Mini Krishnan, Concept & Series Editor, Oxford University Press
Guest Author’s Profile:- Mini Krishnan has been in publishing world for more than two decades. An educational publisher she is best known for the translations of Indian literature that she sourced, edited and published first through Macmillan India and now through Oxford University Press where she is the Literary Translations Editor. She was the founding editor of the South Asia Women Writers Website. She sources and edits short stories in translation for The Hindu and The Week. She is Concept & Series Editor Living in Harmony, (Oxford University Press) a Peace & Value Education programme of books for national integration meant for Indian schools class I to VIII. She has spoken on translation in the following universities- Cambridge, Leeds, Warwick (UK) and Austin- Texas, Chicago, USA.
Article:-
“All education is for Peace” (Maria Montessori)
When universal education based on textbooks was introduced into an oral and traditional culture like ours it seemed to have no room for assessing the co-scholastic personality growth of the student. The entire training between the child’s fifth and fifteenth years was focused on understanding the external material world around him slotted into History, Math, and Science etc about which he was relentlessly tested. The higher order of thinking skills gradually lost ground and education became not the slow process of gaining knowledge and responding to situations and people but a way of life to pass examinations.
Very recently as teenage suicides and child-against -child violence began to rise a question has repeated itself: on the road called academic excellence, had we taken a wrong turning? I’d like to quote from the poem Archibald Macleish wrote on seeing the first photographs of the Earth taken from moon were circulated, and he wrote this on Christmas day, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night “Educating our children to focus on this truth is our only hope for building a safer world that promises tranquility for a generation headed for old-age, and to ensure that as a species we don’t go where the dinosaurs went.
Since teaching the young is one of the greatest symbols of nation-building a marked degree of personal and social transformation is possible through educating children about Peace. A policy to foster the idea and importance of peace can be implemented through schools to influence at least those children who get an education and who will one day lead their communities and society; they will write and teach, build cities, patent new medicines and technologies; they will enact policies and laws.
This is especially important when 80 million Indian children below the age of ten have no hope of an education. Doesn’t that leave the rest of us with a duty to overcome our limited knowledge based on traditions and prejudices? We have a obligation to the future to construct such a programme. This is one plan for which we don’t need a UN consensus; we can put it into action and expect global understanding because everyone will agree that we have to do something to save ourselves and our neighbors from divisions that will otherwise plunge us all into a tunnel with only darkness at the other end.
The extreme and ferocious competition that a school foster has already had such a terrible effect that many youngsters have had to destroy their better selves in order to succeed. They thus have no inner resources left to counter anxiety, fear and rage. They attack fellow students, rape classmates, and injure teachers. Some young children are so lonely and edgy they take their own lives when they fail entrance exams, do not get the kind of clothes they want for Diwali or feel inadequate in English-language classes (all documented in newspaper reports). It is very clear that the skills necessary for creating a harmonious society have become extremely urgent and as important as literacy and academic achievement. With our complex caste/class issues in our multi-religious and multi-lingual society, if we could structure even partial solutions and strategies, it might even serve as a model for other nations.
Educating for peace seeks to nurture a moral vision about the role of the self in the family, society, nation and the world. If we are to survive on an impoverished planet that cannot manage its food-stocks or famines, its water resources or forests, we must, as quickly as possible, see ourselves as a global family and sensitize children to understand that what affects one group in one part of the world, will eventually affect everyone everywhere else. If we are to make the world a safer and better place we must also plan how to raise safer and better people. We have already learnt how to make children healthier but we have paid less attention to the hearts and minds of children. Surely the goal of education is to equip people to lead meaningful lives and not merely to make a living.
Guest Author’s Profile:- Mini Krishnan has been in publishing world for more than two decades. An educational publisher she is best known for the translations of Indian literature that she sourced, edited and published first through Macmillan India and now through Oxford University Press where she is the Literary Translations Editor. She was the founding editor of the South Asia Women Writers Website. She sources and edits short stories in translation for The Hindu and The Week. She is Concept & Series Editor Living in Harmony, (Oxford University Press) a Peace & Value Education programme of books for national integration meant for Indian schools class I to VIII. She has spoken on translation in the following universities- Cambridge, Leeds, Warwick (UK) and Austin- Texas, Chicago, USA.
Article:-
“All education is for Peace” (Maria Montessori)
When universal education based on textbooks was introduced into an oral and traditional culture like ours it seemed to have no room for assessing the co-scholastic personality growth of the student. The entire training between the child’s fifth and fifteenth years was focused on understanding the external material world around him slotted into History, Math, and Science etc about which he was relentlessly tested. The higher order of thinking skills gradually lost ground and education became not the slow process of gaining knowledge and responding to situations and people but a way of life to pass examinations.
Very recently as teenage suicides and child-against -child violence began to rise a question has repeated itself: on the road called academic excellence, had we taken a wrong turning? I’d like to quote from the poem Archibald Macleish wrote on seeing the first photographs of the Earth taken from moon were circulated, and he wrote this on Christmas day, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night “Educating our children to focus on this truth is our only hope for building a safer world that promises tranquility for a generation headed for old-age, and to ensure that as a species we don’t go where the dinosaurs went.
Since teaching the young is one of the greatest symbols of nation-building a marked degree of personal and social transformation is possible through educating children about Peace. A policy to foster the idea and importance of peace can be implemented through schools to influence at least those children who get an education and who will one day lead their communities and society; they will write and teach, build cities, patent new medicines and technologies; they will enact policies and laws.
This is especially important when 80 million Indian children below the age of ten have no hope of an education. Doesn’t that leave the rest of us with a duty to overcome our limited knowledge based on traditions and prejudices? We have a obligation to the future to construct such a programme. This is one plan for which we don’t need a UN consensus; we can put it into action and expect global understanding because everyone will agree that we have to do something to save ourselves and our neighbors from divisions that will otherwise plunge us all into a tunnel with only darkness at the other end.
The extreme and ferocious competition that a school foster has already had such a terrible effect that many youngsters have had to destroy their better selves in order to succeed. They thus have no inner resources left to counter anxiety, fear and rage. They attack fellow students, rape classmates, and injure teachers. Some young children are so lonely and edgy they take their own lives when they fail entrance exams, do not get the kind of clothes they want for Diwali or feel inadequate in English-language classes (all documented in newspaper reports). It is very clear that the skills necessary for creating a harmonious society have become extremely urgent and as important as literacy and academic achievement. With our complex caste/class issues in our multi-religious and multi-lingual society, if we could structure even partial solutions and strategies, it might even serve as a model for other nations.
Educating for peace seeks to nurture a moral vision about the role of the self in the family, society, nation and the world. If we are to survive on an impoverished planet that cannot manage its food-stocks or famines, its water resources or forests, we must, as quickly as possible, see ourselves as a global family and sensitize children to understand that what affects one group in one part of the world, will eventually affect everyone everywhere else. If we are to make the world a safer and better place we must also plan how to raise safer and better people. We have already learnt how to make children healthier but we have paid less attention to the hearts and minds of children. Surely the goal of education is to equip people to lead meaningful lives and not merely to make a living.
