INTUITION AND EXPERIENCE ABOVE INSTRUCTION K B JINAN

 

INTUITION AND EXPERIENCE ABOVE INSTRUCTION   K B JINAN

Returning to senses

KB Jinan’s alternative learning approach places intuition and experience above instruction

KB Jinan grew up in Thrissur immersed in textbooks and timetables. He was studying engineering.

By the fourth year of college, he made a life altering decision. He would never do work he did not love. It led him to NID in Ahmedabad. It was the space where learning was full of life... Jinan says,”NID taught me the difference between teaching and learning. Elsewhere you find teaching environments. At NID you find learning environments.” There was no attendance pressure. Faculty members were immersed in their own inquiries. Students often worked late into the night, driven by curiosity than compulsion.

 As a student of engineering, he had felt something was deeply amiss in formal education. He began asking uncomfortable questions. Why did scientific knowledge always arrive stamped with Western names? Why were students chasing marks instead of understanding? Why did learning seem to evaporate after exams?

His conclusion was stark. Modern education does not cultivate human beings. It produces cognitive labor. Formal schooling, he argues, was never designed to nurture human potential but to manufacture workers – something Alvin Toffler had stated explicitly in ‘The Third Wave’ on the evolution of mankind and the Industrial Revolution -  for an expanding marketplace. He says, “Education created cognitive workers - people trained to analyze information, not to understand life.” “For decades, this system supplied industries with disciplined minds. But artificial intelligence has now disrupted even that arrangement. The market no longer needs this kind of labor. Machines can do it faster.’

Jinan’s mindset was transformed when he began working with rural artisans and indigenous communities in Odisha and elsewhere. Living closely with such people, he encountered forms of intelligence largely absent from modern classrooms. According to him, “The literate learn the word. But the illiterate learn the world.”

 From the early 1990s, Jinan began documenting children – photographing and filming how they naturally interact with spaces, objects and materials. Over time a pattern emerged. Children bounce on sofas because their bodies seek rhythm. They slide on smooth floors because the environment invites motion.

He explains, “The world tells the child what to do with motion. But adults interrupt this intelligence.”

With this view in mind, Jinan began organizing annual workshops where children were given simple materials and complete freedom. Though there had been no guidance, children often produced compositions of remarkable sophistication. The children were mixing colors intuitively to match the shades of dry leaves strewn around even as trained teachers or urban schoolchildren struggled to recreate the same palettes. It was like a living organism finding its rhythm.

The contrast convinced Jinan that intuition, not instruction lies at the heart of learning.

He also noticed that children who had not passed through rigid schooling systems often lacked even a word for ‘mistake.’ They experimented freely, without fear of being wrong. He says, “In life, there is no mistake. There is only exploration.”

According to Jinan, “Teaching is a modern invention that emerged when knowledge became a product. Nobody teaches a child how to balance on a bicycle. The cycle teaches you. Everyone else is bystander.”

Today, he conducts, “Do Nothing Parenting’ sessions and immersive retreats where families live together without screens, toys or instructions. Parents learn to observe instead of directing. Children rediscover their innate capacity for play and inquiry. “Don’t teach,” Jinan tells the adults. “Just respect their cognitive ability.” Moments like this capture what he has been trying to articulate since 1980s.

The underlying theme is, “Learning does not begin with instruction. It begins with the seses.”

Jinan concludes, “My workshops are not for children. They are for adults. Parents are the problem, not children.” His approach reverses conventional parenting logic. Instead of fixing children, he asks adults to examine their own conditioning – their need to control, instruct and optimize.

Every child, he believes arrives with freedom, trust and abundance – the qualities that society gradually dismantles.

K B Jinan, a designer-turned-researcher who has spent more than three decades of questioning how children truly learn, signs off raising a question, not about how children should be educated, but about what kind of humans society allows them to become.

An alumnus of the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, Jinan was recently conferred the Pride of NID Ahmedabad Award 2025-26.

 

PS Sreerag in The Times of India of 14 February 2026