Education as Medication
By: Vibhuti Sachdev
Tags: Education Reform

Education as Medication

Intellectual pursuits have often been considered as ‘food’ for the mind. Food that helps our mind grow by providing it nourishment and strength. Mainstream Science acknowledges the correlation of body and mind, and Education is certainly something that helps us through our ‘growing up’ years to prepare us for action and a purposeful existence in the world.

Human Life requires Saving

The natural tendency of human life to self-destruct is resisted in its infancy and through adolescence well into adulthood, by vaccinations, carefully mapped benchmarks of growth, performance, and test reports. Medical and Educational systems contribute towards armouring human life against its default mode of self destruction. Education and Medication systems provide scientific methods of catching any deviations from the ‘norm’ by classifying them as deficiencies. These deficiencies are ‘attacked’ purposefully through remedies (indeed ‘remedial’ is an often used term in education parlance to refer to action designed to solve the problem of lack of performance in a student).

Allopathy: attack the Deviations to Normalise

‘Allopathy is a system of medical practice which treats disease with remedies which produce effects different from those produced by the disease under treatment. MDs practice allopathic medicine.’ [https://www.medicinenet.com/allopathy/definition.htm]

So, in that regard, the Modern medication system of Allopathy has a lot in common with the Modern education system. Both have stages of primary years of close monitoring till 18 years of one’s life and a change of gear from then on. But, the whole of ones life is governed by these two systems that share the approach and method of ‘dealing’ with human life…saving it to make it purposeful.

One could argue that this purpose of Education itself may now be outdated, as the Industrial production methods are slowly being replaced by Digital methods [To further situate the connection between Power and Knowledge see Foucault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-knowledge]. And of course, any Medical system will reflect the worldview of the period it belongs to. If Medical Systems are inextricably seeded in their worldviews, then they can also reveal meta-processes of other systems of that worldview such as the Educational frameworks. Here, I would like to focus on two marginal Medical systems that may point towards different systems of education.

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Homeopathy: small doses of Dangers to trigger Healing

‘Homeopathy is a medical system based on the belief that the body can cure itself. Those who practice it use tiny amounts of natural substances, like plants and minerals. They believe these stimulate the healing process.’ [https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-homeopathy]

Working on similar principle of exposing the mind to ‘antibodies’ of dangerous situations that kickstarts the homeostasis thought process. This process may involve gathering information, skills, action plans that counter the danger, allowing the growth and vision to continue.

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Ayurveda: all Consumption is Medication

“Ayurveda is one of the world’s oldest holistic (“whole-body”) healing systems. It’s based on the belief that health and wellness depend on a delicate balance between the mind, body, and spirit.” https://www.webmd.com/balance/guide/ayurvedic-treatments

Ayurveda regards everything that one does (eating, thinking, doing…) as part of ones ‘being’. The food we eat, the relationships we have, the work we do…are all interconnected in to a matrix that shapes us. Everything has an impact on everything else. Physical ailments are symptomatic of an imbalance to be restored at a metaphysical level.

In Education, this approach can teach us to dissolve the boundaries between learning and doing, for example. To learn is to do, to do is to learn. To regard our actions as a result of our learning, and also as something to draw out learning from. Also, in Ayurveda, for example, gender, biological station in life, personality type, humour, element and so on are analysed to the extent that no two prescription will ever be same. Ayurveda is a highly standardised system of questions that individualises the solutions.

[see https://medium.com/@vibhutisachdev/customised-learning-some-preliminary-thoughts-74649177487e]

Of course, more research is required to understand conceptual subtleties of ‘other’ Medication systems to see a correlation with Education. This exercise could lead to answering the important and topical question: How do we exactly embed well-being into our education system?