Text (Speech): Pracha Hutanuwatr
Recording and Translation：Liang Xiaomei, PCD
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| Pracha Hutanuwatr always delivers talks on how to realise social change. |
Editor’s note:
Pracha Hutanuwatr is a major facilitator for PCD’s Ecovillage Design Education-inspired training. On 10 March 2014, PCD invited Pracha to deliver a talk in Guangdong, expounding his thoughts on education in mainstream modern society, and on how education transforms a person and in turn changes the community. His views are incisive and inspirational. The following is an abridged version of his talk.
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I’m Pracha Hutanuwatr and at the moment my organisation is called “Ecovillage Transition Asia” in Thailand. The topics for the talk tonight were proposed to me by the [PCD] colleagues here. One of them is my views on education adopted in mainstream society.
Education in mainstream society
What I will share with you is only my own observation. My views are based on my experience from South East Asia. They may or may not suit the case of China. My experience in South East Asia is based on the situation of my country [Thailand] which is in turn very much affected by the situation in America. So this is also another limitation. For friends in China, there are no perfect answers to how to reform our community through education. I’ll leave it to your thinking and analysis.
First I’ll mention my background. My grandfather came from Chaozhou of Guangdong Province in China. So I grew up in overseas Chinese culture, which encourages us to work so hard to climb up the social ladder. When I was five years old, my family went bankrupt, and so I had to work hard before going to school. When I came home from school, I had to work at home also. However, my family still belonged to the middle class, a kind of lower one. Compared with many of my friends in primary school, I was not too badly off economically. The fact that I worked for my family has influenced how I look at education now. I weigh the importance of manual work in education highly.
Lots of scientific studies have proven that manual work can improve the connections of different parts of our brain. People who often engage in manual work will have better brain development. My son now goes to an alternative school. The school [the Waldorf School in Bangkok] he attends advocates alternative education. For the first three years, he learns nothing about reading and writing but how to clean the table, how to wash dishes, how to sing songs, how to play games – no reading and writing. Later on, he learns how to cultivate rice in the field. A lot of such learning is using the body.
Now about myself. When I was young, I studied hard to get into the best school in Bangkok. So many people later running the country were trained in this school. Students were divided into different classes and I was among those in the first rate.
There were changes to my studying when I was at high school. At that time, the democratic movement broke out in Thailand. From the time I was born until my days in high school, Thailand was under military dictatorship without democracy. In my last two years at high school, the democratic movement became strong in my country. I was involved in the movement, when in 1973 the movement threw out the military government. In the movement, I joined the revolutionary wing. Three years later, I found my comrades were busy fighting each other, rather than fighting the capitalists.
Later on, I chose to become a monk for 11 years. I wanted to understand life more deeply. After I disrobed, I joined different NGOs and social movements and ran international organisations which were mainly concerned with combining meditation and social action. Now, my interest is in combining social action, Daoism, Buddhism, and the ecological world view. But I still regard myself as a socialist. So I’m a Buddhist, a socialist and a green activist.
Now I would like to talk about my views on education adopted in mainstream society. Combining my experience in the elite school and experience in dealing with the government, I think that education adopted in mainstream society puts too much emphasis on mind training. Such training is a very small part, very incomplete when it comes to education. People have different dimensions. Just like the sun, which shines everywhere. If we educate ourselves only in one dimension, it only develops a small part of the potential of a person. It’s very limited. Moreover, education in mainstream society is so compartmentalising, not forming a whole for all aspects of life. We learn Thai language, English language, science, et cetera. Each subject is alienated from another.
Secondly, modern education is also really competitive and makes us become very individualistic. So it makes us become selfish; especially if you live in a capitalist society, you just live for yourself. When you go to medical school, they may tell you about professional ethics. When you study law, you learn professional ethics. However, deep down in all these is that your self comes first. You need to earn more money, get more power and fame. That is the underlying message.
Being more educated is part of modernism, which is to look down upon traditional culture, and your past; that the new is always better than the old. So modern educated people everywhere are uprooted from their own culture and their own tradition. The more modern you are, the more uprooted you are. When you are uprooted from your culture, another thing that comes with it is a feeling of your own inferiority. You are always not good enough. Even if you’re in the top school, you are not good enough because you are not the first in class; not the first in the country. This is the secret of modern society, industrialisation and capitalism. It makes us feel that we are not good enough and thus we go shopping. If you have the right brand of cell phone, you will feel better. If you have the right shirt, the right brand, you are better. And this is endless because the business will always create new brands. So you feel you are not good enough and you go shopping; and that keeps capitalism going on. We just exploit nature so much. We exploit our human friends so much. Hundreds of years of colonialisation came from this drive – to be better than and to dominate others.
So, real education has to deal with our feeling of inferiority; we are already good enough as human beings. Some countries In South East Asia and my country in particular, we are so much influenced by the US. When we go to school, our dream is always the American dream – big car, big house, comfortable life and everything you see in the Hollywood movies. This is not only in my country. It’s everywhere. But this American dream cannot be materialised, not even in America; most people cannot materialise the dream.
The next aspect of education in mainstream society is to develop authoritarianism. It makes you believe in authority because knowledge is from the teacher. You’re nobody. You’re just sitting and learning knowledge from the teacher. It’s very much teacher-centred.
In summary, the education system produces an alienated man. He cannot be connected with himself, cannot be connected with other human beings because of competition, cannot be connected with nature – an unhappy human being. The education is like a mass production system which produces people with the same thoughts, because the start of modern education coincided with the start of industralisation. It’s like industrialisation, which produces cans that look exactly the same.
Personal transformation and social transformation
Let me go to the second part – my understanding of transformation: people transformation and social transformation.
For me, there are two important conditions for real education and real transformation. One is critical self-awareness. It means you can look at yourself critically, see the good side and bad side; and be aware of your thoughts, your pattern of thinking. This condition is to be healthy here and now. We do not live in the future or under others' expectation. Life is here and now. A good life is here and now. Only in this way can you see what is deep inside you, and see different things happening in you and your reaction to the world.
The second condition is a community of good friends. You need a healthy community here and now. You need to learn and grow. The best school in the mainstream makes you compete with your friends so that you can get good marks. But your friends are more important than your marks. Later on in your life, when you go to work, modern society makes you compete with your colleagues so that you become the top in your organisation, at an upper level over your friends. Again, higher position is valued more than friendship. Yet, your friends and family are very important. If you want to grow, you need the right education. You have to create a community of like-minded people who support each other to go towards this direction together.
So the right kind of education is liberating, one which makes you feel free, makes you feel good enough, and frees us from authoritarianism, from consumerism, and from fear and insecurity. The middle class is very afraid of insecurity. We have to liberate ourselves from that. We are good enough and have enough. Another thing is 'conscientisation' [Editor’s note: this concept was introduced by a Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire], which helps us understand where we are in the world, know the social structure we are living in, be able to analyse it, its strength and weaknesses. If you know about that, you will be empowered. In other words, we become more active citizens. We look after our society, and look after ourselves as we feel confident and self-contented. If we think that we don’t have enough, we won't do things for others. If we feel contented, we will become very rich. A man has a bicycle, and goes to work by bicycle – if you feel contented that way, you are richer than a person who has a Mercedes-Benz but wants a new one every year. The man who is richest is the man who is contented. If you have confidence and you feel contented, you have compassion. You feel for the people who suffer, and you are ready to act wisely for the people who need your support. If you are like that you become a mature change agent. You work to change your consciousness, and at the same time, you work to change the social structure. In that way, we can step by step create a more just and sustainable society, as well as more enlightened individuals: personal transformation and social transformation have to go together.
The categorisation of head, heart, hand, or mind, body, spirit, implies that we try to understand human beings as a whole. Mainstream education, at its best, helps us develop critical thinking and clear thinking. The heart and spirit refer to all the spiritual practices for people to develop mindfulness, body-awareness and mind-awareness, and we emphasise the development of the body and hand. We learn much through manual work and right speech [Editor’s note: one of the factors in the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism]. The right kind of education is one that changes the head, heart, and the hand; and the body, the mind and the spirit. Manual work or housework is not something trivial. It can be part of the spiritual practice, part of human growth. Doing manual work properly helps develop our selves. That is one way to look at the right kind of education.
Another way to look at right education is self-restraint. It is to place a boundary on our speech, action and livelihood. We don’t go beyond the boundary lest it harms other people, ourselves and nature. We have to make that boundary. This will free us from confusion, harm and dissipation.
Next is meditation and concentration practice. That is very important because you have to train yourself to be calm and peaceful inside. Then, you will feel happy without going shopping. You can be happy just by “being”, not “doing” and “buying”. Modern people are encouraged to do more, to have more, but we don’t know the art of being, to be more. By just being, you will be very happy. But you need practice for that. And all the spiritual tradition in the East, such as Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Hinduism…all teaches us to train our mind.
The last aspect is to change our perspective on the world, to a right way of thinking. Happiness is not to get more and more but to reduce our needs and desires.
Also, be aware of our harmful thoughts. Part of being human is to be greedy. When we are hungry, we are greedy in eating. When we feel cold, we need to put on clothes. But we need to put good limitations on this. Even for people like me, engaging in social movements, when we see our friends getting rich, sometimes we will be jealous. So to be aware of all these thoughts is very important. We don’t need to hurt ourselves because of such thinking; we just have to bring our awareness to these harmful thoughts. All these different kinds of thoughts we don’t’ like, we need to be aware of them. We give compassion to these thoughts. We don’t follow such a pattern of thoughts; but at the same time, we don’t hate them. Because if we hate them, we hate ourselves too
A more holistic type of education is one which looks after different aspects of your life.
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The Thai green activist Pracha Hutanuwatr. |
The Thai senior facilitator from the |