It is a little after six in the morning in a flat in Pune. The pressure cooker in the kitchen has just let out its first whistle. In the front room a ten-year-old girl sits cross-legged on a cotton durrie in front of a harmonium, playing the same short phrase for what must be the fortieth time. Her left hand pumps the bellows, slow and even. The fingers of her right hand find the keys a fraction late, then a fraction less late. The floor is cold under her ankles. Nobody is explaining anything to her. Yet by the end of the month that phrase will live in her fingers in a way no explanation could have put it there.
The word for what she is doing
Sanskrit has a word for this. Abhyāsa (practice, the patient return to the same effort) is an old Indian idea about how a person changes, and musicians call its daily form riyāz. We tell children to practise their tables, their handwriting, their shlokas, their cover drives. So what does practice actually do to a person? We rarely stop long enough to ask.
Mostly we treat it as a means, something you do now so that you can perform later. Abhyāsa says something less comfortable. Practice is not the waiting room before knowledge arrives. For a great deal of what we know, practice is the only door through which knowledge can enter at all.
Where the idea comes from
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra says the restless movements of the mind are steadied through practice together with vairāgya (non-attachment, a loosening of grip). Then comes the line that matters most for teachers. Practice becomes dṛḍhabhūmi, firm ground, only when it is kept up over a long time, without breaks, and with satkāra, a kind of care and respect for what one is doing. The Bhagavad Gītā makes a similar move. When Arjuna says the mind is restless and very hard to hold, Krishna agrees with him, and then says it can be held through practice and detachment.
Neither text is a manual for schools. But look at the conditions they name. Long time, no gaps, care. Information can be received once. Firm ground has to be built.
Thinkers elsewhere reached a similar place. Michael Polanyi argued that we can know more than we can tell, and gave the example of recognising one familiar face among thousands without being able to say how. Maurice Merleau-Ponty described habit as the body’s own knowledge of what to do, with no reflection coming in between. This is home ground today for the study of embodied cognition.
The science of expertise adds an honest warning. K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues studied three groups of violin students at a Berlin music academy and found that the best had accumulated far more practice alone. A later replication by Macnamara and Maitra, with violinists in Cleveland, found that practice still mattered but explained roughly a quarter of the differences in performance, about half the original figure. Practice is necessary, but it is not the whole story.
What it changes in how we see a child
Once we take abhyāsa seriously, a child who cannot yet form the letter क neatly is no longer a child who has failed to understand. She may know perfectly well what the letter looks like. What has not happened yet is the slow passage of that letter into the hand. No scolding will hurry that.
Patañjali’s word satkāra tells good repetition from bad. Repetition done with care, with the learner present in it, deepens. Repetition done mechanically, or as a penalty, empties, and this is the line between practice and rote learning. Indian thought also has a word for the trace each repetition leaves, saṃskāra (an impression that shapes later action). Every repetition leaves one, whether or not we intend it.
Where this series parts ways
The usual case for practice in education is instrumental. Drill the tables and the marks go up. Practice, in this view, is a technique for faster results.
This series makes a different claim. Abhyāsa describes what a learner is, a living body that slowly becomes what it repeatedly does. The girl at the harmonium is not only acquiring a phrase. She is becoming someone who listens with her fingers, who can sit with difficulty, who knows how it feels when something hard turns easy. That is kauśala (skill in action), and it is part of her now.
Seen this way, the question for a school is not only how much children practise. It is what their repetitions are turning them into. A child made to copy the same sentence a hundred times as a punishment is practising too. She is practising boredom, fear and the habit of being absent from her own hands.
Think again of the girl on the durrie, the cooker whistling, the phrase coming a little cleaner each time. Nobody will grade what is happening in her fingers, yet ground is being laid. If every repetition is quietly shaping a child, what are the repetitions of an ordinary school day teaching our children to become?
Put it into practice: P21 Chanting and recitation done well · P18 Air, sand, then paper: three stages of writing a letter · P16 Clay before letters: preparing the hand to write
Read next: R16 Saṃskāra: how repetition shapes a learner · R51 Rote and recitation: when repetition deepens learning and when it empties it
Notes
- Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra 1.12 to 1.14. Sanskrit text and translation in “Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras 1.12–1.16, Practice and Detachment“, Rising Sanskrit.
- Bhagavad Gītā 6.35. Text and translation with commentary by Swami Mukundananda, holy-bhagavad-gita.org.
- Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1966. Reissued by University of Chicago Press, 2009. Publication history from the Polanyi Society.
- P. Moya, “Habit and embodiment in Merleau-Ponty“, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014), 542.
- K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe and C. Tesch-Römer, “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance”, Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993), 363–406.
- B. N. Macnamara and M. Maitra, “The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993)“, Royal Society Open Science 6, no. 8 (2019), 190327.