Book review: Shomie Das's counterintuitive views on education

There are very few books in India that serve as a rich distillation of a great educator’s thoughts as this one sets out to do and succeeds. Das in “retirement" went on to work with two educational entrepreneurs, Tummala and Raj Yarlagadda, and therefore, this is also the story of his work with them to set up five Oakridge International schools in Telangana that followed the international baccalaureate (IB) system. Das, whose mode of conversation often involved a kind of Socratic back and forth, unsurprisingly, preferred the IB system because it is “enquiry-based… the child learns to consult many sources and construct their own knowledge".

One of the seminal influences on Das’s thinking was Kurt Hahn, who spoke against Adolf Hitler and was forced to seek refuge in the UK where he founded the prestigious boarding school Gordonstoun in Scotland. “Hahn thought you must teach children to rescue lives. Students were trained for fire service, in mountain climbing and rescuing," Das observes in one of his many counterintuitive comments about teaching.

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In Gordonstoun, where Das was assistant housemaster and taught King Charles in the 1960s, the school fire brigade was on call and part of the adult fire service in the area. In an unintended epitaph of himself, Das said, “Hahn trained children to be good citizens." From Hahn, he took the notion that, especially at a school for privileged children, there was a need for students to do social service work. He had students help out with the work of poultry and mushroom farmers and learn carpentry.

Under Das, Doon School students were part of the rescue effort after an earthquake in Uttarkashi, helping people out from debris and even driving ambulances, according to the book. Similarly, at Mayo College, where he became principal when he was just 34, students helped in relief efforts after floods near Ajmer, in some cases walking miles to get drinking water to villagers. He had adopted Hahn’s novel idea that children must, through treks and relief work during natural disasters in the area, be exposed to occasionally harrowing experiences so long as there was a caring and capable adult around. At the same time, he worried about classrooms with desks with sharp edges. As the perceptive foreword by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor of Ashoka University, observes, Das’s ideas about education are true “to the Latin educere, to draw out. He is passionate about opening the doors and windows of young minds".

In one of many revealing anecdotes about working with Das, Tummala recounts seeing a student having turned his chair away from the teacher to the window. Before Tummala could chide the child, Das gently cautioned Tummala, arguing that it was okay for children to occasionally daydream. Das believed students should move from classroom to classroom in between lessons rather than having the teacher come to them so they could stretch their legs and have a change of scene, both of which likely improved concentration.

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In each of the three tradition-bound schools he headed during his career, Mayo, Sanawar and his alma mater Doon, Das was, in startup language, a profound disruptor. A physics teacher, he was an evangelist for science students receiving humanities education as well. Influenced by Austrian educator Ivan Illich, he argued for a “deschooled society", a worldview critical of the pronounced institutional hierarchies of most schools and of curriculum that killed “curiosity, creativity and critical thinking". He lived by principles that emphasised these attributes. At Sanawar, which had once been run by the military, he did away with mark reading where each student’s results were publicly read out, resulting in a ritualistic humiliation for those who were struggling. At Mayo, he quit in his late 30s despite being a phenomenally popular principal, following a tussle with the governing council in 1974 after he tried to raise teachers’ salaries.

This book sometimes flags in its efforts be a hybrid biography that grafts the founders of Oakridge International’s life story and ideas about education upon the many successes and the know-how Das built over decades. The research process for the book involved interviews with former students, including me, and a few teachers, but all too few to give a sense of the breadth of his career and a multi-faceted view of his work. At times he is misquoted too: At a Mayo-Doon alumni cricket match in 2022 in Bengaluru, Das looked dashing in a Mayo polo shirt and a Doon cap and sunglasses. When he gave away the trophy, he quipped, as only a former principal of both schools could, “I am disappointed for Doon but delighted for Mayo." Das is misquoted as saying Doon was “the best" but that he was “happy" for Mayo, which gives a very different sense of what he meant.

An easy wit, a dislike of stuffy protocol and being a clear-eyed judge of character were Das’s traits as a human and teacher. He told former students to call him Shomie and not “Sir" because that “makes me feel like a bank manager". As former diplomat Padmanabha Gopinath, who briefly overlapped with Das when they studied at Doon, and later became a good friend, wrote to Das’s children after he died, “Behind his courtesy lay a very shrewd appreciation of human nature. He could relate to people because he understood people. He could deal with school children and prime ministers with equal facility."

I happened to be staying with a friend who had studied at Sanawar when Das died in September. We reminisced as if speaking of a favourite uncle, who had also paradoxically been a close school friend. Still in his 30s, he was my principal at Mayo in Ajmer when I was not even 10. A homesick child from Kolkata, I remember frequently wandering into the welcoming home his wife Pheroza and he kept; with her theatrical sense of fun and larger-than-life personality, she was an uplifting maternal presence for hundreds of children. As Vikram Seth observed in an address to The Doon School on Founder’s Day in 1992, boarding schools can be perversely anti-intellectual, rough-and-tumble places. “You learn to cope, or you collapse," Seth said. “The ethos (in a boarding school is) one of conformity, of fear of public opinion." At Mayo I admired how Shomie and Pheroza Das’s Renaissance sensibilities, informality and kindness softened the hard edges.

In retirement, Das was a favourite at alumni get-togethers because he was a natural raconteur. His conversations were frequently characterised by self-deprecation. One of the last conversations I had with Das in August included a gem about his being too skinny as a young college student at Cambridge to help chop down some giant trees on a Scandinavian country estate he and friends were visiting on holiday. He was told to look after the saplings, he said with a big laugh. This anecdote, recounted to poke fun at his youthful lack of brawn, was, in retrospect, a beautiful metaphor for Das’s life’s calling.

Rahul Jacob is the former travel, food and drink editor of FT Weekend and is a Mint columnist.

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