RETHINKING THE OBVIOUS!

 I CANNOT TEACH ANYBODY ANYTHING, I CAN ONLY MAKE THEM THINK.

-Socrates 

Socrates rightly said that I cannot teach anyone but I can only make them think. What did Socrates intend to say here? It is quite open to interpretation considering the context, considering the background, considering the perspective that we look at it from. What I interpret from it is a person always learns from their own individual experiences, we all have had experiences when we tried to teach the other or for that matter of fact, when others have tried to teach us something, do we really connect to it until we connect it to any of our personal experiences?

Let's take an example here - I am telling you God exists, I am teaching it to you, I am preaching it to you, whatever you call it. But what would be your reasons for believing that it certainly exists, or for that matter does not exist? Whatever would be your reasoning process would depend on what experiences you have of it, how do you define it, what is its' purpose to you - basically, something that you would have in relation to it, and then you would come to terms with whether you agree or disagree with God exists or not. But what we missed out on is, here when I told you this that God exists - an internal thought process began in your mind, a reflection of previous experiences was considered by you and you started thinking about it on a different tangent. So, what exactly happened here? You started to think even when I tried to teach you something, and what I am teaching to you could again be limited to certain perspective, but, when I and you come together and think and discuss about it, we are considering a varied approach, which can extend beyond limits with as many more number of people we interact with.

To take one step ahead now, were you really aware of the process until it was brought to your notice? This is what we at Chalo ThinKare do. We take up some stimuli in form of stories which we have read since our childhood, poems which are very lucidly written, videos which we watch on our devices everyday and bring them to connect to our daily experiences, reflect on it, try to go deeper into why we act in any particular way in given time and in given situations. We make you think and also make you aware of the thinking process. But now the next question would be, how would it do me any good? I think, everyone does - so what's different in that? 'Thinking individually' and 'thinking individually and independently together' does create a lot of difference. Think about it. As we have discussed above, when we discuss with a larger group, hear out to different perspectives, think on it critically and reflect on our own thought process while considering others perspectives too, aren't we creating any difference? Aren't we developing in anyway? Aren't we growing as an individual while taking the community together? And most importantly aren't we agreeing to disagree?

Now, the example that I took above was of God, which is a very abstract topic to discuss to. To take an example of things in our daily lives - be it our school, home, workplace, if we adopt this method of self-awareness and reflection, we come to know that the obvious is not as obvious as it seems, and we rethink it.

Chalo ThinKare is an Indian non-profit organization, which adopts and experiments with the tried and tested method 'Philosophy for Children/Philosophy For Community' (P4C) to bring a conscious awareness in our society, to address our societal issues in a way which is very obvious yet requires reflection, and to manage our own emotions effectively. It has a never-ending list of effects it has on us and it surely is a slow process, but you can never really know what it is until you experience it.

 See, how it is an endless loop, we started with experience and again we are back to experience!

The thoughts expressed here are from my own perspective and are open to interpretation. Please feel free to share your comments on this piece.

 

Gauravi - Faciliator at Chalo ThinKare