my anti-dihliz-ian childhood: a broken courtyard of

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Pedagogy of the Stupid1

Sayan Dey

ABSTRACT: This article elaborates, through decolonial phenomenological analy-sis, the author’s concept of pedagogy of the stupid, a metacritical idea that offers a critique of the colonial practice of constructing colonized people as intellectu-ally, politically, and ethically incapable of self-governance, cultural growth, and epistemic pursuits. Drawing upon the author’s experiences and concepts from the constellation of countries and people that constitute postcolonial India and the country of Bhutan, the author issues a critique of colonial constructions of knowledge through which the aim of producing colonized subjects depended on miseducation. The article concludes with a discussion of Bhutan’s “Green School System” of education as an effort to cultivate a form of decolonial practice and a phenomenology of the precolonial traditions of pedagogy in India.

KEYWORDS: dihliz, GuRu-Shishya Parampara, pedagogical imperative, pedagogy of the stupid, polylogical pedagogy, Green School System

My Anti-Dihliz-ian Childhood: A Broken Courtyard of Knowledge Dissemination

While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem, it now takes on the

character of an inescapable concern.

Paulo Freire (1970, 43)

Ebrahim Moosa, in his book Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (2005), defines Dihliz as a Persian word that has been Arabized, and it denotes “that

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23Pedagogy of the Stupid

space between the door and the house” (48). He also says: “What one slowly begins to fathom is that the dihliz, or the dihliz-ian space is a liminal space as well as the action of two entries: entry from the outside and entry into the in-side” (ibid). The dihliz-ian spaces or courtyards, according to Walter Mignolo, are “anchors of memories, social organizations, and patterns of living spaces” (2013, 9). Moroccan philosopher Fatima Mernissi reflects on the subjective impact of the courtyard through recollecting her childhood memories: “My childhood was happy because the frontiers were crystal clear. The first fron-tier was the threshold separating our family’s salon from the main courtyard. I would sit on our threshold and look at our house as I had never seen it before. First, there was the square of the rigid courtyard, where symmetry ruled ev-erything” (Mernissi 1995, 2–3). She adds: “Looking at the sky from the court-yard was an overwhelming experience. At first, it looked tame because of the man-made square frame. But then the movement of the early morning’s stars, fading slowly into deep blue and white, became so intense that it could make you dizzy” (4). This de-compartmentalized, open-ended, diverse, indigenous, multiversal, and self-realized dihliz-ian space of learning and sharing was what my childhood was deprived of.2

At the age of four, I was diagnosed with the neurological problem of ep-ilepsy. Instead of learning with the cosmic constellations and the natural ecology, my entire childhood was restricted and suffocated within a fixed time-frame of swallowing tablets and capsules. My family doctor strictly warned my parents that if I forget to consume my medicines on time, the problem could be life-risking. So, my upbringing was chained with different forms of phys-ical and psychological restrictions. Moreover, my medical problem imposed on me a set of collectively preconceived narratives of socio-cultural assump-tions and sympathies that were falsely created by my acquaintances, neigh-bors, relatives, and friends. Instead of giving me the space to self-understand, self-create, and self-realize, they assumed that I could never “think,” “feel,” “question,” and “analyze.” Why? Because I was epileptic, and the society in which I was born simplistically interpreted it as being “mad.” In other words, I was regarded as mentally unsound and dumb. In this way, my dihliz of episte-mological and ontological liminalities were disrupted, broken, uprooted, and replaced by the mainstream ideologies of ethics, morality, and humanitarian values, which Lewis Gordon often argues are a “theodicean problem” (Gordon 2014, 97). To elaborate, in order to authenticate and systematize the moral and humanitarian values of knowledge production, many societies invent the dis-course of dehumanization, “not only as an ontological possibility but [also] as an historical reality” (Freire, 1970: 43). In an identical manner, many people,

24 Philosophy and Global Affairs

given the context of a hegemonic Hindu society into which I was born, dehu-manized, downplayed, and denied my medical problem as a kind of suffering from the sins that I had committed in my previous birth. As a result, my par-ents were told that, in order to free my life from the clutches of evil control and allow me to be a part of the socio-cultural mainframe of “normality,” it was important to seek divine intervention through religious offerings and rituals. “Otherwise you will suffer a life of denial, dumbness, stupidity, and pain”—as one of my relatives concluded.

During my childhood days, on many occasions (especially public ones), I would observe that I’d be subjected to a special treatment of sympathetic ig-norance and existential denial by the people around me. Usually, my patterns of thinking, questioning, reflecting, and arguing were de-identified and ad-jectivized as “baseless,” “nonsensical,” and “stupid.” Among several medical side effects, the three major impacts on me were stammering, obesity, and a weak memory. After the first experience of an epileptic concussion in 1993, the physician suggested a dosage of 50 milligrams of Carbamazepine.3 By the time I was three years old and ready to go to my first nursery school, the dosage was increased to 200 milligrams due to the alarming rise in the frequency of concussions. So, a few days after I joined school, I became a perfect object of ridicule for my classmates, and I was identified as “comical” (because I stam-mered), “stupid” (because I had a weak memory), and “obese” (because I was, among so many skinny children, fat). The already shattered self-confidence and self-identity of my preschool childhood were degraded further, because, with the passage of time, I was made to realize increasingly that I was regarded as nothing more than an abnormal and amputated being of complete exis-tential, ontological, and epistemological lack. I remember how my classmates laughed at me when I stammered while interacting in the class and made fun of my obesity and mocked my inability to memorize the class notes. On several occasions, I was humiliated by the tutors as both “over smart” and “stupid” for not adhering blindly to the class notes, for counter-arguing the viewpoints of the teachers, and for building arguments of my own. Quite deliberately, some tutors avoided any form of interaction with me in the class because I could not speak “properly” or expressed what my tutors often would frame as “verbal abnormality.”

From the first day of my school, the tutors encouraged dialogic exchanges among the students in the classrooms. But, with the passage of time, I real-ized that such dialogic exchanges were underlined with definite parameters of inclusivity and exclusivity. The notion of dialogue was implemented as a technique to systematize and justify the violent epistemological and ontolog-


ical binaries of normality/abnormality, morality/immorality, and intelligence/stupidity. That is why Paulo Freire, in his conversation with Donald Macedo in “A Dialogue: Culture, Language and Race,” rightly argues:

In order to understand the meaning of dialogical practice, we have to put aside the simplistic understanding of dialogue as a mere technique. Dialogue does not represent a somewhat false path that I attempt to elaborate on and realize in the sense of involving the ingenuity of the other. On the contrary dialogue characterizes an epistemological relationship. Thus, in this sense dialogue is a way of knowing and should never be viewed as a mere tactic to involve students in a particular task. We have to make this point very clear. I engage in dialogue not necessarily because I like the other person. I engage in dialogue because I recognize the social and not merely the individualistic character of the process of knowing. In this sense, di-alogue presents itself as an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing. (Freire and Macedo 1995, 379)

Unfortunately, my school tutors regarded dialogue as a medium for practicing favoritism and validating a practice of epistemological otherness and ontologi-cal invalidity. I remember how my “normal” friends would not interact with the “abnormal” me because often my presence became a source of embarrassment for them. I remind myself of how, with the passage of time, my self-realized ways of understanding, learning, and sharing were systemically and epistem-ically dehumanized, declassified, and rejected as “invalid” and “stupid.” Each and every moment I recollect how my self-constructed dihliz of knowledge dis-semination was invaded, distorted, broken, decapitated, and silenced by the mainstream forces of normality. I consistently recollect and remember these experiences not for the sake of gaining public sympathy, but for that of con-sciously engaging in the exercise of dismembering the stigma of “being stupid” and celebrating “stupidity” as a powerful phenomenon of gaining, sharing, and acknowledging the diversities of knowledge systems across the globe.

Keeping these arguments at the forefront, what follows is divided into five sections. The first sets the tone of this article in an auto-ethnographic manner. I reflect there on the various ways through which the self-created and self-re-alized diversities of learning and sharing have been invalidated, dismantled, and dehumanized by the mainframe ideologies of institutions, such as family, neighborhood, and schools. In order to analyze my experiences philosophically and phenomenologically, I invoke and recontextualize the notion of dihliz.


The second section carries the argument further by elaborating how dif-ferent western/colonial factors have influenced the development and produc-tion of knowledge as a unidirectional, universal, and an unquestionable entity in postcolonial India. Among several western/colonial factors, one of the major ones is the influence of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minutes to Education (1835) and the gradual rise in the fetishism of Indians toward learning and earning degrees from Anglophone institutions (primary through secondary schools, colleges, and universities). It is important to note that learning and sharing in “English” is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a process of awarding superior epistemological and ontological designations to definite classes, castes, communities, religions, and topographies. Such forms of su-periorities stand as gatekeepers to the white-patriarchal-Euro-North-Ameri-can-centric modules of knowledge production, which are underlined with the prejudice that they can never be counter-argued and interrogated. Any form of practice that exists outside their epistemic constellation is downplayed as invalid, uncivilized, and stupid.

The third section examines the diverse ethical, moral, and phenomeno-logical dimensions of “being stupid” and the “praxis of stupidity.” The term “stupid” or “stupidity” is not mere terminology for humiliating an individual and/or a group. It is a carefully curated and well-researched phenomenon that has been socio-historically implemented in India since the European colonial era (especially during British colonialism). The imposition of white European knowledge systems, in the form of coercion as well as seduction, has convinced Indians about the superiority of the universalized colonial/western epistemic frameworks and the inferiority of the indigenous knowledge frameworks. Such impositions have successfully preserved the hierarchical structures of good knowledge/bad knowledge, intelligent knowledge/stupid knowledge, high knowledge/low knowledge.

The fourth section is an effort to interrogate and dismantle René Des-cartes’s “I think, therefore I am” in the context of the systems of knowledge dissemination in contemporary India. Noam Chomsky (2015) argues that “It is not important what we cover in the class, but what we discover in the class to be truly educated.” Usually, the contemporary education system in India is more inclined toward quantitative rather than qualitative output. In other words, most of the educational institutions in India function as a laboratory for man-ufacturing machinated brains, which will never think, never question, never argue, never acknowledge, never unsettle, and never unlearn, but will instead calculate how much syllabus they could cover, how many competitive exams they could qualify, how many authentic voices they could disqualify, and, in


lieu of all these aspects, how many inauthentic recognitions they could receive. The notion of “I am stupid, therefore I am” is a form of epistemological, on-tological, and pedagogical exercise that resists such uncritical and dictatorial compartments of prejudiced and hegemonic knowledge systems.

The final section offers a set of collaborative and co-creative possibilities that propose the “idea that we can learn to be connected to the constellation of knowledge of the ages” (Gordon 2016a). I outline two specific practices of indigenous teaching and learning from Bhutan and India, which have been analyzed and framed as celebrations of stupidity. In other words, the various indigenous teaching and learning practices function as a celebration of critical thinking, a process of acknowledging each other’s epistemological and onto-logical differences, and a depolarized plural methodology to “respect the hu-manity of the students” (Gordon 2016b). The practices that are discussed in this section are: Ngojang Dang Denpai Lobdra (a traditional pedagogical practice that evolved with the monastic education system of ancient Bhutan that cur-rently has been adopted as an integral part of the “Green School system” in Bhutan) and Guru-Shishya Parampara (a non-capitalistic, precolonial system of education in ancient India in which the process of learning and sharing is based on a polylogical pedagogy).

English Medium: The Haunt of Macaulay’s Ghost

During a televised conversation with Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra in March 2019, Lewis Gordon said: “We need to be treated like human beings. In other words, if we treat people and respect their humanity, they grow. If we don’t, most people wither.” Thomas Babington Macaulay’s proposition of introducing English as a medium for promoting science and literature in In-dia was officially recognized on 7 March 1835 with the consent of Lord William Bentink, the Governor-General of India. English was not only introduced as a linguistic phenomenon, but also as a European/colonial project of hunting, gathering, distorting, trafficking, and dehumanizing the diverse indigenous knowledge systems on the one side and disrespecting and eroding the basic value of knowledge systems—that is, respecting each other’s humanity—on the other. Let us selectively look into some of Macaulay’s decapitating intentions behind introducing such in a Minute on Education (1835):

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of the value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have


conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the ori-ental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of In-dia and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education. (Cited in H. Sharp 1920, 107)

He adds:

It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of litera-ture in which the eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I cer-tainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principals investi-gated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immea-surable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. (Ibid., 108)

And more:

We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the no-blest which Greece has bequeathed to us,—with models of every spe-cies of eloquence,—with historical composition, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, con-sidered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equaled—with just and lively representations of human life and human nature,—with the most profound speculations on meta-physics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade,—with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. (Ibid., 108–09)


And finally:

The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal con-fession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can patron-ize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter. (Ibid., 109–10)

First, Macaulay mentions his learning experiences from the oriental scholars of Arabic and Sanskrit and how they influenced him to reach the con-clusion that any form of learning in these languages is not superior to English. But none of the oriental scholars who were consulted by Macaulay were local Indian natives; rather, they were white male European scholars who had been systematically indulged in socio-culturally distorting, dehumanizing, and mistranslating the texts that were originally written in the native Indian lan-guages. Macaulay then weighs the intellectual value of English and Sanskrit and concludes that the standard of Sanskrit lies even below the standard of the preliminary English language lessons in the preparatory schools of England. But his conclusions were exclusively based on the (mis)translated works of the white European scholars, as he had already confessed that he had no knowl-edge of Sanskrit and Arabic. He goes on to argue that with the native languages in India the holistic social, cultural, political, economic, scientific, literal, and intellectual development in India will continue to remain backward. He mocks the authenticity and originality of indigenous history, science, literature, and philosophy of pre-Europeanized India.

The irony behind Macaulay’s arguments and interpretations are that they were framed on the basis of those epistemological and ontological frameworks that he disowned in his Minute, which portrays the superiority of the English language or only exposes colonial insecurity toward the rich diversity of the in-digenous knowledge systems of India. If India’s intellectual status is so regres-sive and uncivilized (as claimed by Macaulay in his Minute), then why was it necessary for the British (the primary European colonizers) to distort and steal


the indigenous databases of philosophy, science, and literature from India, transport them to Europe, and patent them as their own? If the English lan-guage, cultures, and traditions were so advanced and superior, then why was it necessary for the British to invade India as discoverers, pillagers, dictators, and colonizers? Why colonize a place that offers nothing? If the native languages and cultures were so backward, then why was it necessary for the European colonizers to train and educate a class of people who were Indian in origin but Europeanized in their habitual processes of thinking and doing? Why was it important for the British to establish English medium schools not alongside the native language schools, but instead as their ideal replacements? Why was it important for the Europeans to engrave their local knowledge systems in the epistemological and ontological center of the globe and push the preco-lonial knowledge systems of India to the periphery? Why was it crucial for the Europeans to manufacture “universalized narratives” and “ethics of unques-tionability” to preserve and globally channel their frameworks of knowledge production? In fact, why was it at all necessary for the Europeans to transmute the multiversal and polylogical systems of knowledge dissemination in preco-lonial India into a universal, capitalistic, and machinated mode of knowledge production?

These questions have remained unanswered to date. On the contrary, the convincing and seductive nature of the Minute is reflected through its appre-ciations and acknowledgments in the contemporary era. For instance, Sudhir Chella Rajan, a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, re-flects that “I contend, nonetheless, that the Macaulay Minute is both overrated and somewhat misjudged in Indian cultural studies. . . . Macaulay here [in the Minute] is speaking of a nation’s progress towards a more cosmopolitan outlook, but he is not thereby denigrating its own native cultures and practices” (cited in India Today Web Desk, 2018). Such appreciations have ensured the preserva-tion and growth of English as a phenomenon for generating certain dominant categories of social, cultural, political, economic, geographical, and intellec-tual elitism that faithfully conserve white-patriarchal-Euro-North-Ameri-can-centric knowledge systems. Whosoever questions these elitist categories are immediately demeaned as unmodern and stupid. In a similar fashion, I have been identified as “stupid” since my childhood because I did not prefer to disown my biologically and genetically imbibed mother tongue at the cost of a forcefully embedded stepmother tongue (English), because I have questioned the ethics, the moralities, and the ideologies of an English-medium education system, because, on the very first day of my high school, I dared to stand up in the class to disagree with my class tutor and put forth my counter-arguments


in a very logical manner, because I have never acknowledged the “one-size-fits-all,” uncritical, and unquestionable pedagogical systems, because, as a tutor, I practice a depolarized and discursive pedagogy instead of a unidirectional and dictatorial pedagogy, because, instead of compelling my students to blindly appreciate my teaching-learning methodologies, I wholeheartedly invite them to criticize me, disagree with my thoughts and actions and share their propo-sitions, and because I have been making an effort to dismantle the capitalistic practices of knowledge production, and I have been trying to share knowledge as a collaborative and co-creative exercise toward de-hierarchizing and diver-sifying existence.

In order to elaborate on the socio-historical applicability of the notion of stupidity in contemporary India, I began with Macaulay’s Minute on Education because it functioned as the initiating point of expropriating the traditional multiversal systems of knowledge sharing and appropriating the colonial/western systems of knowledge production. It was also through this project that English was introduced as an unchallenged, ethical and phenomenological system of governing and regulating the everyday processes of learning, think-ing, reflecting, and doing. English as a way of life convinced people falsely that “stupidity” is not just a figure of speech, but also a symbol of unethicality, im-morality, arrogance, and intellectual immaturity. Therefore, in order to over-come stupidity and be intelligent, ethical, and moral, one is expected not to question the authority of the western/colonial systems of knowledge produc-tion. Rather, one is expected to idolize them as perfect pedagogical approaches.

Stupidity: Ethics and Phenomenology

Before arguing further about the ethics and phenomenology of stupidity, let us explore the etymological origin of the word “stupid.” The word is believed to have originated from the Latin verb stupere. In English, the word stupid is used either as a noun or an adjective, but in Latin stupere functions as a verb. Stupere means to become numb and astonished. In the process of acknowledging, gain-ing, and sharing diverse forms of knowledge across the globe, numbness and astonishment are the two crucial inter-related self-confessional phenomena that an individual needs to experience. Numbness enables an individual to re-alize honestly that s/he does not know everything and needs to learn and share as holistically as possible. With numbness, as the individual starts to acknowl-edge, learn, and share different forms of knowledge, s/he gradually enters the experiential realm of astonishment. The experiential realm of astonishment injects, among several aspects, two very crucial elements in an individual. It gives birth to a never-ending urge for learning and sharing of different forms


of thoughts and ideas. It transforms the teacher from an all-pervading master of knowledge into a lifetime disciple. According to Lewis Gordon: “This shift from mastery to learning transforms the master into a disciple (learner) and raises a new kind of consciousness, a potentiated double consciousness, of a learner [working with] a more advanced learner. Both meet, then, in the project of learning and co-learning. This shared learning process we call a pedagogi-cal imperative” (Gordon, 2015: 8). He adds: “Pedagogical imperatives are obli-gations of epistemic responsibility. There are expectations that commitment to knowing demands the same for learning. Research, from this perspective, demands continuous study. This is an activity that most researchers and schol-ars do to some extent, but the titles ‘researcher’ and ‘scholar’ are loftier than ‘disciple’ and ‘student.’ Yet, students we all ultimately are precisely because we could only learn more, never everything” (ibid).

When stupere was translated into English as “stupid,” the action of “being stupid” as a pedagogically imperative process was transformed into a dehu-manized identity through pedagogical dictatorship. It was not only a process of translation, but also a form of epistemological and ontological transcreation which has impacted the school and education systems in colonial and postco-lonial India. The precolonial Greek scholē (a space for leisure activities) was colonially transcreated into a school (a laboratory for producing like-minded, hierarchical, and unquestionable ideologies), and the precolonial Latin educ-ere (to bring out or to lead) was colonially transcreated into “education” (a dictatorial technique of forcing people to stop thinking and blindly mimic a certain set of western/universal knowledge systems). This is why today, one who studies in an English-medium school is regarded as intelligent, but the one who studies in a native-language-medium school is regarded as stupid; one who cannot mimic the verbal patterns of British and American English is considered as stupid, and the one who is able to do that is considered intel-ligent; one who accepts knowledge systems at their face value is considered intelligent and the one who questions each and every knowledge system is con-sidered stupid; one who belongs to the rural area, by default, is regarded as unsmart and stupid and the one who belongs to a metropolis or megalopolis, by default, is considered as smart and intelligent; a person who has earned a degree from an institution outside India is expected to be more knowledgeable and more informative when compared to a person who has earned a degree from a local Indian institution. In a nutshell, the dominant knowledge systems in contemporary India wish that “every human being becomes a market ac-tor; every field of activity is seen as a market; every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, state or corporation) is governed as a firm;


people themselves are cast as human capital and are subjected as market met-rics (ratings, rankings) and their value is determined speculatively in a futures market” (Mbembe 2018, 4). This capitalization and marketization of knowledge systems in India have been consistently pushing individuals into the suffocat-ing compartments of bad faith, which always involve an effort “to hide from re-sponsibility” (Gordon 2010, 30). Once the responsibility is hidden successfully, then the possibilities and tendencies of unlearning, interrogating, challeng-ing, counter-arguing, and re-learning are killed. In this way, all the internal and external doors of knowledge dissemination get locked, all the courtyards of self-realized learning are broken, and the liminal dihliz-ian experiences are replaced by a set of unquestionable, devastating and authoritarian epistemo-logical and ontological ideologies. So, what are the possibilities of re-building our open-ended courtyards toward epistemological and ontological freedom?

I am Stupid, Therefore I am: Dismantling the Cartesian Cartography

In his book Consciencism, Kwame Nkrumah discusses the role of ideology in a society in the following manner: “The ideology of a society is total. It em-braces the whole life of a people, and manifests itself in their class-structure, history, literature, art and religion. It also acquires a philosophical statement. If an ideology is integrative in intent . . . then its instruments can also be seen as social change” (Nkrumah 1964, 59). Keeping in tune with this argument, it is only possible to build our open-ended courtyards toward epistemological and ontological freedom through destigmatizing, rehumanizing, and celebrating stupidity as a habitual pedagogical ideology. As the process of celebrating stu-pidity involves the process of unlocking the doors of non-dictatorial interro-gations, unprejudiced learning, and acknowledgment of existential diversities and differences, let us begin with a fundamental question: How can stupidity interrogate and dismantle Descartes’s avowed universalized, self-centered, and exclusive philosophy of “I think, therefore I am” with respect to our daily pedagogical engagements and develop a selfless, multiversal, collaborative, and co-creative phenomenon of “I am stupid, therefore I am”?

I begin the analysis of this question with an anecdote, which I hope will en-able readers to understand the possibilities of channeling knowledge systems from the handicapped status of “I cannot/should not think, therefore I am not” to a status of “I am because we can think and act collaboratively, freely and di-versely.” In the year 2019, when I entered the classroom of my college as a tutor in Bhutan for the first time, I introduced myself to the students by saying: “I am a stupid man.” As expected, the students appeared absolutely puzzled. Gradu-ally, I started analyzing why it is important to admit and celebrate stupidity as a


fruitful way of gaining and sharing knowledge in our daily life. In the process of my analysis, I shared a three-dimensional exercise that can play a phenomenal role as a pedagogy of the stupid:

Self-Confession: Before trying to learn something, it is important for us to indulge in a self-confession. The self-confession should be that “I do not know anything; therefore, I should try to learn as much as possible in a diverse and holistic manner.” This self-confession is important because psychologically it opens the gateways of our mind to receive and engage with different perspectives of knowl-edge in an unauthoritative and de-hierarchical manner. It also en-ables us to acknowledge each other’s differences in a depolarized, plural manner. The exercise of self-confession makes us realize that it is not necessary to agree with each other. Rather, it is important to agree to disagree because the act of disagreement is a “form of com-munication and is an exchange of ideas” (Medlock 2018). In order to transform the process of learning and sharing from a “capitalistic ritual of production” toward an “all-inclusive process of distribu-tion,” it is crucial to undergo the exercise of self-confession.

Seeking Unprejudiced Knowledge: The exercise of self-confession also enables an individual to gain and share knowledge in an un-prejudiced manner. Usually, our process of approaching any form of knowledge is widely underlined with multiple forms of social, cultural, geographical, communal, political, and racial prejudices, which ultimately lead to generating various forms of epistemological and ontological hierarchies. To dismantle the hierarchies of knowl-edge development, it is important to approach and experience the different frameworks of knowledge without any preconceived ideol-ogies. This approach provokes individuals to question every form of epistemic establishment, rather than accepting them at face value. Moreover, it also convinces individuals that it is more important to ask questions rather than drawing borders through conclusive state-ments.

A Journey Toward Non-Conclusion: An unprejudiced urge for gain-ing and sharing knowledge makes an individual realize that the pur-pose of knowledge distribution is not to have a final conclusion of/for everything. It is only possible to build up, multiply, and trans-mute the existing structures of knowledge dissemination by accept-


ing the open-endedness, diversity, and the non-conclusive nature of planetary knowledge systems.

The regular implementation of this three-dimensional exercise with my stu-dents takes place in the following manner:

Question and Counter-Question Sessions: Usually, my classroom lec-tures are scheduled for an hour and I divide my class into two parts. For the first 40 minutes of the class, there are lectures and discus-sions and then the next 20 minutes are always reserved for collective reflections. But, instead of making the collective reflection process a “question and answer” session, which is the usual practice in most Indian and Bhutanese classrooms, we (my students and I) organize it as a “question and counter-question session.” As such, with respect to the classroom discussions or to the broader subject module that is being dealt with, we ask questions that are addressed not toward a concrete and/or abstract answer, but to generate counter questions. For instance, when a student asks, “What is the relevance of postco-lonial studies in Bhutan when the country was never physically col-onized?” instead of replying with a concrete answer we could pose a counter-question: “Despite not being physically colonized, don’t you think that the massive inflow of western brands of clothes and cos-metics or the blind mimicry of western cultures and body languages at the cost of indigenous socio-cultural practices signify the influence of colonial/western culture in Bhutan?” Now this counter-question has every potential to keep the process of discussion quite diverse and open-ended, rather than shutting it down with a concrete state-ment. Moreover, it also allows each and every student to pitch in with diverse analytical perspectives in a very inclusive fashion.

Weaving a Collaborative Web: Apart from generating diverse and all-inclusive analytical perspectives, this practice of questions and counter-questions also enables the students to give feedback to each other and develop a peer-review culture. On the one hand, the peer-review culture enables students to engage in a decentralized teaching and learning process by disentangling them from their sole dependence on a tutor and, on the other, it enables them to collec-tively participate in each other’s pursuit of knowledge.

Building an Online Archive of Questions: In order to continue with this teaching and learning strategy, the questions and discussions


that take place in the classroom are archived on a regular basis on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) platform. This enables us to ensure continuity in our discussion process and maintain a record for future reference.

These practices have generated a positive impact on the attitude, approach, and quality of participation of the students in the classroom. It also functions as a “platform for humanization . . . towards liberated thought” (Frehiwot 2015, 297). According to the Webster-Merriam Dictionary the term “stupid” can be defined as “slow of mind,” “acting in an unintelligent and careless manner,” “dulled in feeling and sensation,” “marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking and acting,” and “lacking interest or point.” In our habitual process of intellectual development, it is extremely crucial to experience the above-men-tioned phases. In other words, it is important for every one of us to have a slow mind, to act in an unintelligent and careless manner, to act and think in an un-reasoned manner and to lack interest. Altogether, these experiences encourage individuals to embrace and celebrate stupidity as a de-hierarchical and multi-versal phenomenon of learning, unlearning, curating, and distributing knowl-edge across the globe.

A Luta Continua: The Unceasing River of Collaborations and Co-Creations4

The practice of encouraging, embracing, and celebrating stupidity as a peda-gogical phenomenon is an integral part of various indigenous cultures across the globe. Let us reflect on some of those pedagogical practices:

Ngojang Dang Denpai Lobdra: The Dzongkha (the national language of Bhutan) phrase Ngojang Dang Denpai Lobdra can roughly be translated into English as “the culture of green learning.” Among several, two crucial features of the culture of green learning in Bhutan are learning with/from nature and learning with/through critical interrogations. This process of green learning has been in practice since the monastic education culture of pre-modern Bhu-tan.5 Yonten Dargye, the research officer at the National Library of Bhutan, ob-serves:

The ultimate purpose of monastic education is spiritual prog-ress. . . . Besides getting the students trained in many mundane arts, he is required to get trained in the essential part of the teachings which include recognition of the perfect human birth, imperma-nence and death, the law of karma, the misery of samsara, generat-


ing Bodhicitta, moral values and principles, the training of the mind and much other such training.6 (2006, 2)

One of the intentions of spiritual learning within the monastic education sys-tem of Bhutan was to teach eco-spirituality in a logical and scientific manner. In other words, the monastic education system was underlined by the follow-ing practices. First, knowledge was not regarded as an “object of ownership,” but as open-ended, disowning prejudices and advocating a process of learning and sharing as a lifetime exercise. Second, the process of teaching and learn-ing was aligned with the practical experiences of habitual existence. Third, any form of epistemological, ontological, and ideological frameworks, prior to their acceptance, were thoroughly questioned and contextually interpreted. Fourth, nature was regarded as the highest form of teacher, as it does not dic-tate knowledge, but instead upholds the virtues and wisdom of learning and sharing in a holistic and de-hierarchical manner.

While in most parts of the world the contemporary frameworks of “mod-ern education” are shaped at the cost of ecological consciousness, inclusivity of knowledge systems, and de-hierarchical ways of thinking and doing, Bhutan continues to practice the culture of the green school. Though the education system (schools and colleges) in contemporary Bhutan is widely influenced by westernized patterns, they still make consistent efforts to remain rooted in their premodern monastic system of the green school.

In 2009, the government of Bhutan, with the vision of creating a balanced, inclusive, de-hierarchical and critical system of knowledge dissemination, conceptualized the “Green School System.” According to the ex-Education Min-ister Thakur Singh Powdyel, one of the pioneers of the Green School System:

Green School is not just about the environment, it is a philosophy, so we are trying to instill a sense of green minds, which are flexible and open to different types of learning. It’s a values-led approach to education that stems from the belief that education should be more than academic attainment, it should be about expanding children’s minds and teaching what it is to be human—and at the forefront of this is the conservation of the natural environment. (Cited in Kelly, 2013)

With respect to this vision, the Green School System is divided into eight com-ponents:

Natural Greenery: The purpose of preserving natural greenery is to learn and share knowledge with the natural environment in a collaborative and


co-creative manner. The physical environment of a learning institution should be organized in such a way that it interrogates the various existen-tial components of modernity, on the one side, and promotes cleanliness, sense of belonging, carefulness, harmony, and sustainability, on the other.

Intellectual Greenery: The natural greenery offers moral values, knowl-edge, and ethical sensibility, which significantly contributes to the intel-lectual development of the human mind. Instead of accepting knowledge at its face value, intellectual greenery provokes individuals to question and analyze every system of learning and sharing.

Academic Greenery: The natural green environment serves as a reservoir for learning and sharing in a practical and collaborative manner. It also enables individuals to bridge the gap between texts and contexts. In other words, individuals not only learn through text-centered theories and philosophies, but also find possibilities to question their applicability in real life. For instance, in an academically green environment, after learn-ing about the different parts of a flower in the textbook, a child can walk out of the classroom into the natural green environment to identify and experience the things that s/he has read in the book. Such learning expe-riences enable an individual to develop critical thinking.

Social Greenery: The process of learning and sharing in collaboration with the natural environment allows individuals to overcome bad faith, which Lewis Gordon argues is “a form of evasion of human reality” (1995, 92). Apart from developing one’s own self, nature also teaches various ways to learn/share with each other and to acknowledge each other’s epistemolog-ical and ontological differences.

Cultural Greenery: This process of diverse learning from the natural en-vironment has a massive influence on individual as well as collective socio-cultural development. In the article “Eco(di)versity: Education, Com-munity Building and Sustainable Development” (2020), I observe: “On the one hand the collation between nature and culture not only gives a unique cultural dimension to Bhutan, but also it keeps the local natives attached to their indigenous roots of origin.” This is how cultural greenery adds unique-ness, individuality, distinctness, and togetherness to one’s life.


Spiritual Greenery: Spiritual greenery upholds the role of nature toward the spiritual growth of individuals in a rational manner. Spiritual ratio-nality provokes an individual to interrogate each form of social, cultural, religious, and spiritual practice that is followed by various individuals and communities.

Aesthetic Greenery: With respect to the growth and development of aes-thetical qualities, nature enables an individual to realize the differences between appearance and reality. The process of understanding these dif-ferences involves an exercise of self-realization in the forms of questions, counter-questions, arguments, and counter-arguments.

Moral Greenery: The eight components of the Green School System con-tribute to developing critical moral values among individuals. In other words, they motivate people to question the western-centered universal parameters of ethics and morality, and to identify multiversal and indige-nous notions of moral values.

Several countries, such as Vietnam, Thailand, Lithuania, Japan, India, Ger-many, France, and Canada, have already started exploring the possibilities of adopting the Green School System as a regular pedagogical practice. This is how the phenomenon of the green school encourages individuals to expe-rience stupidity—the unceasing process of building an unprejudiced, critical, non-conclusive, and an open-ended future. In other words, green schools make an effort to build a non-static future that can be consistently interro-gated and expanded.

Guru-Shishya Parampara

Apart from the Green School System of Bhutan, the precolonial traditional pedagogical system of India was widely underlined with four phenomenolog-ical practices—listening, questioning, learning, and sharing. These practices upheld the three closely connected values of knowledge dissemination—dar-sana, jnana, and vidya. In “Indian Knowledge Systems: Nature, Philosophy and Character,” Kapil Kapur observes: “Darsana, philosophy is the ‘system,’ the point of view, which yields/leads to jnana, knowledge. When knowledge gathered about a particular domain is organized and systematized for pur-poses of say, reflection and pedagogy, it is called vidya, ‘discipline’” (Kapur, 2005: 11). The cultivation of darsana, jnana, and vidya took place through an interconnected, polylogical, interrogational, and interactional pedagogi-


cal system, which was referred to as GuRu-Shishya Parampara.7 In the word GuRu, the syllable Gu means “dark” and Ru means “light.” According to Man-ikandan Krishnan, the term GuRu can be translated as “darkness to light, or possibly one who leads from darkness to light. The Guru is a teacher who guides the Shishya’s (student’s) life or a spiritual mentor who leads the shishya from blindness or ignorance, to bliss, wisdom, and enlightenment” (Krish-nan, 2019). This journey from blindness to enlightenment is underpinned by practices of questioning and self-criticizing. With respect to the culture of GuRu-Shishya Parampara and its relation to the pedagogy of the stupid, let us take the example of the GuRu-Shishya relationship between Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Swami Vivekananda.8 Swami Vivekananda was born as Na-rendra Nath Datta into a family that was strictly driven by the ideologies and principles of Brahmo Samaj.9 One of the important principles of Brahmo Sa-maj was to decline any form of idol worship. So, before Naredra Nath attained monkhood and became Swami Vivekananda, he used to look at the theological beliefs and practices of Ramakrishna in a very skeptical manner. As a result, he questioned Ramakrishna about the authenticity and value of worshiping the idol of Goddess Kali. Instead of becoming offended, Ramakrishna wholeheart-edly acknowledged Narendra Nath’s understanding of theological philosophy and shared with him two very crucial perspectives about one’s approach to-ward gaining and sharing knowledge: joto moth toto poth and ghora hotey gele agey gadha hotey hoye.

The phrase joto moth toto poth in the Bengali language means that no sin-gle form of ideology or no single system of knowledge can ever be regarded as authentic.10 Every form of knowledge that generates togetherness, growth, pos-itive values, and wisdom is authentic and valuable in its own way. The positive growth of knowledge can only be ensured through acknowledging each other’s differences and such a kind of acknowledgment can only take place through the practice of questioning and self-criticizing. Therefore, Ramakrishna al-ways encouraged Narendra Nath to question him because it not only widened the latter’s understanding of socio-religious philosophies, but it also enabled Ramakrishna to be self-critical.

The phrase ghora hotey gele agey gadha hotey hoye in the Bengali language means that to evolve in life it is important for a person to be humble, respect-ful, and collaborative.11 In other words, to gain and share knowledge in an unprejudiced manner, it is important for a person to be receptive and open-minded. The process of gaining knowledge should be initiated with an attitude that the act of learning and sharing is unquenchable and forever incomplete. So, in order to be epistemologically and ontologically enlightened in a holistic


manner, one needs to accept this process of knowledge dissemination as a form of lifetime labor. Later on, when Narendra Nath attained monkhood, he shared these perspectives of teaching and learning, which he gained from his GuRu Ramakrishna, with his fellow monks and his Shishyas.12

Besides gaining and sharing knowledge in an open-ended and polylogi-cal manner, another important feature of the GuRu-Shishya Parampara is to gain and share knowledge beyond books and in self-chosen area(s) of interest. This pedagogical system, which in contemporary India is often identified as “unmodern,” “backward,” and “stupid,” was also practiced in the precolonial universities of ancient India. For instance, in Takshashila University (founded in 515 BCE), Nalanda University (founded in 500 BCE), Pushpagiri University (founded in 300 CE), and Vikramshila University (founded in 800 CE), differ-ent subjects were taught, not for the sake of earning a few degrees, but to gain knowledge that would collectively contribute toward the betterment of society. Today, across India, efforts are being made, for instance in the Sarang School in the Attapady district of Kerala, to challenge the capitalistic and dictatorial modes of knowledge production through conceptualizing non-institutional modes of knowledge dissemination.

Disappointed with the mainstream education system of India, Gopal-akrishnan and his wife Vijayalekshmi left their job at a local primary school in Attapady and procured twelve acres of land to start a school, which, they stated, would have “no certificates, no rote learning, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ cur-riculum” (Sivaswamy 2017). They named the school the Sarang School. Initially, the land that they procured was barren. So, with the assistance of the children and the elders from the neighboring villages, they started to plant saplings, build mud huts, and dig percolation pits. As the barren land started reviving, the Sarang family started growing grains, fruits, and vegetables through natu-ral farming methods. This is how the children and the adults, who had never attended a school prior to joining Sarang, started learning art, culture, phys-ics, geography, mathematics, and environmental science in a collaborative and co-creative manner. Within fifteen years of Sarang’s initiation, the barren land was revamped into a lush green forest with abundant flora and fauna.

At present, the project is looked after by Gautham (Gopalakrishnan and Vijayalekshmi’s son) and his wife Anuradha, who are providing alternate ed-ucation to children across the globe. This project is of planetary relevance as it is not only acknowledged by parents and researchers from India, but also by people from abroad. Often parents from abroad, along with their children, visit Sarang to attend workshops that are associated with its alternate, trans-cultural and non-institutional patterns of learning. After completing the work-


shop, they return to their respective countries and try to develop independent academic ventures through which to implement the ideologies of Sarang. This project has been playing a pivotal role in unlearning colonial, universal, and text-centric Knowledge and relearning the indigenous, multiversal, transcul-tural, and context-centric knowledge of India.13

Altogether, the process of learning and sharing is a non-conclusive, mul-tiversal, polylogical, unauthoritative, and de-hierarchical endeavor and, if it is identified as stupidity, then let stupidity be proudly embraced as a collective phenomenon of everyday existence because “one thing that history teaches us is that we should never underestimate human stupidity. It’s one of the most powerful forces in the world” (Yuval Harari, cited in Huang, 2018).

Sayan Dey works as a Lecturer at Yonphula Centenary College (Royal University of Bhutan). He recently published his documentary research (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmJEGvjY0Nc&feature=youtu.be) and an accompanying essay titled “Voices of the Dead: A Documentary Research on the Scottish Women of Calcutta” (https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol21/iss6/31/). His areas of research are history, ar-chaeology, everyday decoloniality, sociology, food humanities, and race studies. He can be contacted at [email protected].

ENDNOTES

1. Shorter versions of this research article were published in the form of two op-eds. “Why a pedagogy of the stupid is smart and liberating” was published by Univer-sity World News on 4 April 2020. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200401114425376. “I am Stupid, Therefore I am—A Mnemonic Cele-bration” was published by Center for Regional Research and Sustainability Studies on 17 July 2020. https://www.thinkcrrss.com/post/i-am-stupid-therefore-i-am-a-mnemonic-celebration. With respect to the thematic and theoretical relevance of this article, certain sections from the two op-eds have been reproduced here. As the copyright for both the op-eds lies with the author, the author has the right to re-produce them fully and/or partially.

2. In this article I am not using the idea of dihliz or courtyard as a physical space, but as a psychological, symbolical, ontological, and epistemological space for gaining and sharing knowledge in a diverse and de-hierarchical manner.

3. Carbamazepine is an anticonvulsant medicine, which is used to treat neurological issues like epilepsy, schizophrenia, neuropathic pain, etc.

4. “A luta continua” is a Portuguese phrase that was the rallying cry of the Mozambi-quan struggle for independence. It means “the struggle continues.”


5. By “pre-modern” I mean the time period that existed before the introduction of a western-styled education system in Bhutan.

6. The term “Bodhicitta” can be roughly translated into English as “self-consciousness.”

7. I have written the word Guru as GuRu (with a capital R) in order clarify the differ-ence between Guru as a dictatorial and an unquestionable entity and GuRu as a non-authoritative, open-ended and critical being, who wishes to learn and share at the same time. In contemporary India, the precolonial indigenous practice of re-specting the teacher is often distorted and misinterpreted by presenting the teacher or the Guru as a dictatorial and a theodicean entity, whose thoughts and actions should be blindly accepted. Therefore, I have used the word GuRu in order to spe-cifically focus on the pedagogical patterns of the teacher who moves away from the practice of knowledge production towards the practice of knowledge dissemination.

8. Ramakrishna Paramhansa was a religious leader of nineteenth-century Bengal and was the founder of the Ramakrishna Order. Swami Vivekananda was a Hindu monk and the chief disciple of Ramakrishna Paramhansa.

9. A monotheistic reformist movement that was organized by the Hindus during the Bengal Renaissance.

10. This Bengali phrase can be literally translated into English as—“the human mind is a never-ending and an ever-evolving breeding ground for different forms of knowledge.”

11. This Bengali phrase can be literally translated into English as “to be a foal, it is im-portant to be a donkey first.”

12. Plural word for Shishya.

13. Here the term “Knowledge,” with a capital “K,” represents knowledge as a dictato-rial monopoly of colonial Europe and North America. The term “knowledge” with a small “k” portrays knowledge as an indigenous, de-hierarchical and multiversal medium of collaboration and exchange.

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my anti-dihliz-ian childhood: a broken courtyard of

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