CREATIVITY AND EARLY YEARS EDUCATION: A Lifewide Foundation by Anna Craft. Continuum, London, 2002; Atlantic Publishers, New Delhi, 2004.
CREATIVITY has been conceived as being mainly associated with ‘the arts’ and the privilege of a few ‘gifted individuals’ who have been so endowed by nature. Such notions have governed the treatment of creativity in the curriculum. Anna Craft proposes an alternative conception of creativity in the early years of education. She defines creativity as the capacity of ordinary individuals to route-find by making choices, across and through life – a notion of ‘personal effectiveness’ or ‘little c creativity’, involving the use of imagination, intelligence, self-creation and self-expression to promote know-how and possibility thinking and on dealing innovatively with everyday life situations. It does not necessarily involve a product-outcome. Rather than being seen as separate from other skills and characteristics, ‘little c creativity’ is embedded into the context of lifewide development. The concept of ‘personal effectiveness’ has been an oft-discussed term in the field of management and personal development. It is interesting to understand how the author has presented this as a method of conceptualising creativity in the context of early education.
Taking cognizance of the changes in the social and economic realms due to industrialisation and globalisation, Craft stresses the critical need and rationale for ‘little creativity’ in early education. As observed by her, the growing culture of individualism, together with continuous changes in technology and the marketplace, demand an ever-growing role from an individuals own ‘agency’ in determining directions, routes and pathways through the many facets of life. In other words, a certain level of ‘personal effectiveness’ is necessary for ordinary people to cope well with the current global scenario.
The book begins with an analysis of curriculum policies and practices which have dominated creativity in the domain of early years of education in Britain since the mid-20th century. The first of these was the 1967 Plowden Report whose recommendations had a major influence on child-centred approaches to teaching and learning. Although not specifically about creativity, the Plowden Report was significant in that it envisioned a critical role for creativity in the curriculum. The second major set of influences discussed involve policy initiatives in the 1990s on the early learning goals for 3-5 year olds – the NACCE (National Advisory Committee of Creative and Cultural Education) report, ‘All Our Futures’ (1999), and the National Curriculum for Children aged 5-16 (2000). The detailed critique of the Plowden Report included in Chapter 1 makes for useful reading.
Part II of the book explores various constituents of ‘little c creativity’: imagination, intelligence, self-creation, self-expression and know-how and how these are brought together in possibility thinking. Anna Craft concludes that the gains from developing ‘little c creativity’ in children range from increasing their resilience to situations, to encouraging greater resourcefulness and confidence in facing life situations, both as children and later as adults. Part III of the book focuses on the practical issues of applying the concept of ‘little c creativity’ in the curriculum, teaching practice, assessment and teacher education.
The chapters are well-organised with informative and appropriate subheadings; at the end of each chapter there is a useful conclusion summarising the chapter content. Case studies are used to clarify aspects of the approach in practice. Detailed references have been made throughout the book to theoretical developments in creativity from the work and views of numerous persons specialising in early years education. However, the coverage of the practical aspects of the specific concept being proposed is inadequate. The book, therefore, is likely to be of greater interest to academics involved in early years research and those following teacher-training programmes but less relevant for practitioners.
Shalini Mittal
MIRA AND THE MAHATMA by Sudhir Kakar. Penguin, New Delhi, 2004.
FICTION is also a mode of arriving at truth. The form allows us to explore those recesses which fall outside history, biography and even psychoanalysis. It is this possibility that has increasingly attracted Sudhir Kakar to the form of the novel. After The Ascetic of Desire and Ecstasy Kakar now explores one of the more fascinating of relationships – that between Madeline Slade and Mahatma Gandhi.
Madeline, a daughter of an English admiral had an unremarkable childhood in her grandfather’s estate ‘Milton Heath’ when her father was away in distant waters for long stretches. She spent her days between the day nursery, walks through the garden of the twenty-acre estate, riding full-sized hunters and going through regulated meetings with the elders of the family. She had a special feeling of fellowship with the trees and plants, exploring every nook and corner of the garden, expressing her feelings for them by throwing her arms around trees and embracing them. The feeling of comfort given by this embrace stayed with her till her old age.
Even as she grew up surrounded with affection and luxury, something remained unexplained and unanswered in her life. Though not gloomy or depressed she remained aloof, conscious of being different from others. This awareness of being different and having affectionate yet unfulfilling relationships with her elders and sister Rhona turned this adolescent inwards. Then, almost as if it had been divined, she heard Beethoven. She had no special training or musical talent. But Beethoven stirred and awoke her being; through his music she felt that she was in communion with his soul. She heard far beyond the sounds of his music; it was his soul that spoke to her. Describing this spiritual experience, she said: ‘Yes, I had found him. But now an anguish seized me – oh, what an anguish! I threw myself down on my knees in the seclusion of my room and prayed, really prayed to God for the first time in my life.’
Her special relationship with Beethoven was known only to her; it was deep down in her inner being. Her search for Beethoven’s soul took her to Bonn and Vienna. Her search was not material, it was not musical either; it was essentially to hear his sound, to feel the continual touch of his fingers on the piano. In her intense longing for Beethoven, time stood still. Her longing took her to Romain Rolland, the author of Jean Christophe, to his retreat at Villeneuve. Their meetings were halting and awkward. Rolland at the time was preoccupied with a man leading his people in far away India, a man he described as ‘ another Christ’.
As she took leave of him, Madeline felt that Rolland had given her something that she had unconsciously sought all her life. As she read Rolland’s Mahatma Gandhi, Madeline felt that here was the answer to her prayers, that her calling was not Beethoven but Gandhi. Instinctively she decided that she had to be with Gandhi, a part of his cause, and his community. She trained like a sadhak to equip herself for the life in Gandhiji’s ashram at Sabarmati. After a year of preparation, Madeline arrived at the Satyagraha Ashram, Sabarmati on 7 November 1925. She sensed light as she fell at the feet of the man whose call she had answered. As he gently raised her Gandhiji said; ‘You shall be my daughter.’ Bapu named her Mira.
It is this relationship between Bapu and Mira that Kakar wishes to explore. He had available to him vast archival and biographical information, including Gandhiji’s letters to Mirabehn and her autobiography, The Spirit’s Pilgrimage. Kakar cleverly moves between the historical and the fictional to tell his tale. The story is told through the eyes of Navin, Mira’s Hindi teacher at Sabarmati. Gandhiji’s letters to Mirabehn, her fictional diary and letters to Rolland propel the narrative.
Mirabehn came at a time when Gandhiji had decided to spend a year (1926) living at the ashram. These were spiritually one of the most intensive years for the Mahatma. In 1925 he had commenced writing his story, the story of his experiments with Truth. The ashram itself was undergoing a process of churning. The ashramites along with Bapu were engaged in a process of self-purification –a process that would enable them to dedicate themselves to the service of the people, the daridranarayan. The ashram that Kakar takes us into is a community bereft of laughter, music, life itself. In Kakar’s narration, the ashram becomes a space of unwilling women, silenced children and men, attracted not by the vision but the visionary.
The ashramites are a lot of men engaged in bodily penance for self-realization. They are epitomised by the character of Bhansalibhai who had taken a vow of silence for twelve years, engaged a goldsmith to stitch his lips together with copper wire and was surviving on a diet of neem leaves mixed with wheat flour and water. This is not the community where men and women such as Maganlal and Narayandas Gandhi, Mahadev Desai, Kishorelal Mashruwala, Vinoba, Premaben Kantak, Gangaben Vaidya, Kakasaheb Kalelkar and Swami Anand lived. Nor the ashram that woke up every morning to the singing of Pandit Narayan Moreshwar Khare, a disciple of Pandit Paluskar. Of course, life at the ashram was one of discipline, of bodily labour, of ashram observances, the ekadas vrata. But it was in no sense a community as seen by Kakar – non-creative, silenced, marred by petty bickering – presided over by a man obsessed only with the examination of dried human shit as part of his quackery and yards of cotton spun everyday.
Kakar does provide some tantalising glimpses of Mirabehn and Gandhiji’s intense longing for each other. But rarely are we provided anything beyond the well-known letters. He does not explain the nature of Mirabehn’s spiritual quest, her need to feel the presence of Beethoven and later of Gandhiji in her daily existence. Her quest for love that was neither material nor bodily as evident in her relationship with Sardar Prithvi Singh, remains equally a mystery. What attracted her to Gandhiji or to Beethoven, two figures she could not have ever bodily possessed? What was the nature of her calling? Surprisingly, Kakar chooses not to dwell in areas where he is at his best. A man who has given us some of the most original insights into our cultural psyche fails to engage. We are also no wiser on Mirabehn’s return to Beethoven.
The book disappoints not only at the level of cultural insights but equally as a novel. With the exception of Navin, none of the other characters who inhabit the novel, including Sardar Prithvi Singh, move beyond the two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Even Kasturba remains a shadowy figure though Kakar makes much of Mirabehn’s desire to occupy Ba’s place in Bapu’s life, surely a tension worth exploring to a psychoanalyst. We can only mourn the loss of a great possibility.
Tridip Suhrud
WATER HARVESTING AND SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY IN INDIA by R.N. Athavale. Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad and Rawat Publications, Jaipur, 2003.
RAINWATER HARVESTING: New Approaches for Sustainable Water Resources Development by P.M. Natarajan and Shambu Kollalikar. Sarma’s, Pudukottai, 2004.
NOT since Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain’s Dying Wisdom: Rise and Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems (Centre for Science and Environment, 1997) has this reviewer come across a book like the one by R.N. Athavale, Water Harvesting and Sustainable Supply in India that brings alive and helps one understand various aspects and intricacies of water harvesting in the Indian context. Not that the two books are really comparable. Dying Wisdom was an extensive region by region survey undertaken in 15 ecological zones (interestingly enough, Athavale’s book contains a table summarizing the various types of traditional water harvesting structures identified and classified zone-wise by Agarwal and Narain) by a large number of persons from diverse backgrounds and of efforts, some quite well-known by now, to revive and adapt them in specific settings.
Athavale’s volume is the effort of a hydrologist to provide a comprehensive definition of the subject matter and scope of water harvesting, describing the principal methods and practices (traditional as well as scientific/modern) of harvesting rain, surface and groundwater in India. It forms part of the environment and development book series of the Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad, seeking to bring development alternatives for a variety of ecological situations to the notice of decision-makers and policy-planners.
Athavale starts off by reviewing India’s water resource endowments, looking at both surface and groundwater and the monsoon systems affecting India, and providing long term predictions of water availability (absolute and on a per capita basis) and deficits in the various rainfall zones of the country. He points to the need for not only creating new resources but also for widespread water harvesting efforts. He explains how water harvesting can improve both the quantity and quality of drinking water sources as also provide irrigation water in areas of water stress, including in drought prone and arid areas.
The descriptions – examples, maps, charts and diagrams – provided by Athavale makes it easy for social scientists, rural development administrators, policy-makers and the intelligent layman (including community users and NGO personnel) to make sense of how rainwater harvesting on rooftops and in-situ surface water harvesting, groundwater harvesting, artificial recharge including the use of check-dams, use of traditional water harvesting structures like tankas, kunds, khadins, rapats, naadis, johads and minor irrigation tanks, or modern techniques like lining of ponds, construction of modern percolation tanks and farm ponds, or subsurface dykes, and the use of the watershed approach to water harvesting can be undertaken. It includes calculations of catchment sizes, methods of analysis of relevant hydrological data, and design of water harvesting structures. Even technical persons will find the author’s explanations useful for understanding the various aspects, ramifications, structures, processes and the hydrology involved in water harvesting.
In addition to providing concrete examples of various types of structures, the techniques involved and their planning, design and use, Athavale also delineates the successful water harvesting examples of Sukhomajri (inspired by the now deceased ICAR scientist Dr. P.R. Mishra), the late Vilasrao Salunkhe initiated Pani Panchayats in Maharashtra, Annasaheb Hazare’s experiments at Ralegaon Siddhi, Tarun Bharat Sangh and Rajendra Singh’s work in Alwar district, Rajsumandhiyala and the efforts of the sarpanch Hardevsingh Jadeja, as well as the mass movement for recharging wells in Saurashtra and the men who inspired the same – Shyamjibhai Antala of Saurashtra Lok Manch and Pandurang Shastri Athavale, spiritual leader of the Swadhyaya Parivar.
Natarajan and Kallolikar, like Athavale, start with an analysis of the water resource situation, but their focus is on one state – Tamilnadu. Their second chapter parallels parts of Athavale’s book as it describes 24 techniques of rainwater harvesting and artificial groundwater recharge with the extensive use of diagrams, touches briefly on the surveys required to successfully implement the techniques, the costs of such techniques, the benefits of rainwater harvesting, and so on. Other chapters, which focus on Tamilnadu, look at remote sensing and conventional approaches to identifying suitable areas for groundwater recharge, strategies to solve Chennai’s water problems and whether inter-basin transfers of water could solve Tamilnadu’s water scarcity problem.
In their preface, Natarajan and Kallolikar indicate that their aim ‘is not to educate erudite scholars on water resources but to make the common man and ordinary housewife understand the various strategies to increase and preserve water resources.’ From that angle, their language appears somewhat cumbersome and technical as also, at certain places, somewhat over-flowery. However, given the paucity of works providing detailed descriptions of techniques, the book is a welcome addition to the literature.
One disappointing feature common to both books is that they provide point wise lists as their summing up chapters (one entitled ‘conclusion’ and the other ‘recommendations’) instead of fleshed out and rounded essays summarizing their views and prescriptions.
Athavale recommends that all cities should follow the example of Chennai, Delhi and Ahmedabad and make water harvesting and surface storage or recharge mandatory for all new construction. Further, that dugwells be preferred to borewells, Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) techniques be adopted in Indian cities and (on a small scale) villages, groundwater be declared a common property resource of the residents of the watershed and permissible borewell depth be regulated, direct and indirect subsidies for electricity and irrigation tariffs be abolished to ensure frugal use of water for irrigation, the tradition of annual desilting of surface water harvesting structures and their feeder channels be revived, the water distribution system in canals be improved to reduce tail-end deprivation and expand the irrigated area, artificial recharge be encouraged, governments develop the courage to prohibit the cultivation of water guzzling crops like paddy and sugarcane, and that the national water policy give communities the right to manage their own water resources in watersheds/mini-basins having a catchment size up to 2000 square kilometers.
Natarajan and Kellolikar too make many similar recommendations in the all-India context – groundwater regulation through legislation (they have used the word ‘regularise’, but this reviewer feels they mean ‘regulate’) to check contamination and overuse of water as also to limit use in critical dark category blocks; that while free power could be considered for dugwells it should not be so for borewells; rainwater harvesting be made mandatory in all new houses as well as in public buildings and encouraged in other buildings through subsidies and incentives; potential aquifers be identified and demarcated as ‘groundwater sanctuaries’ for the future; mass awareness be created about rainwater harvesting, alongside standard designs being finally made available to the public; good and appropriate technologies propagated and cheaper technologies evolved; panchayats, municipalities, state/central governments NGOs and the community, as well as scientists and beneficiaries, should be involved in a national programme for rainwater harvesting.
Their recommendations for Chennai’s water problems, however, may prove to be too drastic and difficult to implement. For instance, they advocate that one of the east flowing Peninsular rivers – the Mahanadi, the Godavari or Krishna – be diverted to Chennai, that roof top rainwater be harvested and utilized and artificial groundwater recharge measures be taken up immediately, that considerable sea water be desalinated and supplied to the population, and finally, if necessary, the state capital be shifted to Tiruchirapalli.
While both books point to the need for peoples participation and community involvement in management, neither spells out procedures to concretize such participation or even discuss the nuances of participatory management as would relate to different types of water harvesting initiatives. It is now up to the activists, proponents of and experts in participation, bureaucrats and members of the rural delivery system, NGO functionaries and the like, to come up with similar suggestions on participatory measures which water professionals and water users can successfully adopt. After all, it is the involvement of the community and of community-based organizations and the ways in which they function in joint partnership with governmental agencies and panchayat bodies in which will lie the key to successful water management and water harvesting endeavours.
Rakesh Hooja
GOVERNANCE AND THE SCLEROSIS THAT HAS SET IN by Arun Shourie. Rupa, New Delhi, 2004.
Paul Appleby, Dean of the Maxwell School of Public Administration, Syracuse University, invited by Jawaharlal Nehru to review India’s administrative system exactly fifty years ago had this to say: ‘...Specific decisions incident to effectuation of purpose in India are reviewed by too many persons in too many organs of the government in too detailed, too repetitive and too negative terms. Perhaps nowhere else have so many systematic barriers been erected to prevent the accomplishment of that which it has been determined should be done.’ All that Appleby wrote is still true today – as a reading of this book will show – only on a far larger scale because of the current size of government and the interlocking relations that size has engendered. Indeed, the Appleby quote is an almost perfect summary of Shourie’s work. Appleby didn’t have the time or the patience to substantiate his charge by reference to individual departments or particular programmes or projects. Shourie’s infinite patience and industry have described in laborious detail the paralysis that grips government departments and public enterprises in India.
But whereas Appleby went on to add, ‘Nothing in this paper is intended to cast blame on any person or any Minister’, Shourie offers no such generous absolution. Although he does not name them, one is left in no doubt that it is not simply the ‘deeply entrenched system’ that is to blame, but that the system has spawned non-feasance, obsession with inconsequential detail, confusion and malfeasance, which officials are only too happy to practice. Sclerosis is Shourie’s diagnosis of the systemic malaise. It is also heavily thrombotic, with thousands of individual clots choking progress and governance.
Every problem, every move in government is mired in a succession of commissions and committees. Every committee report gives rise to the creation of a study group, a task force or, if nothing else, a high-powered committee with no powers. Sometimes a sense of urgency is met by a declaration that the problem will be tackled on a war footing, but that means nothing at all. If we fought our wars with that kind of energy we would lose them.
I recall an event in my own experience, midway between the observations of Appleby and Shourie. The Bahai’s had tried for years to get a neglected open ground in Delhi assigned to them to build a temple and maintain a large public garden. Their request and its treatment had inspired files of respectable size in the Ministry of Urban Development and the Delhi Development Authority and who knows where else. After a 19 years struggle Zeena Sorabjee brought it to me in the ministry. I found nothing unacceptable in the case, so got the minister to clear it. I still remember the pained look on my Joint Secretary’s face when the decision came down to him. He seemed to be dolefully recalling the miles of red tape that the case could still use up. (He rose to be the Kerala government’s Chief Secretary.) Today Delhi has one more lovely garden and a beautiful temple in it, visited and enjoyed by thousands of people daily.
Shourie reviews a number of activities – should I use that word – in government. He looks at the telecom sector, at environment and pollution, at select public enterprises, particularly ITDC, and at the Planning Commission. His account of the last is perhaps the most distressing in this depressing book. The Commission was set up as a kind of think-tank for national policy. Unfortunately as the book shows, it has turned into another department of government, and an ineffective, irrelevant, if not redundant one at that.
The incredibly nonsensical results of the licensing regime in the telecom sector and the steady obstruction to the privatisation of ITDC hotels receive detailed treatment. Cast-iron limits are placed on separate jurisdictions, and artificial distinctions between local and long-distance telephone calls can even turn a land-line call from a room in a home in Delhi to a cell phone in another room in the same home into a long distance connection. The author describes these and other absurdities in careful but tiresome detail.
Equally absurd is the nitpicking obstruction to the efforts to privatise the almost uniformly loss-making ITDC hotels, obstruction based on petty flaws in land titles which find their way to, and get stuck in, court disputes between agencies of the same government. The government’s professed plans to rescue the environment and reduce pollution are another of the book’s laments. Again, there is no commitment to results despite the existence of agencies and officialdom in plenty to promote a safe ecology.
What surprised me as I read this book was Shourie’s avoidance, save for a tiny reference near the end of the book, to the Gujarat pogrom a couple of years ago, a total failure of governance that not only brought horror to most of the state but must surely have deterred a good deal of entrepreneurial interest in India. Shouldn’t I have expected this from an author steeped in BJP bigotry?
What really makes this book unique, and continually astonishes the reader, is the painstaking assembly of detail on each subject or department that it tackles. I cannot think of any study of our governmental system of which the conclusions are so thoroughly supported by actual case histories. That feature makes its conclusions incontestable. Unfortunately, it also makes the book exceedingly tedious. It should be absolutely compulsory study for every Indian civil servant early enough in his career to prevent his encrustation. For the rest of us, this work is telling, if terribly tiresome. Telling, because you realise that between Appleby and Shourie most of what has changed in the procedures of government has been for the worse. That is one of the unkindest developments that our rulers – politicians and bureaucrats – have brought us.
J.B. D’Souza
FRAMING ABUSE: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children by Jenny Kitzinger. Pluto Press, London, 2004.
THE violence that children are subjected to, in wider society and, even more, within the family, is usually treated as a taboo subject, shrouded in silence and secrecy. It is not as if we are unaware of the maltreatment of child labour or even child rape. And media coverage of child trafficking for prostitution and pornography or the operations of paedophiles does episodically make the front pages. But, what happens within the family and household continues to be shrouded in silence and secrecy, treated as a private affair, and seen as too painful to even admit, much less talk and write about.
It hardly helps that if the subject does come up in the public domain, it is most often sensationalised, with standardised constructions of perpetrators and victims. In any case, like divorce, pre and extramarital sex, or wife battering, child sexual abuse too is externalised, seen as done by and happening to others – in orphanages and foster homes, by perverts, and, of late, by western tourists. We, the ‘decent’ middle-class are seeped in family values and love our children. Little wonder, the phenomenon in societies like ours is explained away as western perversion.
Framing Abuse by Jenny Kitzinger discusses how this ‘painful and sensitive’ reality is perceived by and presented by mainstream media, thus influencing public understanding of sexual violence against children. Even though her examples are drawn from experiences in Britain – how the media discovered child sexual abuse, the different and changing modes of reportage, the manner in which a story is ‘branded’ and the role of empathy, the social construction of localities, landscapes and communities in news, the creation of new phobias (the fear of the stranger), and the more recent construction of the audience as activist, thereby strengthening the trend of moral policing – the book has much of value for not only media professionals but us, consumers of news.
Of particular interest are the sections related to the political economy of the media which has significant bearing on how activists against child sexual abuse can ‘use’ the media without the issue being either trivialised or sensationalised. A danger, unfortunately insufficiently realised, is that an overplay of such news can result in deadening both media and audience interest. Also, how a story is handled is of immense concern to the ‘victim’ who, while desiring justice also wants to be given the space to get on with life. All too often, the search for easy villains and victims and for more high profile coverage, our activism may make ordinary relationship between adults and children impossible. Just imagine if you can no longer pick up and hug a child for fear of being perceived as a paedophile.
Breaking the silence on this issue is crucial. Hopefully, Jenny Kitzinger’s book will prompt some of our own child rights activists to prepare an account based on our experiences. That may enjoy greater salience with our policy-makers.
Seminarist
