The fan turns slowly over a Class 4 room in a small-town government school, pushing warm air and chalk dust from one wall to the other. The science textbook is open at a page that says plants need water. The teacher reads the line aloud and forty voices repeat it after her in the same tired rhythm. In the second row sits a girl who has watered the tulsi in her family’s courtyard every morning since she was five. Her palm knows the cool weight of the steel lota. She knows the smell of wet soil, and she has watched the leaves hang limp on a May afternoon and lift again by evening once the plant has drunk. When the teacher asks why plants need water, she says, “Because otherwise the leaves get tired.” The answer is not in the book. She is told to copy the book’s line three times in her notebook.
Which of these two things does she actually know?
An everyday word with an exact meaning
In Hindi, anubhav is an ordinary word. In Indian philosophy anubhava (direct experience, or fresh apprehension) has a sharper meaning, and that sharpness matters for schools. The Tarkasaṅgraha, a short primer of Nyāya logic, divides all cognition into two kinds. One is smṛti (memory), knowing something again because it was known before. The other is anubhava, cognition that is not memory. The text adds that anubhava can be right or wrong, and that right anubhava comes through perception, inference, comparison and reliable testimony. So anubhava is not a warm feeling, and it is not limited to the senses. It is knowing that happens now, in this person, rather than knowing that is fetched from storage.
When the girl copies the line three times, what gets trained is recall. When she noticed the drooping leaves, something was known for the first time, and it was known by her.
Two old refusals
Śaṅkara is remembered as the great defender of scripture in Advaita Vedānta. Yet in his commentary on the second sūtra of the Brahma Sūtra, he writes that scriptural texts are not the only means of knowledge in the enquiry into Brahman, because that enquiry has to end in anubhava. Centuries earlier, the Buddha told the Kālāmas not to go by reports, legends or scripture alone, and to act when they “know for yourselves” which ways of living are skilful and which are not.
Neither tradition throws away the teacher or the text. Both refuse to let knowledge stop at someone else’s word. The word has to become the learner’s own seeing. John Dewey reached a cousin of this idea in America in 1938. In Experience and Education he argued that experience is necessary but not enough, since some experiences are mis-educative and block further growth.
What the body brings to it
In 2015 Carly Kontra, Sian Beilock and their colleagues gave college students an axle carrying two spinning bicycle wheels and asked them to tilt it. Some held the axle and felt the wheels resist, while others only watched. Those who had felt the force did better on later quizzes about angular momentum, and when they reasoned about it afterwards, sensory and motor areas of their brains were more active. In a real physics class, students given the hands-on role scored about seven per cent higher on a quiz days later. These are studies of university students, not of young children. Still, they point the same way as the old texts. What the body has felt is present when the mind thinks. Researchers call this embodied cognition.
Not a technique but a description
The usual way of using such findings is instrumental. Let children touch things, the argument goes, because their scores will rise. I want to make a different claim. Anubhava describes what a learner is. A child is not a container for sentences to be recalled later. She is a living body in which knowing either happens or does not. Rote repetition is not the enemy here. Abhyāsa (patient practice) can carry a song or a multiplication table deep into the body. The trouble begins when recitation takes the place of apprehension, when a school accepts the memory of someone else’s words as if it were knowledge.
The Nyāya warning matters too. Anubhava can be wrong. This is why the teacher does not disappear. She builds trust, asks the child what she noticed, and helps her test it against a second look, against reasoning, and against what others have found.
Go back to the girl in the second row. Her sentence about tired leaves was not the textbook’s sentence. It was hers, and it was not wrong. Inside it sat a real question about what water does once it enters a plant. Her notebook now holds the correct line three times. Something else was written that day too, more quietly. She learned that what she sees with her own eyes does not count here.
How much of what our children “know” have they ever known for themselves?
Put it into practice: P42 Watching closely: observation as a practice · P20 Soil and seeds: a classroom garden as hand learning · P48 Tasting and naming: the senses at mealtime
Read next: R20 Jñānendriya and karmendriya: the knowing senses and the acting senses · R33 Dewey: experience and education
Notes
- Annambhaṭṭa, Tarkasaṅgraha, on buddhi as anubhava and smṛti, and the four kinds of right anubhava. English study notes, Department of Sanskrit, 24 August 2020, bnmv.ac.in.
- Śaṅkara, commentary on Brahma Sūtra I.1.2, in George Thibaut (trans.), The Vedânta-Sûtras with the Commentary by Sankarâkârya, Part I, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 34 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1890). sacred-texts.com.
- Kālāma Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.65), translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight.
- John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York, Kappa Delta Pi, 1938).
- Carly Kontra, Dan Lyons, Susan Fischer and Sian Beilock, “Physical experience enhances science learning”, Psychological Science (2015). doi:10.1177/0956797615569355.