Teaching compassion through drama

"Why don't we teach our children compassion?". 

Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week, implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.

On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion; they learn to get into someone else's skin.

I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful. 

Rafael Nadal the Educator

The Rafael Nadal Foundation just opened a primary school in India, in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh. I am especially delighted because Rafa’s name is now linked with education, because, to me, Rafa epitomizes what education ought to be about. Its not really about multiplying matrices or solving differential equations. It is about being educado.

This excellent New York Times article on Rafa describes what I mean:

The Nadal personality stories that circulate among tournament fans are all variations on a single theme: the young man is educado, as they say in Spanish, not so much educated in the formal sense (Nadal left conventional schooling after he turned pro at 15), but courteous, respectful, raised by a family with its priorities in order. Nadal may have the on-court demeanor of a hit man, as far as the party across the net is concerned, but you will never see this champion hurl his racket during a match...

“It’s about respect,” Toni (Nadal, Rafa’s uncle and coach) told me. “It’s really easy for these guys to start thinking the world revolves around them. I never could have tolerated it if Rafael had become a good player and a bad example of a human being.”

What I love about Rafa is that he is lit up not by divine inspiration, but by the fire in his belly. He is not a J Krishnamurthy-esque other-worldly idealist, contemplating the beauty of the morning sun lighting up a dewdrop on a blade of grass. He is not a Christ-like figure who will turn the other cheek. Rafa is not a saint, but a man; a very decent man.

Once upon a time, sport played a central role in education, because it helped produce people like Rafa. Sport makes it easy be educado, precisely because it is fierce, physical and competitive. Decency is not about sappy moralizing. When sport is about being educado, it is not just for elite athletes, it is for everybody. Playing with gumption, respecting the game, playing to win, never passively accepting defeat, its a part of being educado, at every level of play.

Once upon a time, Aussies exemplified these values. Don Bradman, Ken Rosewall, Richie Benaud, Rod Laver, Mark Taylor - all educado. Clive Lloyd's Windies were such great champions not just because they won, but because they were educado. Boys from PG Wodehouse's Wrykyn would know exactly what I am talking about, without needing explanations. Somewhere along the way, something important got lost. Punter Ponting and his punks were congratulated on their "ruthless professionalism" as long as they kept winning, but are despised by the cricketing world now that they have stopped winning. Tennis is exciting again not just because Rafa and Roger play so well, but because of the way they play, re-capturing a spirit which should never have been lost.

And so, will the good people of Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, take to hitting a furry yellow ball around a geometrical grid? Will they imbibe the spirit of champions past and become educado? I couldn't blame them if they were more concerned about landing a job in an air-conditioned software office in Hyderabad. But, heck, hope springs eternal...maybe the good people of Anantapur will write better software because they are educado, like Rafa.

We do need some education. But why?

I visited the Iona School yesterday for their Advent Fayre. Some good friends' children attend this excellent school. It was a very nice family morning, with craft activities for the children, live singing, and freshly pressed apple juice. Also picked up a brochure about the Steiner Waldorf system of education followed at Iona, which says:

Integral to the Steiner Waldorf education is its view of each child as a unique, spiritual individual, developing... towards an adulthood in which the individual spirit can find full freedom of expression. Every step in the child's education may be seen as geared to this end.

Was struck by the contrast between this and a thought emerging from my own alma mater, Vidya Mandir, Mylapore:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All play and no work makes Jack an unemployed adult.

This is taken from an email that came through on the alumni mailing list. Work, in this context, means swotting. Play means loafing around like Aamir Khan in the latest Bollywood flick. The implication, deeply embedded in Mylapore culture, is that the purpose of education is to get a good job, earn a decent living, and support a family.

Does this Mylaporean approach also lead to the individual spirit finding full freedom of expression? Perhaps, yes. Especially if the individual spirit finding expression is similar to that of Mac MacGuff, the dad in the film Juno. Mr MacGuff's teenage daughter, Juno, is searching for her calling. She asks her dad about his career. He tells her that he found his passion, the calling which gave his spirit full expression, in Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) repairs. Which, fortunately, is the means by which he earns a living.

Spiritual Intelligence and corporate life

कर्मण्ये  वाधिकारस्ते  मा  फलेषु  कदाचन
मा  कर्मफलहेतुर  भूर  मा  ते संगोस्त्व  अकर्मणि

These words from the Bhagavad Gita were first spoken by Lord Krishna to Arjuna at Kurukshetra. They roughly translate to: you contol your actions, but not their more remote consequences. So take the remote consequences off your mind, act, and fulfill your sacred destiny.

These words were also the theme of a corporate leadership development program I was at earlier this week. A bunch of successful and well-compensated executives spoke to us developees about how leadership is about service, about having a bias for action, and not obsessing about moving up the corporate ladder. Absolutely. Following the blockbuster success of Emotional Intelligence, Amazon is now selling a book on Spiritual Intelligence.

Yeah, right…but this program was not naïve. It recognized that the developees cared about money. After all, these were people in corporate jobs. The program advised setting very specific goals on how much wealth one wanted to build.

This advice, from Jack Weber at the Darden School in Virginia, was based on an interesting longitudinal study done by Harvard Business School. The study sampled a class of HBS MBAs at graduation. It asked the graduates to rate how much they cared about money on a scale of 1-10. It also asked them how much they thought their net worth would be in 5, 10 and 15 years. The answer to the second question could also be “don’t know”. The study then went back and measured the net worth of these graduates in 5, 10 and 15 years. The finding was that the first question had no predictive power: the MBAs all cared about making money. The second question was a strong predictor of future net worth, with the people who didn’t know what they would be worth performing even worse than those who had put down modest targets. As an aside, I would love to know if the students with the highest wealth expectations also had the highest variance in wealth outcomes, because of having made lower probability bets (I couldn’t locate this study through googling).

A third perspective on careers that emerged came not from the faculty but from a fellow developee, chatting after work. Her boss had told her, “Our company is an ocean with many currents running through it. The key to success is to find a current that will become as big as the Gulf Stream, and to ride it.” This makes even more sense if company were replaced by industry or society. Some realpolitick here: how does one respond to mundane work that moves the company forward, but is unlikely to grow into a career-enhancing Gulf Stream?

Maybe staying sane is about balancing these perspectives. Or maybe it is about these elements coming together: ride the Gulf Stream to get wealthy, which enables the generosity of spirit needed to think in terms of मा कर्मफलहेतुर भूर.

What they don't teach you at the Australian Cricket Academy

A point worth making when it is obvious, because it will be quickly forgotten.

Cricket schools, and more generally, cricket systems, don't produce great cricket teams. They do produce good teams. The vital gap between good and great is, unfortunately, something that can't be taught at school.

The reason this is worth remembering is that the Australian cricket system, including the Australian Cricket Academy, got a lot of credit for Australia's domination of world cricket through the 90s and the early 2000s. Even at this dark moment for Australia, when the talent cupboard is looking bare, the system is working as well as it ever was.

The system - the ACA, the first class structure, grade cricket, schools cricket, talent scouts, sports science, the whole shebang - just ensures that Australian cricket is competitive, that standards never go into free fall like in the Windies. The Aussie system is very good, but not fundamentally different from the cricket systems in England, India or South Africa.

What made the Border-Taylor-Waugh cricketing dynasty was not the Aussie system, but a bunch of exceptional players.

What is right about Indian education?

My friends and family in India are in a state of perpetual despair about our education system. The system does not even attempt to develop creativity, or critical reasoning, or the love of learning, or emotional intelligence. These are things we all want. Some good friends of mine are doing superb work to try and invigourate the system. But the fact remains that the system teaches students to learn by rote, to "crack" exams.

Yet, despite this depressing unidimensional approach, one can't help but notice that the products of this flawed system generally do OK. Certainly, compared the products of other national systems, and better than the prevailing despair might suggest. Why?

Lord William Henry Beveridge, born in Rangpur, Bengal, to an ICS officer in 1879, quoted here here in the Times, may have a clue. In his report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, submitted to the Government of Winston Churchill in 1942, he notes that:

“Most men who have once gained the habit of work would rather work... than be idle... "

Extrapolating a bit, teenagers who have worked their tails off to get 97% in their board exams have surely gained the habit of hard work. Ditto for the brutally competitive entrance exams which serve as gatekeepers to most walks of Indian life. The same habit of hard work has been installed in ten times that number who slaved away for assorted entrance exams and didn't get accepted. They Indian educational system may be very good at giving kids a tough work ethic.

This may also provide a clue to another puzzle. Why do jocks, serious sportsmen, do much better than their CGPAs suggest? Maybe because they have developed a tough work ethic?

Michael Mukherjee, Ayman al Zawahiri and a liberal education

Watched and enjoyed the Mani Ratnam film Yuva recently. This got me thinking about social change, revolution, terror and education...a train of thought led to me being an even more ardent fan the American ideal of a broad, liberal university education. Like, for example, the core College curriculum at the University of Chicago, which my cousin Shakti just finished. Probably not the point Mani Ratnam wanted to make. But then, that is why minds have windmills.

Yuva features Abhishek Bachchan as Lallan Singh: a violent underworld hit-man with a thread of gold running through his heart. Lallan Singh works for powerful establishment politicians. Ajay Devgan features as Michael Mukherjee: an idealistic middle-class student of Physics at Presidency College, Calcutta. Michael has many friends and a very gorgeous girlfriend who teaches French. He turns down a scholarship offer from MIT, takes on the violence of Lallan Singh and his wicked, venal political masters, and promises to change the system by standing for election as Mr Clean. He duly wins the election. The movie ends with Michael and friends striding confidently into the Bengal assembly. The implied feel-good conclusion is that Michael's idealism will reform the system.

What started me on the train of of thought was that I found Michael Mukherjee's idealism more scary than Lallan Singh's violence. Michael was sure. He was never in doubt. He never paused to re-consider. He never changed his mind. He couldn't have. Michael's charisma stems from his conviction, in his own personal integrity and in the completeness of his ideas. And, while Ajay Devgan isn't a gifted actor, yet he played Michael perfectly, instinctively. I know real people like Michael, people who derive their sense of self from ideological conviction.

People who share Michael's conviction are often revolutionaries. Could be the Communist Revolution, the Islamist Revolution, the Environmental Revolution, the Freedom Movement, racist supremacists, religious evangelists of any hue…you get the picture. What Michael Mukherjee and all these people share is a world view that is complete. When this world view is adopted, the mind comes to rest. The psyche now has the basis for action. The action is usually both bloody and futile, because the real world is never that simple.

Was it just chance that Michael Mukherjee was a student of physics?

A theory I heard from Professor Ahmet Evin suggests not. Professor Evin was lamenting the (relative) failure of modern Turkey to create a vital civil society. He attributed this to the fact that the Turkish leadership, and therefore all of Turkey, prizes a technical education above a liberal one. The Engineer’s Mind tends to see society as a problem to be solved with a simple, specific and well-designed intervention. Not as an amorphous mass of humanity which needs to be inspired, jollied and cajoled towards another amorphous vision of beauty, virtue and justice (or words to that effect).

While this has to be unfair to my many well-read engineer friends, this theory really resonated with me, as an Indian. My friends from China and Mexico tell me the same narrowness of vision is true of their countries as well.

The prevalence of a technical education among the Al Queda top brass is fascinating. Osama bin Laden is a civil engineer, apparently a pretty good one. Ayman al Zawahiri is a medical doctor. His fellow Al Queda ideologue, Dr. Fadl, is also a medical doctor. Mohamed Atta is an architect who did a Masters degree in Urban Planning at Hamburg University. The pattern is clearly not perfect: Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s ideologue, had apparently read up on the Vedanta and Buddhism. But there still seems to be a pattern here.

The problem could only be the dog that did not bark. A solid base of engineering knowledge could hardly be a bad thing, in any circumstances. The problem might be that these smart, sensitive, idealistic young people, who were going to be influential in their societies anyway, had no exposure to history, politics or law. They knew nothing of the genius of the Medici family in making the Renaissance possible in tiny, vulnerable medieval Florence. They knew nothing of C. Rajagopalachari’s dissenting views on Indian socialism, and on organizing independent India into language based states. They never wrestled with the differing world views of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, or with Friedrich Hayek's notion of The Fatal Conceit, the conceit that societies can be engineered.

Maybe, in that half light between education and ignorance, it is easy to imagine that building one mega-dam, or embracing the one true faith, or ridding the world of one hated oppressor, or anointing one master race, or detonating that one perfect suicide bomb, is the key to liberation.

In that case, the point of an education should surely be to dispel that half-light. Education, as opposed to technical training, should be about exposing plastic minds to this dazzling diversity of thought, none of which are complete or correct.

This, unfortunately, is a concept of education alien to Indian Universities. In India, understandable middle class anxiety frames education as a means to earn a decent living. I'm fairly close to my company's graduate hiring program at British Universities. I don't often run into this ideal in Britain either, where 18 year olds are encouraged to make definitive choices between chemical engineering, medicine or architecture. Though the PPE program at Oxford points in this direction. This ideal seems to be best developed in America, where a liberal university education often precedes technical specialization, therefore cultivating humanity.

Geeks, meet the jocks

Michael Medved on the value of an education:

That piece of parchment from New Haven or Cambridge does indicate that you've competed with single-minded effectiveness in the first 20 years of life....the driven, ferociously focused kids willing to expend the energy and make the sacrifices to conquer our most exclusive universities...are likely to enjoy similar success...

Competed, single-minded, driven, ferociously focused, energy, sacrifice - these words could be used to describe sports people. Not gifted amateurs, but the tough competitors who win ugly.

Among my peers, the sportsmen/ games captains have certainly gone on to be as successful as the university toppers. There is something in that old Thomas Arnold belief about sport building character...

If you want to start a revolution...

...use radio. If you want to suppress a revolution use TV.

Radio forces people to focus, and listen to your words, and engage their imaginations. With TV, people are more focused on the colour of your tie than on what you're saying.

Just heard this on BBC Radio 4 ten minutes ago. I love the Marxist interpretation. TV is the ultimate capitalist plot to foil revolution by feeding the masses an opiate.

What's special about Cambridge?

"My classmates from Cambridge believed the sky was their limit. And they were willing to work their tails off to reach that limit. My classmates from the University of Birmingham believed they would get what they deserved. And they waited for their just rewards to come to them."

This comment by a colleague who attended undergraduate programs at both Cambridge and the U of Birmingham. The context was a bunch of friends from work at the pub on a summer evening talking about what they got out of an education.

This comment cuts deep. I heard it last summer and it's still in easy-access memory. The start of the recruiting season just brought it to the top of my mind.

The most talked about and researched aspects of an elite education are selection, training and access. Yet, quite possibly, the most important value derived from an education is in shaping these deeply-held, pre-cognitive notions of identity and destiny. These deeply-held notions of self are what shape behaviour, and therefore learning, and therefore achievement.

A sense of one's identity and destiny need not come from education. But the only equally powerful source of that sense of self, of that source of integrity, is probably family.

When does real learning happen?

Should reference books be in libraries? Or should they be lying around on desk tops and cabinets, within casual stretching distance of where people sit when they work?

I'm debating this exact point with the HR department of the company I work for. I teach a course of business writing. I want my students to leave my class with a set of reference books that they can dip into when wrestling with a complex story. My belief is that this is when the real learning will happen.

HR wants me to put these books in the corporate library. Of course, a student who is serious about writing well could go to the library and check the book out. But the likelihood that a student will do this when wrestling with a real problem is low. So even the serious student will check the book out, flip through it, and put it back in the library without really internalizing any learning.

There's a pretty deep point here. People are receptive to learning at those moments when they most need to the information. The task of the teacher is make that information accessible at those moments. And ideally, to create those precious high-pressure moments when the student is receptive to learning.