A few days ago, an acquaintance, asked me if it was true that, cadet's on ships were made to do manual work.He was quite amused & surprised when I replied in the affirmative.I said, not only were cadets made to do manual work, possibly, it was the only learning that they had on board, during the initial phase of training.
My first brush with manual work was on a very old ship with wood decks & we had to 'holy stone' the deck, which was boring, tedious & painful to a young fellow like me.
Holystone is a soft and brittle sandstone that was formerly used for scouring and whitening the wooden decks of ships. It was used in the British and American Navy for scrubbing the decks of sailing ships.
More importantly it seemed unnecessary!However it had to be done & it was done very very well.So much so, that at the end of a month, my baby fat had all but disappeared....
My acquaintance walked away, with a look of distaste, as if to say, you are a lesser man because you had to work with your hands.I wondered why? There is this interesting story:
The ambassador, from Great Britain wan shown in to an early morning meeting with the American President Lincoln. The ambassador was aghast to see, Lincoln polishing his shoes & could not stop himself and blurted out: ' Your excellency, you polish your own shoes'. Lincoln paused, and said ' Yes, Mr.Ambassador, I do, whose shoes do you polish?'
Why do we consider, manual work beneath us, here in India? Hark back to ancient, India.The rich kids who attended, a Gurukul, were first initiated to manual labor, including carrying a begging bowl & trying to get their food. They collected firewood, tended to cattle & washed their Guru's clothes. Who were these students? Many times, future kings!
How did this help? I think the labor was a great equalizer & cast ego's aside. It also taught people to be self reliant and learn to use their hands. Gandhi spun his cloth, Churchill was an expert mason, Lincoln was very good at splitting logs........
Doing manual work taught me a thing or two:
1.Respect all work!
2.Do a job before you delegate. Understand the pain of a person doing a task!
3.Keep your ego in check. Jobs are situational & circumstantial, so there is little need to have your nose in the air, because one is in a particular profession today!
4.Manual work in groups produces some of the best bonding! Team work that is valued by a great many organizations.
I think in our homes and educational system we are creating a set of 'educated', elitist snobs as we discourage any kind of physical work.In short we are creating a new class of Indians! The greater tragedy is that, there is to be an immediate 'Return on Investment' on all work done today. If immediate results are not visible ( in term of school marks ), then the work is worth not doing.......the fun of doing something for the fun of doing it, is gone.
3 comments:
Good one.
Without hands on work experiential learning never happens. Not all learning can be the result of intellectual reasoning. This is excatly the reasons why we keep getting new bersions of software and new cars or for that matter process improvements. Intellectual reasoning gives us the starting point but continuous improvement requires combination of intellectual reasoning and experiential learning. This has happened in the software industry where the top brains get involved in doing things which is India is ahead in Software. In the real Engineering Industry top brians refusal to be hands on has slowed not brought much progress in the Indian Engineering Industry.
Other way of looking at is the person who designs or buils let's say a car, but not the user of the car, the opportunity for performance feedback is lost. One must embrace hands on experience.
At least in the Indian context (Changing for the better now) the workers learn from experience and as Managers lacking in experiential learning and having ego issues separate themselves from workers feedback. Result is we continue to have products like Ambassadors.
Shankar
On a subconscious level it triggers off thoughts about Karl Marxs "Communist Manifesto" where he says in the very first line that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" . For years, bourgeosie delegated all their manual labour and work they considered beneath them to the proletariat which led to the misconception that manual labour was for the working class whereas the upper class was merely meant to sit back and do nothing..!!
But of course, few realise that experience breeds better learning and better development!!
Thank you.
Appreciate your comments!
There is this strange dichotomy, of Indian's not liking manual labor, but most learning at elitist schools, started with labor!
Cheers...
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