L e a r n in g t o s e e

With 6th standard children from Sahyadri school.

Learning to see is a workshop I was fortunate to conduct with about

40 6th standard children from the Sahyadri school. Pune. Children
blessed me with their innocence, love, curiosity and spontaneity that
was still some what intact. I could see naming was slowly getting
prominence than the seeing of the object. Once naming gets more
important the cognitive processes related to senses die and thinking
and reasoning takes over. As they get entrenched in the linguistic world
the world of objects recede from their vision. They stop being present
to the world around. From the realm of timelessness they also get
caught up in the clutches of time. My exposure to the rural tribal non
literate people have made me realize that people who are using senses
to cognize the world are in the realm of timelessness as they are always
in the present.
Senses are our cognitive tools that not only connect us to the outer
world but also awaken sensitivity, sense of beauty and intelligence.
Reading and writing are not cognitive tools at all but somehow this not
only gets prominence in our schooling system but also eliminate the
true cognitive tools.
The purpose of the workshop was to initiate seeing in such a manner
that the ability to see gets fully entrenched/ reinforced in children so
that as they progress to higher classes the ability for observation is
retained.

For some strange reason schools tend to treat beauty and

creativity as something that belongs to the art class and all the
other subjects are devoid of beauty and creativity. Hence we have
termed some professions as creative professions. I cant
understand why mathematics, physics or a biology class need not
have creativity and beauty as the basis for learning.
Beauty and creativity are the fundamental principle of being alive.
These are rooted in our biology, the original stuff with which we
are made.
Eliminating senses and beauty from our educational process have
killed true creativity as well as produce beauty disabled people.
The real learning disability is caused by this educational process.
The learning disability that is now being spoken of is really our
inability to adjust to the wrong educational process!
Familiarity and boredom are infact two sides of the same coin and
disuse of senses are the cause of both. Ability to see afresh can
not make anything familiar.

Observation drawing is an important activity to make

children see things around them in detail. Each activity
we did was to enhance their seeing of nature. Various
aspects of nature became our theme and each day
children went out and drew, felt, saw, painted,
smelled, touched nature.
We looked at the way creepers climbed, negative
spaces in between the leaves, the way light falls on
the leaves, the movement due to wind, raindrops and
the dew drops, patterns in nature, symmetry,
geometry, texture, colour, smell of nature.
We made several small booklets based on these
themes.

The senses speak to the understanding: Poor

understanding, from us you took the pieces of
evidence and with them you want to throw us
down? This down throwing will be your fall.

Democritus

It is only after you have come to know the surface of

things that you can venture to seek what is underneath.
But the surface of things is inexhaustible.

Italo Calvino, in Mr Palomar (1983)

Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are

hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi

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Children were given only the basic six colours- black, white, red,
blue, green and yellow and they
were able to easily mix and create
the matching colours. I had noticed
This earlier while working with
children from Aruvacode. I think
children from the age of 9 or so
develop this capacity or fine tune
this capacity for solving problems bypassing logic and reason and
hence are able to make accurate matching colours.
At a teachers workshop in Hyderabad in 2004 I found most of the
70 teachers who took part in the workshop could not create the
colours. Where as the non literate women who helped in the
school and the drivers were able to mix and match. The so called
educated used recollection or reasoning to solve this. But the
people who are not formally educated didnt have anything to
recollect nor use reason to figure out how to make the colours.
It looks like education destroys an important cognitive ability by
never having opportunity for children to deal with the unknown
as well as never having to learn by doing with out instruction.

Also it looks like all knowledge is not out of trial and error but
may be there is a way of knowing that is instantaneous like the
way most things in nature knows.
Children were getting an opportunity to figure out all by
themselves and different set of cognitive conditions were thus
created . They were dealing with something unknown and not
having the rational mind developed yet they naturally had to use
another process to solve this. Thus a different cognitive process
was at work to solve this problem. Non literates or sense
literates never having had to go through the cognitive rewiring
set in by the schooling system could also solve the problem of
making the colours easily.
Three conditions were 1.children were autonomously dealing
with the task, 2. they are doing something experientially and 3.
they were in the realm of unknown.

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Converting the three dimensional object in to two dimension is an very

important cognitive act. The abstraction that happens is quite remarkable and
this is very difficult for the educated person to accomplish. It seems that children
before they are caught by the rational framework is able to see with out the
need for thought to interpret what they are seeing. They are able to just observe
and draw. The educated goes through three steps. They see, think and draw and
quite often they are not able to draw where as children are able to draw quite
easily.

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Once a child learns the name for any

object, perception moves from the right
to the left side of the brain, that is from
sense and experience related activity to
language and thinking related activity.

When thinking process, reasoning and takes over it

aggressively subdues the sensory perception and
experience.

There are no seven wonders of the

world in the eyes of a child. There
are seven million.
-Walt Streig