Learning by Heart - a paradox

“The school was what could euphemistically be called a ‘teaching college’.'' At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community. The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education.”

-Excerpts from novel ‘Zen and Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance’


Any educational institution like a school, a college or a university stoops down to be just another ‘teaching place’. A place where there is only one state of affair and that is to teach, to teach and only to teach. In short, it is an eternal automaton.

That’s what we all have been through – series of automated factory lines where in every thing follows just one simple rule of dull, monotonous and dreary mode of learning. The sole intention of this mode of learning (if it at all can be called so) is to dump the entire load of facts onto the perplexed minds of students. A typical student who takes this form of learning will turn into a zombish automaton – and adds to the thousands of such minds which have been made devoid of simple yet essential aspects of education.

Learning and education which can be a dynamic and enlivening process ends up just another set of trite words written in an equally alienated textbook which takes out all of charm out of the process of learning. All this backed up with the eternally conditioned teachers and parents make life of a student nothing less than a horse with blinders on, not sure of where he is going, or why.

Another companion for all the students is the great technique of “rote”. I still cannot forget the fact that I used to rote up to five pages of History answers when I was 12 years old. This aspect of rote does not stop there but also extends to all other subjects, which should be learnt out of analytical understanding or experiential understanding. There were cases where in I even had to rote a mathematics problem. I am not sure if educated has ruined me, or vice versa.

One memorable phrase which we all have heard hundreds of times, yet the most ill-understood and easily the most misinterpreted one must be “by-heart”. By heart, in most general usage refers to learning something into memory, so that we can recite it back from memory without referring to the original source of content. But, don’t we all know out of our own experience that the things which we tend to remember the most are the ones which appeal to our hearts, and the ones which we love. For instance, don’t we remember certain childhood stories and fairytales which took our fascination? Also, we easily remember most songs because we like them, and we listen to them because they are fun.

Have we not lived the life of zombies most of the student life – arguably the most intuitive and intellectually rich days of our life. At atleast I did from school right through to Engineering.

In retrospect, I see that “by heart” could have been the saviour of the day, if it was interpreted in the right way. It probably meant getting swept into the fascination of the subject – falling in love with the subject and then it brings forth the passion which takes things in intuitive and intellectual way – a perfect sense of approach to education. When I look back I see that I never really “fell in love” with anything that was taught to me. Science was OK, History was boring, English was laborious and the most haunting and daunting was Mathematics. And guess what I graduated as an Engineer – whose foremost tools are supposed to be scientific method and mathematics.

I did enjoy English classes, in bits and spurts though. If it was not for the dull and uninteresting grammar sessions, I would have really fallen in love with English. And please don’t get me wrong because I am good at both grammar and English, but I could have had more of other things in this time. I never had enough time to bask in the melodious poems, enchanting fairy tales, etc. Never was it stressed that English, as any other language was a mode of communication – a vehicle for expression.

All the years, English like all other subjects was another demon to be conquered by hard work and by rote. And, it is only years later I have realized that language is a vehicle of expression – something which I should have been taught years earlier. It is only vehicle I have now to express my concern and disdain.

Please don’t get me wrong that either I have been a bad student or am not able to pace up with life. It is the other way round; I have always been in top three of students in a class, throughout my education.

Being a success, in reality, I have been a failure. Probably vice versa would have been better.

Only if all these years someone had taught me that “by heart” meant by passion and drive rather than by memory and conformity I would be at some other place, doing something really “by heart”.

Let me wrap up with words of Karl Menninge –
"What's done to children, they will do to society."