Unlettered but not ignorant

The author is talking about educating farmers to use scientific methods

On Wednesday, the media went to town reporting the agitation by Tamil Nadu farmers at Jantar Mantar. On one of the far too many 24X7 news channels on TV today, an “expert” said that farmers across India need to be educated so that they can farm using scientific methods. The spread of literacy, he said, would provide a safety net for them when their crops failed. This got me thinking about a mistake that development theorists commonly make, when they equate illiteracy with ignorance. When we define literacy within the narrow parameters of conventional schooling, we’re doing a grave injustice to the Indians who are skilled, and more importantly, capable of imparting their skills to students. Here are some of the many cases that illustrate this point.

The first is of a rice farmer I once met near Dehradun. For the last decade, he had patiently collected the seeds of his best plants and propagated them in the next sowing season till he created a paddy crop that was high-yielding, pest-resistant and yet, desi. He said nobody ever had to teach him farming. He had just learned it by watching his father in the field. Will it be accurate to call him illiterate just because he hasn’t been to school?

The second case in point is Daili Devi, the charismatic animal healer I met in Sadri, Rajasthan. Belonging to the Raika, an animal herding nomadic tribe of Rajasthan, her animal-healing techniques, using herbs and roots foraged from the desert scrub, were legendary. She introduced me to her cow, whom she had found abandoned in the desert, left there to die with a fractured and infected leg. Daili Devi applied a poultice on the fracture with potter’s clay and some herbs. Using bamboo canes as splints, she tied them around the cow’s leg with her own hair. Modern veterinary medicine would scoff at treating a fracture with herbs, clay and human hair, but her treatment worked like a charm and the cow is now a grandmother. Can we call her illiterate simply because she hasn’t been to school?    

Case number three doesn’t refer to a single individual. All of us have used the services of plumbers, electricians, masons and carpenters, most of whom haven’t been to school but have trained under masters, colloquially known as ustads. Recently, a reader, Yuvaraj Galada, sent me a thought-provoking essay in which he states that instead of wasting time and resources to classify and “educate” people who haven’t been to school — perhaps, it would be useful to recognise their unique skill sets and understand how best to realise their invisible potential. Instead of labelling them illiterate, what if we could empower them as teachers with valuable skill sets they could pass on?

Unfortunately, since we as a society don’t recognise and value the skills of the illiterate enough, many end up not even passing them on to their own children. In fact, many of them don’t even realise the wealth of knowledge that resides in them.  Daili Devi has sent her young daughter to school instead of teaching her the art of animal healing. The rice farmer’s son has long migrated to a city where he works as a clerk. “This life is all right for an illiterate farmer like me,” he told me as we walked in his lush paddy field. “But my son has been to school… he deserves more.” 

Perhaps, the time has come for us to discard the one-size-fits-all definition of education for a more inclusive interpretation of what it means to educate and be educated. Else, a wealth of folk wisdom and vocational knowledge would be drowned in a flood of modern education.