all of this, I grant you, but in fact, I would be running a twenty-four-hour school, I would have non-teachers working with teachers in that school, I would have the kids coming and going at different times that make sense for them.
Not like the schools of today, essentially custodial: They're taking care of kids in work hours that are essentially nine to five -- when the whole society was assumed to work. Clearly, that's changing in our society. So should the timing. We're individualizing time; we're personalizing time. We're not having everyone arrive at the same time, leave at the same time. Why should kids arrive at the same time and leave at the same time?
Alvin says, I think that schools have to be completely integrated into the community, to take advantage of the skills in the community. So, there ought to be business offices in the school, from various kinds of business in the community.
That's what a home based education is, it begins at home and then the child is handed over to or I should say taken over by a mentor specializing in the skills of life just the way Narain Shiv Ji used to tell me.
If we are not going to replace the existing education system with the original ways of educating a child we must at least customize and revolutionize the system the way Alvin Toffler suggested.
The role of a teacher must change. Teaching shouldn't be a lifetime career. It's important for teachers to quit for three or four years and go do something else and come back. They'll come back with better ideas. They'll come back with ideas about how the outside world works, in ways that would not have been available to them if they were in the classroom the whole time.
We must be advocating for fundamental radical changes.
It's inevitable that there will have to be changes. The only question is whether we're going to do it starting now, or whether we're going to wait for catastrophe.
Here is Alvin Toffler's School of Tomorrow
These are the fundamentals of the futurist's vision for education in the 21st century:
Here is Alvin Toffler's School of Tomorrow
These are the fundamentals of the futurist's vision for education in the 21st century:
- Open 24 hours a day
- Customized educational experience
- Kids arrive at different times
- Students begin their formalized schooling at different ages
- Curriculum is integrated across disciplines
- Nonteachers work with teachers
- Teachers alternate working in schools and in business world
- Local businesses have offices in the schools
- Increased number of charter schools
But sadly it still lacks the basic values manners and morals. How would our generations learn these basic and essential ingredients of a personality like commitment, loyalty, kindness, dedication and respect? Would there be a school to teach them?
