PLANTING THE SEED OF CURIOSITY

SANDEEP SHASTRI
National Coordinator of Lokniti Network, Director (Academics) at NITTE Education Trust, and Co-editor, Indian Youth in a Transforming World

Being a facilitator in the higher education space for over four decades has been a truly humbling and overwhelming experience for me. From X to Z, each generation has been innovative and transformative. In one of the institutions I worked in, you could see a thoughtfully stated statement every time you entered the building: Anyone who refuses to be a student, refuses to be a teacher.

Happy Teachers’ Day! The messages I receive from learners I’ve been fortunate to share the classroom with on Guru Poornima and Teachers’ Day impact me and the learning process’s influence on the approach to life and philosophy of living.

Five years ago, when launching the National Education Policy 2020, the Prime Minister raised a crucial question. He asked his audience whether the time had come to move from “what to learn”, to “how to learn”. This is the credo of relevance for the learning revolution.

The transformation of the classroom from a zone of teaching to a place of learning over the last few decades has been remarkable. When I recall the first class I entered as a facilitator in 1982, the technology, methodology and approach to learning was vastly different from the classrooms of 2025. Our role as facilitators has seen a shift from lecturing for an hour to initiating a thought-provoking dialogue.

This need for this transformation was best brought out recently by a question raised by a Gen-Z learner. At the end of an interactive session on the 21st-century learning process, an Ivy League professor was asked by a second-year student whether attendance was compulsory in his classroom. It led to spontaneous applause from the rest. The professor paused for a moment, and with a smile went on to say, “No, attendance is not compulsory in my classroom.” The magnitude of the audience's silence was much louder this time.

When the initial gasps subsided, the professor added, “Attendance is not compulsory, yet there are two ground rules that those serious to grow in my subject are required to keep in mind. One, that if the topic we discuss does not come to my class, please do not tell me later that the questions asked in the term end examination assessment tests or terminal examinations were not from the syllabus. Every question would be needing an application of the reflections of the dialogue we have had in the classroom. Secondly, your learning assignments would not be the take-home tasks of the past. There was class with pen and paper, without any access to digital technology.” There was pin-drop silence for a while, ending with a standing ovation for the speaker.

Whenever we think of this discussion, the core of the learning process is to encourage the seeds of the dialogue. Are the dialogues we have, in and outside the classroom, focused more on transforming information into knowledge? Is it also about triggering new lines of thinking and reflecting? Does this dialogue provide for more life questions, curiosity and exploration, rather than merely being satisfied with rehearsed ‘one set of answers’? All discussions and innovation in higher education stems from this.

Two decades ago, when tasked with the responsibility of assisting in the drafting of the Karnataka youth policy, we began by undertaking a comprehensive youth survey in the state to capture the aspirations, expectations, attitudes, and anxieties of the youth. Any youth policy, we felt, needs to echo the voice of young people. The policy we framed had a chapter that focused on higher education titled ‘Learner First, Learning Always’. Even today, this needs to be the guiding philosophy of higher education.

This narrative would remain incomplete if I don’t include an advanced Teachers’ Day greeting from earlier this week. The message was from a young teacher in her early 30s. She asserted the point that teaching-learning methodologies may get transformed, changing contexts may lead to newer content, but the power of persuasion and the process of questioning is paramount.

She recalled a debate we had in the classroom in 1995 on the meaning of democracy. One of her classmates had asserted that the core idea of democracy was not just about elections but meaningful participation of citizens in the decision-making process. The classroom dialogue came alive a few weeks later when she went on a field trip with her classmates.

The 73rd constitutional amendment in 1992 had initiated changes in the functioning of local governments and democratic decentralisation with a distinctly different flavour. She added that when her son came back from his first-year degree class in 2024, he narrated how there was an animated discussion in the classroom on gender equality. He factually took the entire discussion, experience, in practical terms, much like the narratives we had discussed in the classroom. The dialogue surely continues in her son’s chat groups.

She concluded her message to me by saying that in this era, the learner is changing the dialogue. Happy Teachers’ Day! In the classroom dialogue, floats the potential answer to the ‘how to learn’ question. Happy Learners’ Day!

*(Views are personal.)