A counterintuitive view on education

A book about Shomie Das, principal of three posh schools, serves as a rich distillation of his thoughts on education

- Rahul Jacob

Shomie Das, who was successively principal of three well-known boarding schools, Mayo College, Lawrence School, Sanawar, and The Doon School from 1969-95, had radically unconventional ideas about education, gleaned from German and Austrian educationists and the product of his own innate liberalism and innovativeness. His ideas about education have a relevance well beyond the three posh schools he headed because they were contrary to the priorities of Indian education, then and now.

Das, who died aged 89 in September, is the subject of a new book, Shomie Das: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow by Naga Tummala. 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.