Fiza Pathan on the Mundaka Upanishad and the flaw inherent in IB and IGCSE classroom teaching

Let me get to the point: this article argues that a systemic and largely unexamined flaw lies at the heart of inquiry-based pedagogy as currently practiced in International Baccalaureate (IB) and International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) classrooms in India and around the world. That flaw is the premature and often total displacement of direct instruction, explanation, and knowledge transmission in favor of student-led probing, discovery-questioning, and peer-constructed meaning. Drawing on the Mundaka Upanishad, one of the principal Upanishads of the Atharva Veda and a foundational text of NEP 2020 Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), I propose that the ancient Vedantic model of education — structured around the three sacred stages of Shravanam (listening), Mananam (reflection), and Nididhyasanam (deep contemplation) — offers not merely a philosophical alternative but a rigorously sequenced, psychologically coherent, and practically demonstrable corrective to the current crisis of learning in IB and IGCSE classrooms.

Let me explain further.

Realize that if something is not done at once about this crucial issue in IB and IGCSE classroom instruction, then soon we will be dealing with employees in our various work environments who have zero knowledge about anything and everything, and who also will not be able to associate in an empathetic and patient manner with their fellow colleagues or their employers. Thus, it will be even more necessary that automation across several job avenues takes place not just by the year 2030, but by the year 2027 itself. The Mundaka Upanishad seems to have the solution to the problem, and the problem is lethal.

I write this article as a professionally qualified IBDP and AS & A Level teacher of over 23 subjects in the Humanities, and as a direct witness of the damage that the misapplied probing model has wrought in IB and IGCSE classrooms I have personally observed throughout Mumbai, India. My central claim is simple — and it is one that the Mundaka Upanishad knew even four thousand years ago. That claim is that a student cannot reflect on what they have never received. The teaching must come first. The silence must be cultivated before the questioning can be fruitful. And the guru or the teacher must be permitted to teach.

During my PGCITE candidature, I have sat in classrooms where thirty children were simultaneously shouting competing answers to questions they did not understand, at a teacher who was simultaneously shouting competing prompts at them, and where at the end of a 45 minute lesson, not a single new piece of knowledge had been transmitted, consolidated, or genuinely received by any student in the room. I saw this throughout IB and IGCSE schools all over Mumbai, India as I went from school to school seeking job opportunities and giving a number of demo lessons in a number of IB and IGCSE Humanities Subjects like English Literature, Global Perspectives, Individuals & Societies, Sociology and History. .

I have witnessed this spectacle repeated across year groups right up to the IBDP and AS & A Level. What I observed was not a failure of individual teachers. The teachers I watched were trained, committed, and in many cases genuinely gifted people who were, however, doing exactly what their training had told them to do – probe, prompt, probe again, facilitate, never explain. The result was, invariably, the same — maximum noise, minimum learning, and a classroom atmosphere that oscillated between the theatrical and the chaotic.

The uncomfortable truth that my PGCITE college appeared wholly unwilling to examine was this: the children were leaving these lessons having learned nothing. They went home and unlocked their phones. They hired tutors. They attended coaching classes in Andheri, Chembur, and Thane, where a man or woman sat down with them and, in a perfectly ordinary and entirely effective manner, told them what they needed to know. Some of them contacted me for my services, as I have been a professional senior school tutor for the past 20 years of my teaching career. The tuition teacher explained. The tuition teacher was not afraid of explanation. And the child, finally having received the foundation of actual knowledge, was at last able to think.

This article is my attempt to understand why this is happening, to name the error precisely, and to propose, through the ancient and luminous wisdom of the Mundaka Upanishad and the mandate of India’s own National Education Policy 2020, a corrective that is both philosophically grounded and practically implementable.

The Mundaka Upanishad belongs to the Atharva Veda and is classified as one of the Mukhya Upanishads — the principal Upanishads considered foundational to the Vedantic philosophical tradition. The word mundaka derives from the Sanskrit root mund, meaning ‘to shave’ — suggesting the stripping away of ignorance, the shaving off of illusion, that is the Upanishad’s central project. The text is structured as a dialogue between the householder Shaunak and the sage Angiras, and is divided into three Mundakas, which means ‘books’, each containing two Khandas or ‘sections.’

What is frequently overlooked in modern educational discourse is that the Mundaka Upanishad is not merely a text about liberation or metaphysics, but it is also, and crucially, a text about how knowledge is transmitted. Its very narrative structure embodies a pedagogical philosophy. The frame story itself, in which only a qualified student seeks a qualified teacher, approaches with humility and a genuine hunger for knowledge, and receives instruction through a deliberate, sequenced process, is indeed an enactment of the teaching model it describes.

As the philosopher and statesman Dr S. Radhakrishnan observed in his landmark commentary, the Upanishads represent not only the source of Indian intellectual tradition but a living model of how the human mind, rightly disciplined, moves from ignorance to knowledge, from darkness to light. The Mundaka Upanishad is perhaps the most explicit of all the principal Upanishads in articulating the conditions under which this movement becomes possible.

The Upanishad opens with Shaunak’s foundational question to the sage Angiras –

‘Revered sir, what is that, by knowing which, all this becomes known?’

–Mundaka Upanishad 1.1.3

This question is extraordinary from a pedagogical standpoint. Shaunak is not asking for an accumulation of information. He is asking for the organizing principle, which is the foundational knowledge from which all other knowledge flows and finds its meaning.

Angiras’s response is equally significant. He does not immediately probe Shaunak back. He does not say, ‘Well, what do you think? Let us explore together.’ Instead, He teaches. He distinguishes between Apara Vidya, the lower, accumulated, ritual knowledge, and Para Vidya, the higher, transformative knowledge of Brahman. He explains both. He defines both. He then proceeds throughout the text to convey the Para Vidya through a series of carefully constructed, intellectually rich, and metaphorically resonant explanations.

This distinction between the two orders of knowledge is itself a profound pedagogical act. Angiras is telling his student that not all knowledge is equal, that some knowledge is foundational and must be received before other knowledge can be evaluated. This sequencing indicates that foundational knowledge comes first. It is the first of the Mundaka Upanishad’s three principled pedagogical lessons.

The Vedantic tradition identifies three sequential stages of genuine learning, and these three stages are both described and enacted in the structure of the Mundaka Upanishad. Understanding these stages is essential to diagnosing the precise error of the current IB and IGCSE inquiry model. So let us do so, right now.

The Three Sacred Stages: Shravanam, Mananam, and Nididhyasanam

Shravanam (The Stage of Listening)

The first stage is Shravanam, which involves being attentive, receptive, and focused as one listens to the guru’s words. This is not the passive, inert, switched-off listening that critics of traditional pedagogy mistakenly equate with ‘rote learning’ or ‘chalk and talk.’ It is something far more demanding and dynamic. Shravanam requires what the Mundaka Upanishad calls Shanta Chitta, the serene, concentrated, undistracted mind capable of truly receiving what is being transmitted.

The Mundaka Upanishad is exacting about the qualities required for this stage. In Mundaka 3.2.4, Angiras specifies that the ideal student must possess three essential qualities: they must seek a teacher who is both learned in the scriptures and personally established in Brahman, they must approach this teacher with genuine surrender of their own ego and prior assumptions, and they must bring a serene mind or Shanta Chitta to the encounter.

Shanta Chitta is not a passive state. It is an active, alert, poised, and receptive state, like the stillness of an archer who has drawn the bowstring and holds focus before releasing the arrow. The student of the Upanishad is described in precisely this metaphor where the self is the arrow, the bow is Om (the sacred sound of concentrated intentionality), Brahman is the target, and the one who shoots must be ‘like that arrow, one with the target’ –  that is, fully focused, fully present, fully available to what is coming (Mundaka Upanishad 2.2.3–4).

There is simply no equivalent to Shanta Chitta in an IB or IGCSE classroom of thirty children competing to shout answers over one another. The inquiry-based model, as it is currently practiced in many IB and IGCSE classrooms, structurally destroys the conditions required for Shravanam to occur. It produces precisely the opposite of Shanta Chitta; it produces Chanchala Chitta, which is the restless, scattered, performance-oriented mind that is occupied with being seen to participate rather than with actually receiving and understanding. So true in the IB and IGCSE context. Even where their Social Work is concerned or CAS work is concerned at the IBDP and AS & A Level, IGCSE and IB Board students do their social work not out of real empathy for those in need, but to be ‘seen as doing good’ so that their social service hours may be clocked in their portfolios and CVs.

Mananam (The Stage of Reflection)

The second stage is Mananam, which is the turning over of received knowledge in the mind, the active examination of what one has heard, the beginning of genuine questioning. This is the stage in which Socratic dialogue and Inquiry-Based Learning have their proper and legitimate place. Mananam is vigorous, questioning, and exploratory, but it operates on something. It has material to work with. It can only take place because Shravanam has already occurred. Please understand that.

The difference between Mananam and the inquiry-based classroom is the difference between a geologist chipping at a rock with a hammer to discover what is inside it, and a child waving a hammer in the air hoping that a rock will spontaneously form! Mananam is powerful, demanding, and productive precisely because it works upon a foundation of received knowledge. The questions that arise in genuine Mananam are real, emerging from encounters with actual ideas, actual content, and actual difficulty. They are not pretentious or random questions.

Shaunak’s questions throughout the Mundaka Upanishad exemplify Mananam in action. He is not asking questions in the dark. He has received something from Angiras, sat with it, felt where it creates difficulty or confusion in his own understanding, and then returned with a genuine inquiry. His questions are pointed, specific, and intellectually serious precisely because they arise from prior Shravanam.

Nididhyasanam (The Stage of Deep Contemplation)

The third stage is Nididhyasanam, which is the deep, sustained contemplation through which knowledge moves from intellectual understanding to a lived and embodied realization. This is the stage at which knowledge becomes identity, where what one knows and what one is begins to converge. The Mundaka Upanishad’s supreme statement, ‘Brahma veda Brahmaiva bhavati’ that is ‘He who knows Brahman becomes Brahman’ (Mundaka Upanishad 3.2.9) is the ultimate expression of Nididhyasanam.

In modern educational terms, Nididhyasanam corresponds to the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy as I learned in my PGCITE course or Post Graduate Certificate in International Teacher Education course at Podar International School, Santacruz  — synthesis, evaluation, creation, and ultimately metacognitive integration. But here again, the critical point is sequential. Bloom himself insisted that the higher-order thinking skills presuppose the lower-order ones. One cannot evaluate or synthesize what one has never understood. One cannot understand what one has never received. The hierarchy is not arbitrary; instead, it reflects the actual structure of how human cognition acquires and internalizes knowledge.

The Two Birds: What the IB and IGCSE Classroom Is Missing

However, the most celebrated image in the Mundaka Upanishad is the parable of the two birds in Mundaka:

‘Two birds, companions, always united, cling to the same tree. One of them eats the sweet fruit; the other looks on without eating.’

–Mundaka Upanishad 3.1.1

The first bird, the Jiva, or individual ego-self, is busy, restless, consuming, and performing. The second bird, who is the Atman, or Supreme Self, is still, witnessing, and serene. The entire drama of human existence in the Upanishad’s vision is the first bird’s frantic activity, whilst the second bird sits quietly beside it, waiting to be noticed.

I want to apply this image directly to the IB and IGCSE classroom, because I believe it is the most precise and illuminating diagnosis of what is going wrong. The inquiry-based classroom, as I have observed it, produces a room full of first birds. Thirty children, each competing to be seen and heard, each performing participation, each eating as loudly and conspicuously as possible to demonstrate engagement. The noise is enormous. The fruit consumption is spectacular. And nothing is learned.

The second bird, who is the still-witnessing and genuinely receptive self that is capable of Shravanam, is systematically excluded by the structure of the inquiry-based lesson. There is no space for the second bird whatsoever. There is no silence in which it might be noticed. The lesson’s design forbids the stillness that learning requires.

In fact, when I was being instructed to construct my own classes during my PGCITE course, I was given the order to create or facilitate ‘maximum noise as possible’ for ‘real learning to take place’. I obviously did not comply because I don’t know about anyone else, but my ears cannot function at a very high decibel level, period. And I prefer actual learning and making my classes pedagogically useful rather than ‘making a scene’. And my classes proved so beneficial to the students that I had many of them return to me via my various social media to ask me to privately tutor them in their various IBDP and MYP subjects because they felt, for the first time, they were actually learning something in my class, and yet having a fun time along the way.

This is not unique to this situation alone. I have been tutoring ICSE and ISC students for the past 20 years of my teaching career. I have taught senior students from various ICSE schools across Mumbai, India, but lately I’ve seen that even ICSE and ISC schools are using the IB and IGCSE modes of inquiry-based pedagogy in a skewed manner. However, where they are concerned, this pedagogy is used as an alternative to the teachers actually teaching something in the classroom; basically, it is a way to shirk their work, especially in order to complete the syllabus when ICSE teachers are at the mercy of a very inhumane structure or managerial committee who prefer external show over actual learning and academic excellence among its students with various Multiple Intelligences (MIs).

Genuine inquiry — the kind that produces real knowledge, real understanding, and real independent thinking — arises from the second bird. It arises from the moment of stillness that follows genuine reception. The teacher who explains, who transmits knowledge clearly and beautifully and with the full authority of their understanding, gives the student’s second bird something to respond to. The student who has truly listened, who has received, who has let the knowledge settle in their serene mind, that student will ask a question that emerges from depth rather than performance. And that question will teach both the student and the teacher something real.

My Observations Over a Period of 21 years of Teaching (Yes, since age 16. I am now 37 years old. I was teaching batches of senior students since then)

I am writing this article based on the Mundaka Upanishad as a witness to a systemic problem that no individual teacher created and no individual teacher can alone solve.

What I have been observing, repeatedly and across subjects in various IB and IGCSE schools, and now also ICSE schools, is the following: teachers were instructed, during their training, in their mentoring sessions, and in their formal observation feedback, that explanation was to be minimized or eliminated altogether.

‘Don’t explain — let them discover.’

‘Don’t give the answer — ask another question.’

‘The students should be doing most of the talking, not you.’

‘Don’t answer their question, instead tell them to research.’

The underlying intention of this approach, I believe, was genuinely good. The IB and IGCSE frameworks aspire to produce independent thinkers, critical evaluators, and self-directed learners. These are noble aspirations, and I share them entirely. The IB Learner Profile, for instance, with its emphasis on being Inquirers, Knowledgeable, Thinkers, Communicators, and Reflective, represents a genuinely admirable vision of educated humanity.

What I have witnessed in practice is that teachers, under pressure from Senior observers and PGCITE assessors to demonstrate student-centered learning, or simply because of incompetence, especially in ICSE schools, were structurally unable to do what a teacher must sometimes do — explain a thing clearly.

A student who has no idea what the Cold War was in History cannot be ‘probed’ into discovering it. A student who has never encountered the concept of dramatic irony cannot be ‘facilitated’ into producing an analysis of it in English Literature. The knowledge must enter the mind from outside before it can be worked upon inside. This is not a theory. It is a biological and cognitive fact.

The consequences I have observed during my PGCITE course, as well as otherwise in other IGCSE and IB schools, and even now while tutoring IGCSE and IB students in their respective schools, are threefold. First, the lesson time was consumed by a performance of inquiry in which students competed to say anything that sounded like an answer, whilst the teacher tried to steer this cacophony toward a predetermined learning objective that the students did not know and could not have reached through the noise.

Second, the atmosphere in many of these classrooms was disruptive, anxious, and ultimately demoralizing for the very students the method was designed to empower. Especially those who really want to learn something at school and not depend on tuition. Third – and most damaging of all – the students left the classroom having learned nothing, or almost nothing, and were obliged to seek the knowledge they should have received in school from tutors and coaching classes instead, like me!

But at least I am not a ‘moon-lighting teacher’.

Or as these days I am calling ‘the Chaudhvin Ka Chand Ho tuition teachers!’

The Rise of the Moonlighting Tuition Teacher: A Systemic Indictment

The tuition industry in India is one of the clearest pieces of evidence that something is profoundly wrong with formal schooling as currently practiced, particularly in the IB and IGCSE sectors. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2023, private tuition enrolment in India continues to rise even as school enrolment reaches near-universal levels – a paradox that should trouble every education policymaker deeply. Children are in school. And they are still, at scale and at significant expense to their families, going to tutors in the evenings and on weekends to receive the instruction that school is failing to provide.

I have spoken with students who attend well-known IB, IGCSE, and, of course, ICSE schools in Mumbai, who describe the same phenomenon without exception: they sit through school lessons that produce no learning, and they go home and do the actual learning with their private tutors. The tutor – typically a former schoolteacher, or a subject specialist working from their flat in Bandra or Borivali, or the schoolteacher themself – does something that the school has told its teachers not to do. The tutor explains. The tutor writes things on the board at a normal pace. The tutor tells the student the answer and then asks the student to work with that answer, question it, apply it, and demonstrate their understanding. In other words, the tutor provides Shravanam before demanding Mananam. And the student, unsurprisingly, learns.

This is a systemic indictment of the current IB and IGCSE pedagogical model. If the fruits of the educational philosophy can only be produced by private tutors – who are, by definition, working outside the constraints of that philosophy – then the philosophy has failed. The children whose parents can afford tutors will learn despite their school’s pedagogical approach. The children whose parents cannot, will not. The result is a system that masquerades as progressive and student-centered, whilst, in practice, producing outcomes that are deeply inequitable and educationally impoverished.

The Mundaka Upanishad’s model of the guru who transmits knowledge directly, fully, and without apology, before facilitating the student’s own engagement with that knowledge, is not a conservative or retrograde model. It is, in fact, the model that the most effective teachers in the world, including the tutors of Mumbai, still use because it works. But it is like a ‘Chaudhvin Ka Chand’ or a rare sight to be seen practiced among schoolteachers or tuition teachers who also teach at schools.

NEP 2020, Indian Knowledge Systems, and the Mandate for Upanishadic Pedagogy

India’s National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) represents a historic and explicit commitment to integrating Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) into mainstream education at every level, from primary schooling to doctoral research. The policy states clearly:

‘India has a rich heritage of knowledge, wisdom, and pedagogy… The rich heritage of ancient and eternal Indian knowledge and thought has been a guiding light for our civilisation… Great thinkers like Charaka and Sushruta, Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Bhaskaracharya, Chanakya, Chakrapani Datta, Madhava, Panini, Patanjali, Nagarjuna, Gautama, Pingala, Sankardev, Maitreyi, Gargi, and Thiruvalluvar, among countless others, made seminal contributions to world knowledge in diverse fields.’

–(NEP 2020, Section 4.27)

The NEP 2020 further mandates the incorporation of IKS into school and higher education curricula, specifically calling for the integration of ‘classical languages and literature, yoga, philosophy, fine arts, and crafts’ and the insights of ancient Indian texts into pedagogical practice. The Upanishads, therefore, as the foundational philosophical texts of the Indian tradition, are explicitly within the scope of this mandate.

I argue that the Mundaka Upanishad’s three-stage model of Shravanam, Mananam, and Nididhyasanam represents precisely the kind of IKS contribution that the NEP 2020 envisions, which is not a vague cultural ornament appended to an otherwise Western curriculum, but a substantive, rigorous, and practically applicable pedagogical framework that addresses real problems in real classrooms.

The NEP 2020’s vision of the teacher as a mentor, a guide, and a person of deep subject knowledge who fosters genuine curiosity in students is far closer to the Upanishadic guru than to the inquiry facilitator envisioned by the IB’s pure constructivist model. The NEP 2020 states:

‘Teachers must be able to teach in an interactive style… use various pedagogies… give students choice… use local contexts… but must first have deep knowledge of their own subject.’

–Ministry of Education, NEP 2020, Section 5.6, p. 22.

Deep knowledge of subject, transmitted with skill and care — this is Angiras, and this is the model of every effective teacher I have ever encountered over my own lifetime, not merely as a teacher, but as a student, even now, studying for multiple Master’s, post-graduate courses, and Post-Graduate Diploma and Certificate courses from various Universities abroad and in India.

My Three-Point Proposal – The Mundaka Upanishad’s Answer to the IB and IGCSE Classroom

Drawing on the three foundational lessons of the Mundaka Upanishad’s pedagogical architecture and the distinction between Para and Apara Vidya, the three-stage model of Shravanam, Mananam, and Nididhyasanam, and the image of the two birds, I propose the following three-point corrective to the current IB and IGCSE inquiry-based classroom model.

1) Restore Shravanam – The Right of the Student to Receive

The first point is a restoration, not an innovation. I propose that IB and IGCSE schools formally restore, in their lesson design frameworks and teacher-training programs like a PGCITE course or a specialized international B.Ed. Postgraduate Degree Course, the pedagogical legitimacy of direct instruction. This does not mean a return to lecture-based, entirely passive, rote-learning classrooms. It means the recognition that every lesson requires a foundation of transmitted knowledge in the form of an explanation, demonstration, or modeling procedure, before student inquiry can become meaningful.

In practical terms, this means allowing and indeed requiring teachers to teach. The Mundaka Upanishad’s guru is not a bystander; Angiras speaks at length, with precision, passion, and authority, before Shaunak is expected to engage. A lesson plan that allocates the majority of instructional time to student-produced noise before any content has been received is pedagogically incoherent, and the international schools that continue to enforce such models are, in my view, failing their students.

The Shanta Chitta moment, which is the moment of serene, focused reception, must be designed into every lesson. A moment of genuine stillness and attention, in which the teacher speaks, and the students truly listen, is not regressive practice. It is the very precondition of genuine learning. Without it, the second bird has nothing to respond to. The inquiry that follows then, without that stillness, is not inquiry at all — it is performance.

2) Resequencing Inquiry – Mananam After Shravanam, Not Instead of It

My second proposal is a resequencing, not an elimination, of inquiry-based methods. That is all that is required to correct this technique, per se. Student-led questioning, collaborative exploration, Socratic dialogue, and discovery-based activity all have genuine educational value. The Mundaka Upanishad does not dismiss inquiry; in fact, it honors it. Shaunak’s questions to Angiras are among the most beautiful in all of Indian philosophical literature, even surpassing those asked by Arjuna to Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita or by Uddhava to Lord Krishna in the Uddhava Gita. But those questions arise from a prepared and receptive mind, from a student who has received knowledge and is now engaging with it from the inside.

I propose that IB and IGCSE lesson design frameworks explicitly distinguish between initiation, the teacher-led phase of knowledge transmission, and exploration, the student-led phase of questioning and investigation, and that these phases be sequenced correctly. First should come initiation, and then exploration. This is not a radical proposal. It is, in effect, what Vygotsky (who was a developmental psychologist and the founder of cultural-historical psychology) called ‘scaffolded instruction’ where the teacher provides the structure, the support, and the foundation, and only then allows the student to build independently within and beyond it. In the language of the Mundaka Upanishad, Shravanam creates the ground. Mananam plants the seeds. Nididhyasanam brings the harvest. You cannot skip from bare ground to harvest. The sequence is the method. Even Jesus narrates the same indirectly and in theological terms in the Gospel of John, when his disciples were forcing him to eat some food they had bought in Samaria (John 4:31–38).

3) Rehabilitate the Guru – The Teacher Must Be Permitted to Know and to Teach

My third proposal is perhaps the most urgent and the most culturally significant. I propose a rehabilitation of the guru, meaning the IGCSE and IB Board teacher as a person of genuine authority, genuine knowledge, and genuine presence.

The Mundaka Upanishad’s specifications for the guru are demanding and beautiful. In Mundaka 1.2.12–13, Angiras specifies the qualities of the teacher to whom a student should go: one who is ‘Shrotriyam’ that is learned in the scriptures and one who is ‘Brahmanishtha’ or established in Brahman, grounded in the deepest reality. The guru is not a facilitator of other people’s learning. The guru is a person who has himself traversed the path of knowledge and is therefore qualified to lead another along it.

This would be similar in Catholic Theology to the role of Saint John the Baptist in the Bible. Saint John the Baptist was the forerunner of Jesus — his herald who ‘prepared the way of the Lord’ — by teaching the Jews because he:

1. Not only pointed the way.

2. He had also gone the same way and had come back to teach others about the benefits of the same.

He accomplished this by living in the desert alone in deep meditation upon the Lord, fasting, making penance and contemplating the Scriptures and learning from the Ancient Holy Hermits of the Region of Engdi about the way to self-realization and true knowledge — as referenced in both the Nag Hammadi Scrolls and the Dead Sea Scrolls about the Essenes, now being studied and in the process of being authenticated by the Roman Catholic Church.

The current IB and IGCSE professional development culture in which teachers are consistently discouraged from ‘telling’ or ‘explaining’ and rewarded for ‘facilitating’ and ‘probing’ has, in practice, produced a teaching culture that is uncomfortable with authority, suspicious of expertise, and structurally unable to model the kind of deep, assured, generous subject-knowledge transmission that transforms students’ lives. I have met teachers who apologize for knowing things. This is a tragedy. I was belittled many times during my PGCITE or Post Graduate Certificate in International Teacher Education course at Podar International School, Santacruz, for knowing things and having knowledge. I was never applauded for it at all and was, at times, pulled up by the HODs, supervisors, and other senior teachers there for being ‘extraordinarily gifted, multi-talented and intelligent.’ This is a tragedy.

A teacher who knows their subject deeply, who loves it, who can speak about it with clarity, warmth, and precision, and who can, in the Upanishadic phrase, be ‘established in Brahman’ in the sense of being grounded in the deepest truth of their discipline, is not an obstacle to student learning. Such a teacher is then the most powerful catalyst in student learning. The IB and IGCSE frameworks must find a way to honor, develop, and deploy this kind of teacher, rather than systematically discouraging them from doing the very thing they are most able to do.

The moonlighting tuition teachers of Mumbai know this. The great gurus of Nalanda and Takshashila knew this. And the Mundaka Upanishad, in its spare and luminous verses, has been saying this for four thousand years.

But no one wants to bell the cat.

Well, I just did.

The Upanishadic Classroom in the Twenty-First Century

I am not proposing that IB and IGCSE schools abandon their philosophical commitments or discard everything that inquiry-based learning has contributed to education. The IB’s emphasis on international-mindedness, on critical thinking, on genuine curiosity and intellectual risk-taking – these are real gifts to modern education, and I value them. My own teaching practice has been shaped by them, and I would not wish it otherwise.

What I am proposing is a synthesis, which is a classroom model that holds the best of both the Upanishadic and the inquiry-based traditions in a productive and correctly sequenced tension. In such a classroom, the teacher is both guru and facilitator, a person of genuine knowledge who transmits that knowledge with skill and care, and who then, having established the necessary foundation of Shravanam, steps back and allows the student’s own Mananam and Nididhyasanam to unfold.

The IB Learner Profile attribute of being:

a) Knowledgeable ‘developing and using conceptual understanding, exploring knowledge across a range of disciplines’ – can only be realized if the student has first been given something to know.

b) The attribute of being a Thinker, applying thinking skills critically and creatively to recognize and approach complex problems, can only be realized if the student has first been given the conceptual tools to think with.

The Upanishadic model provides these tools, in the correct order, with the necessary patience and with pedagogical grace.

I believe that the NEP 2020’s mandate to integrate IKS into Indian schools offers a historic and unrepeatable opportunity to achieve this synthesis. India’s teachers, particularly those working in the IB and IGCSE sector, have access to one of the world’s richest, most psychologically sophisticated, and most practically tested pedagogical traditions. The Mundaka Upanishad is not a museum piece. It is a living, breathing, urgently relevant document that speaks directly to the classroom crisis I have described in this article and book review.

I intend, through my PGCITE website teaching portfolio and through my continued practice as a teacher, currently teaching 25 subjects at the AS & A Level and IBDP Level, to develop and disseminate practical lesson models that embody the three-point Upanishadic framework I have proposed here. The second bird is waiting. Let us give it the stillness it needs to speak.

Conclusion

The Mundaka Upanishad contains, in the image of the two birds, the most precise diagnosis I have encountered of what is wrong with much of contemporary IB and IGCSE teaching. A classroom full of first birds — restless, consuming, performing, competing — none of it is a genuine learning environment. It is a theatre of simulated learning that exhausts teachers, disorients students, produces nothing of permanent value, and drives the most educationally disadvantaged families into the arms of the tuition industry.

India’s National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) has given us the mandate and the vocabulary to reclaim education. The Mundaka Upanishad has given us its philosophical foundations. The crisis in our classrooms has given us a sense of urgency. It remains for those of us who stand at the intersection of these traditions, as teachers, as scholars, as principals, as school managers, as students of both the ancient and the contemporary, to do the work of synthesis, implementation, and advocacy that the moment requires.

The second bird is patient. It has been waiting for a very long time. Let us build the classrooms worthy of its song.

The best time to start this was yesterday.

The second-best time is right now. Go for it.

Bibliography

1. Mundaka Upanishad. In Olivelle, Patrick (trans.), The Early Upanishads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford University Press, New York, 1998, pp. 430–453.

2. Mundaka Upanishad. In Radhakrishnan, S. (trans. and ed.), The Principal Upanishads. George Allen and Unwin, London, 1953, pp. 667–708.

3. Mundaka Upanishad. In Gambhirananda, Swami (trans.), Eight Upanishads (Volume II). Advaita Ashrama, Kolkata, 1958.

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21. Fiza Pathan’s brain!

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