Sonam Wangchuk speaks on the need to create an educational system that is not just about the head

Sonam Wangchuk speaks on the need to create an educational system that is not just about the head but also about hands and heart, at SGEF 2017.

On the evening of August 19, the final day of the Scoonews Global Educators Fest 2017, the room was filled with the cream of educators in our country who waited patiently for the much-awaited speaker from Ladakh. He came just in time to thrill the audience with his experience of teaching students 12,000 feet high, in the mountains, something which not many among the other educators in the room had experienced. Rushing in to deliver his speech on ‘The Next Learning Revolution’ was Sonam Wangchuk, founder of the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL).The crowd showed respect by being silent as a man brimming with energy within, with fine lines of wisdom on his forehead, and a smile as bright as a sunny day in Ladakh, took to the podium.

He began his speech with a traditional greeting from Ladakh – “Juleh”. He explained how he accidentally stumbled upon the world of education from the field of engineering. He had differences with his father on the stream of engineering to choose and the same resulted in him having to finance his own engineering education. He had to teach students to raise some funds for his own education. This experience, he says, changed his life completely. He came face to face with realities, or rather the “falsehood” of the educational system. And he continued to try and understand the problems in the educational system…

In the 1990s, students were failing in huge numbers in Ladakh – to be precise, 95 per cent of the students were failing in the X grade, every year. The people and the system blamed the students for the failure rather than examining the system. But clearly, when 95 per cent fail, it is for the system to look into itself rather than blaming the children. That is when Wangchuk started questioning the system to see what could be corrected. From his interactions with the children, he realised that the very same children who failed exams year after year were, in fact, very bright and kind and everything about them was right, yet they were blamed and labelled as “retarded “ or as “primitive mountain people”. When he looked into the depths of the system, he realised that they were made to follow a system that was more like a ritual for them, which made no sense.

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They were being taught from books that came from Delhi and London and the concepts made no sense to someone who was in Ladakh. Even the concept of teaching alphabets through association with objects was a failure there, because when the books read “F for Fan” – no one, including the teachers, knew what a fan was in the -30 degree Ladakh temperature!

Sonam realised that the children who were skilled at performing tasks with their hands were being forced to learn, by rote, things that they could barely relate to and that was very wrong. The children had learnt skills of mending torn clothes or repairing houses from their parents, yet the system of education they were forced into was “undoing” whatever skills of the hand they had learnt and they were asked to use only their head. A good preparation for the life that they would live required skilled hands and kind hearts but that had no place in the school system. Their parents had taught them the importance of cooperation and collaboration, which is an important skill to survive in a place like Ladakh, yet the system of education that they were into, forced them to compete rather than collaborate! It forced them to put themselves first over others in the race to the top.

He noted that the most developed or “industrialised” countries like Japan and Korea are also places with the highest rate of suicides. Clearly, the system is not doing good to the people, nor is it making them happy. The outcomes of this system are also causing havoc to our environment itself because the glaciers are melting as global temperatures rise and while the people in Ladakh will have to flee, people living near the coast will drown. 

This is a system that will not do good to our planet or our country. He believes that we must rethink and reconsider what we put into our children if we want a different outcome. The system was not making our children self-reliant to survive in difficult places like Ladakh.

As a result, he decided to think beyond the system that the West had brought in 300 years ago during the industrial revolution. The need of the hour was to create a better system that we can give to the world. We are a country that has given to the world Yoga and Vipassana. We need to create a new system that is not just about the head but also about hands and skill – a system that values experiential learning and preparation for life.

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Sonam believes that we need to replace the 3 Rs (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) in the current education system with 3 Hs – Head, Hands and Heart. Education should not be merely about production and consumption. “I’m more impressed by the technologies of the inner world that our country developed than the technologies of the outer world that have come in the last 300 years. The latter helps fulfil our desires of comfort and ease of doing things but desires keep growing!” Quoting Lord Buddha, he said, “For human beings, it is a bigger achievement to conquer one single desire than to fulfil 1,000 desires.”

The current system trains us to fulfil our desires but the buckets of our desires keep filling with products of technology. He believes that we can keep filling this bucket, all the while failing to notice that it is a bottomless bucket. A much wiser technology is to have a bottom for this bucket and fill it with much less – and this is his vision for education. “We need to figure out where we are going. We are told we have to go fast but I believe that if we do not know where we are going, it is better that we go slow. We need to teach our children to be self-reliant and show compassion to others. We need to make them take responsibilities and that is when they grow up,” he pointed out.

With like-minded friends, Wangchuk launched SECMOL. Working with the government, they rewrote text books and retrained teachers and the results started changing too. Children are partners of the school and involved in the governance and they are taught to solve real-world problems like climate change. They publish their own campus newspaper and they have made their school solar-powered. Together with the support of like-minded people, he hopes to revolutionise the face of education in our country and the world.

This story appeared in the September 2017 issue of ScooNews magazine.

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