--By L P Bhanu Sharma

Through this column, we are attempting to explore into the system of education that promises to finely integrate both the age-old human values and the modern scientific dimensions of living. For the sake of convenience, we call this ‘holistic education’.

One of the most common questions educators have started asking one another is: does the present system of education foster creativity, innovation and out-of-the-box thinking or it just puts a frame around young minds? Some of the best brains in the world – be it Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, William Shakespeare or Henry Ford – had either not stepped into higher educational institutions or simply dropped out in between. Steve Jobs, the Apple’s legendary CEO and the role model of almost all CEO’s of the world, has gone to the extent of publicly stating that his decision to drop out of college proved to be a blessing, and most of the feats he accomplished in business were somehow made possible because of this.

Equally interesting is the fact that educational institutions have very little to boast of in innovation and generation of new ideas in the world. Many of the popular management principles that are taught in business schools today are academic versions of practices in business organizations whose founders had very little or no schooling. That simply means the ideas are first generated by people who somehow escaped schooling and later professors and academicians found some ways to replicate the same through text books and formal school curriculum. Does it in any way indicate that classrooms are no fertile grounds for creativity and new ideas to flourish? Or does that mean that classrooms put boundaries to the boundary-less human minds and that only those who thwart this boundary are able to give something new to this world? Maybe it is too early to give a firm answer. But people all over the world are really asking this question, and slowly we need to find answers.

Possibly, traditional classrooms are specialized at giving mechanistic frameworks to students to think in terms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – what has already been proven is ‘yes’ and what nobody has tried is simply ‘no’. Teachers have a challenge that their students must also pass the written examinations and need to earn good grades. This might be putting them too much unseen pressure to give proven answers and worked out formulae to the students so that they can quickly memorize the theories, vomit them in the examination and earn good grades. In the short term this may look beneficial to all the three parties - teacher, student and institution. But, doesn’t this kill inquisitiveness and creativity and convert men to mere machines?

Holistic education is slowly emerging to provide authentic and realistic answers to all these questions. Rather than being a revolutionary concept, holistic education can be considered as simply an evolutionary version of traditional schooling. It works with a premise that every individual has latent potentials and educational institutions must develop right methods and tools to recognize them right in the formative years, and must do everything to create an environment where students can learn and flourish in their own way. Rather than giving the students a frame that restricts creativity and spontaneity, holistic education emphasizes on development of creative potentials by encouraging students to critically think, imagine and envision. Rather than thinking in terms of what is not possible, holistic education starts with an assumption that human minds are capable of making everything possible.

(The author is the President of Jeevan Vigyan Kendra, a modern spiritual organization, and Principal of Apex College. He can be contacted through bhanu@jeevanvigyan.com)