‘You can scold me, sir.’
Every now and then a pupil or an intern will tell me: “Sir, I am really willing to learn. If I do anything wrong or make a mistake please feel free to scold me. I have no problems with it. You can shout at me also. If you scold me it means I deserve it.” Scold: To speak angrily to somebody, especially a child, because they have done something wrong. Shout: to say something in a loud voice, to speak loudly/angrily to somebody. Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries There are variations to that, of course. The funniest was during a pupil interview I conducted. The candidate told me, “I am willing to work hard. I have no problem with staying back after hours, sir. I don’t have issues with workload. You can give me as much as you want. You can grind me.” To which I hastened to correct her and suggested that perhaps she meant to add ‘with the work’ to her last sentence. I cautioned her to be more careful with her words in the future. Whilst I appreciate and am grateful for the wide liberty granted to me by those seeking to learn from me, I find the offer amusing as I do sad and tragic. Amusing because what they say is an invitation to me to wantonly inflict verbal abuse on them, but at the same time that’s not how I go about teaching. It’s like giving me a chainsaw for something I am content using feather dusters for; thanks, but I’ll stick with the feathers. I prefer empathy, support, guidance and reassurance over worship, scolding, guilt and humiliation. It takes more time, effort and patience but it builds people with better resilience, meaningful confidence and coping mechanisms over and for the long term. I don’t do abuse. But if someone needs to be abused to better learn something during their internship or pupilage, they will be disappointed to know that there is a fee for extras like that. Instruction is free, but abuse is chargeable. Sad because implicit in their invitation is the idea that abuse from another is a price we must pay for our education. Sad because they are trapped within the limitations of their imagination. Tragic because the notion of abuse intertwined with the idea of education is surprisingly widespread. And by abuse I mean a certain amount of verbal and psychological abuse. But the greater tragedy lies in the failure to understand what learning entails. Firstly, we do not need to learn from a person or an ‘educational’ institution. We can learn from many people. Or none at all. We can learn from watching other people, insects or animals. We can learn from books, videos, incidents, courses, and, the best source of learning, our own experience. We learn from reflecting and thinking deeper about what we already know or experienced. Of course, learning from others is best. A suitable mentor accelerates one’s professional and personal development. But not everyone is worth learning from. Not everyone knows how to help others learn; doing is different from teaching. Not everyone gratuitously wants the best for us. Just because a teacher or mentor is reputed to be good does not necessarily make them appropriate for us. Finding an suitable teacher is as challenging as finding a suitable life partner. There must be ‘fit’. When teacher and student fit, they connect not just at the dimension of legal practice but on other dimensions too. They also resonate psychologically, emotionally, intellectually and attitudinally, for example. There is a merging of minds. Both are revitalized and reshaped by the engagement. Both learn, both grow. But, a teacher does not necessarily have to be qualified so long as they speak from genuine experience. Our teachers need not necessarily be those older or more experienced than us. I learn from children, my younger colleagues, non-lawyers, fiction, art, etc. Though they do not consciously teach, there are lessons to be learned from them. Secondly, learning does not only happen in a classroom, lab, university lecture, tutorial, courtroom or in some institutionalized formal space. It happens anytime, everywhere. All we need to do is be observant. It happens in the most innocuous places when we least expect it. Those moments of epiphany or insight – moments when our accumulated thoughts distill burst through to our consciousness – often happens when we are doing something else, like bathing, shopping, driving, taking a dump, etc. But only if we stay open. Stay open to observing, remain open-minded, humble and curious, and don’t go around expecting and insisting things to be a particular way. Staying open allows for things to happen. Thirdly, learning is something only we can do for ourselves. Others can help us with it but they cannot do the thing itself. So studying is like sleeping, eating, peeing, and the like – only we can do it for ourselves. Nobody else can do it for us. We have to personally engage with the material or experience to be learned in order to make sense of it. That ‘making sense of it’ is the core of our learning. That ‘making sense of it’ is us working things out for ourselves. It is in our ‘making sense of it’ that we come to understand our place and role in this existence. This sense-making is what we must cultivate and refine. If someone makes sense of it for us, we lose out on the opportunity to develop our ability to make sense of things for ourselves, and others. Fourthly, learn how to learn better. Learning is a discipline as much as it is a pleasure. It is a learned ability. Some learn it more naturally than others without being taught, but the point is that learning is an ability that can be learned. So, it can be refined and improved. Smarter studying does not simply mean studying or reading more. It is appreciating that setting ourselves up for study is just as important as the
