Last few week @ Anahad, children are learning about House. One of the part is learning about life and work of Laurie Baker, prominent architecture. Who made India his working field. Some of the low cost, efficient, architecture design. Yesterday, while browsing books in almeirah came across a book 'laurie backer - life, work and writing's '. While going through some pictures, writing and title came across a title. 'Building technology in pithoragarh', got my attention. Familiarity with place attracted me to read small writing of the legend on the topic. With deep gratitude, here is excerpts from the book.
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... This delightful dignified housing demonstrated hundreds of years of building research on coping with local materials, using them to cope with the local climatic patterns and hazards, and accommodating to the local social pattern of living. It dealt with incidental difficult problems of building on a steeply sloping site, coping with earthquakes and avoiding landsliding areas and paths. The few examples of attempts to 'modernize' housing merely demonstrated, only too clearly and adequately, our modern conceit and showed how very foolish we are when we attempt to ignore or abandon the hundreds of years of 'research' that goes into local building methods.
... My Observation is that vernacular architecture almost always has apt solutions to all our problems of building. All that is required is to go a step further with the research our forefathers have done - that is, to add on our twentieth century experience to improve on what has already been accomplished. But this addition should be a contribution - not a contradiction.
(Science and rural development in mountains, edited by j.s.singh, s.p.signh, c.shastri, gyadoya prakash an, nainital, 1980)
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This words have captive me to think on education with similar line. Just replacing housing with education and other words related with parallel word in article, gives so much to ponder upon. Specially on thoughts of international school, unschooling, community school, need-demand-supply and utilitarian values given to learning and education.
*Halting a learning with books and passings of examination.
*Expensive education in name of technology, 21st century and being an international school.
* Learning devoid of life and language of place.
* Authoritarian views
* Competition and culture of show business.
We have seen and more is coming up disastrous results at various dimensions of education from physical to mental, emotional to values and character of society as in now today.
