BG 162: Contributing to the Gross National Happiness

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Episode Description:

Richard Brown–a long time Buddhist and contemplative educator–joins us to share some of the details from his recent involvement in helping the small Buddhist country of Bhutan reform their public education system. Bhutan, which since the early 70’s has had as its main goal to increase Gross National Happiness, wants to create an education system that pulls the best from the West. The main principles they’re holding with this reform, include Contemplation, a Holistic approach, Sustainability, Cultural Integrity, and Critical Intellect. They’re aim is to educate their populace in such a way that they’re prepared for the onslaught of some of the more negative aspects of modernity–including the barrage of information and gross commercialization.

Richard was a core part of a recent 5-day workshop aimed at starting to plan the reform of their education system. Richard shares many of the details from that workshop, and shares some of the amazing steps that Bhutan has already taken, as a result, to foster the happiness and well-being of their countries inhabitants.

Episode Links:

• Naropa University Educators Assist Bhutan in Overhauling its Educational System

Transcript:

Vince: Hello, Buddhist Geeks. This is Vince Horn, and I’m joined today in the Boulder studio with a Boulder native, Mr. Richard Brown. Richard, thank you so much for taking the time to come down and speak with us today. I really appreciate it.

Richard: It’s really wonderful to be here.

Vince: Cool.

Richard: Thanks for inviting me.

Vince: Absolutely. And, Richard, you have a really cool background here. We were talking a little before the interview, and it sounds like you’ve been a teacher for quite a long time. You’ve done graduate work at Naropa, and you actually helped found the Contemplative Education Department there in the ’90s. And your contemplative side, on the other hand is you’ve been a long-time student in the tradition of Chogyam Trungpa by you were a student here way back in the day. And, of course, you’re married to Judith Simmer-Brown.

Richard: Right.

Vince: I’m guessing that’s how you met her.

Richard: Yeah. Actually, we met up at Shambhala Mountain Center, which was then Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. We were both sitting in a month-long meditation program, and we fell in love back in ‘78.

Vince: When I spoke to Judith last when we interviewed her, she mentioned that the two of you, and you in particular, were invited by the government of Bhutan to come help reform their educational system, that she thought it would be really great to speak with you. And I was like, “Oh, well, yeah, of course. It would be great to speak with you.” So, I was interested in hearing, what were you invited to do and why are they reforming their educational system?

Richard: This was just last summer when I first got a call from the organization that was helping to work with the government of Bhutan. I was just completely astounded that this was happening, that they were actually thinking about reforming the entire public education system from pre-K all the way up through higher education based on contemplative principles, holistic principle, sustainability, cultural integrity and critical intellect. Those were the five main principles and that they really wanted me to be there. I thought this is like a dream come true, you know, an entire country that is going to be basing its education system on contemplative education, among other things.

The reason they were doing this is that, of course, Bhutan is Buddhist country, and it’s been a very protected country. The culture has been quite intentionally preserved there. It’s hard for people to get in, and they have been very cautious about any kind of intervention in that situation. But, in the last 10 years or so with the Internet and satellite TV and cell phones and all this, the Western world has really penetrated that whole situation. And it’s causing, as you might expect, a profound upheaval among, especially the young people living in a very traditional, agricultural society, strong family and religious values. Then, suddenly you can see whatever you see when you turn on the TV. A lot of it is very, very jarring and out of place. So, it’s caused an upheaval.

The government has been very, very concerned about this because back in the ’70s the government decided that the whole principle of government there was going to be based on Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. Rather than having a money-based system of values, they were going to look more broadly at what is this life about, anyway. It’s not just having money in your pocket. You want to lead a happy life. It’s essentially a very Buddhist philosophy. We all want to be happy, and what does that really mean? They are very astute there. They looked and saw material wealth is not doing it. You know, it’s not really making people happy. The happiness is very temporary. After you’ve had what you can buy for awhile and you want more and more and more, there’s suddenly a point where it’s not happiness anymore. It’s just greed and compulsion, not that everyone’s like that, of course, but they realized that to base a government on the conventional gross national product was not the way they wanted to go.

So, they adopted–this was back in the ’70s under the king before Bhutan became a constitutional monarchy, which it did voluntarily. The King gave up his leadership, and elections were held. And now they have their first government, and this is very recent. So, they’re just finding their way into what it means to govern based on creating that kind of happiness for people. So, one of the things that they discovered was that with this incursion of information from the West, TV and the rest of it, that it was undermining the basis of this cultural happiness which had been there and still is very much there still is very much alive. They could see the writing on the wall. More of the young people are drinking and getting into drugs and losing their connections with their families and, you know the whole thing most industrialized countries around the world experienced. Bhutan never went through an industrial period, they went straight from the middle ages into the information age.

Vince: They leap-frogged.

Richard: Exactly. So, to make a long story short, the government decided that the only way to really make sure that Gross National Happiness wasn’t just a slogan was to really reform the educational system so that people had a really solid education, so that they themselves could individually counteract the influences of all this media and information materialism in the West. You can’t just tell people that that’s a bad thing people have to figure it out on their own. So they thought “We need the best educational system we can get for our people in order to preserve the integrity that’s already there.”

Vince: And do you feel that the information is something that’s inherently destructive or bad or is it something that’s explainable some other way?

Richard: Right, well, obviously there’s nothing inherently wrong with any information. It’s like here when students are in middle school or elementary school in many cases they’re taught how to be media savvy. They’re taught that the things they see on TV are not just there for their edification, that a lot of times they’re to sell a product. To get people to start thinking a certain way so that they’ll want certain things. It creates need. And that’s why one of the principles of the educational reform was developing critical intellect so that the students of Bhutan, who see all this stuff coming in from the outside, can make intelligent decisions about it and decide “Well yeah I’m going to buy a scooter, but I’m not going to buy a scooter this year and then next year get a motorcycle and the year after that get a car and start paving every road I can find because I understand what the implications of that are going to be for me and my family because I’ve learned about this”.

I mean there are plenty of examples throughout Asia of what has happened to communities and countries when this kind of sudden Westernization happens, what it does to people. Because people there are still very much connected to their families, there is so much heart and warmth among the people there they are not going to want that. You talk to people now who are educated and they understand the lure of Western materialism but they’re well educated enough to realize that “we don’t want this to happen. How can we have gradual sustainable growth which preserves our basic culture and way of life and our environment.” Because their environment there is spectacular! And because the government has put in so many protections for the environment. I mean, you can’t drive your car down and wash it in a stream. You can’t cut down a tree on your property without a permit. So there’s a tremendous amount of protection of the environment protection and support of the Buddhist culture that’s there. Things are well taken care of on a human level and on an environmental level. It’s really a very very enlightened society if you will.

Vince: Yeah and I find it interesting that instead of when the, sort of, Western culture started to become pervasive that, instead of locking down further, it sounds like there’s been a movement to respond to it instead of just push it away further. We’ve seen that happen in history too, where a culture will just get extremely rigid or extreme about not letting something in and then it gets weird anyway.

Richard: That’s right. And I think they realize that Westernization, on a certain level, is inevitable. You can’t just build walls and keep it out. On the other hand there are certain things that are clearly harmful, for example they banned the sale of cigarettes in the country Richard: You could say, “Well, that’s a reality, you know. Why not let it in?” Well, it’s clear that that’s harmful to people. So they banned the sale of cigarettes, and then smuggling started happening. So then while we were there they banned cigarette smoking. You can’t possess them and you can’t smoke them.

So, you know, on the one hand, they had the ability to tighten where they feel like it needs strong regulation. On the other hand, they’re willing to open up to the world. Their openness to the “best of the West,” if you will, is extraordinary. They’re just willing to take in people’s ideas and practices and really adapt them to their situation. And that’s what they’re doing with this educational reform movement that just started.

Vince: Yeah, and I wondering if you could say some about what it was like there being at the conference? Like what kinds of things were discussed? Just maybe some of the highlights of the conference itself?

Richard: Well, it was an amazing thing. None of us had ever been to anything like this before. There were 25 experts, if you will, from different fields around the world, including not just education but sustainability and cultural integrity, all with a mind for education. But they didn’t want just educators there. So there were the 25 of us, and there were 25 Bhutanese scholars and officials. So we made that inner group of 50 that was actually doing most of the work. And there were 120 observers who were contributing in less direct ways, also from around the world but mostly Bhutanese. And you know, I thought it’s an unwieldy group, but there was so much interconnection. I mean many of these people I’d known from other venues, but many of them I didn’t, of course. The wonderful way in which everybody in that workshop shared their different perspectives, and it made this incredibly intricate whole. And it just had the effect of energizing everyone who was there.

Now frankly, some of the Bhutanese officials who came to this meeting I think were pretty skeptical because it was really the prime minister and the education minister who were driving this reform. And you have to realize that almost everyone in Bhutan, with the exception of some of the higher officials, was educated in the British system–the old traditional lecture/exam British system. Now I know what that’s like. I went to the University of Singapore for a year, and you’d sit in this massive classroom and take notes. And then at the end of the semester you’d take a big exam, and that was it. You’re just feeding back the information. So suddenly they’re inviting in these holistic and contemplative educators, and there was a lot of skepticism. But because of this kind of synchronization that happened among the people who were there, people just started lighting up. Even the most skeptical among the officials just suddenly got it. They realized what has been happening in the West over the last 50 years or so, depending on how far back you want to go with holistic education.

But so much wealth of this is how it can be done and be done well so that the people of Bhutan, the students of Bhutan, are actually living this education. It’s not something separate. It’s not something you learn about. It’s something you actually participate in. It’s something that goes to your heart as well as your mind. And when they got it, things just took off. It was [laughs] the most amazing workshop any of us had ever been to. Every night the government officials after we closed would huddle, examine all the papers from all the groups, and come up with a reformatting of the next day’s workshop based on what we’d done.

Originally, the idea was that they would just import holistic and contemplative curriculum and give it to their teachers, and they’d just do it. The usual approach in education, you know. You’ve got a good idea and the teachers can handle it, so you set up the class that way and everybody learns this. Well, holistic and contemplative education isn’t like that.

Vince: It’s not a top-down approach. [laughs]

Richard: It’s not a top-down approach. It’s not an external thing. By the second day they had understood that the biggest priority was teacher education, that they really understood that the teachers themselves needed to not just understand this new approach, but actually live it, actually teach that way in the classroom. Complete change of approach. So they got that. And every night, so, we’d have these meetings all during the day, and it was so hilarious. Because when we went in there, the prime minister addressed us the very first time… he was there everyday – he addressed us and he said, “You know, you will be mercilessly exploited during this week.” [both laugh] And it’s true. They just worked us to death. But they worked even harder. And by the end of the 5-day workshop, they had a 3-year plan, the first phase of which was to begin in 10 days with a facilitator training. The facilitators would then have 3 workshops that they would lead, in which all the principals of all the schools in Bhutan would be brought to. So they had these 3 meetings with the principals, each a week long, completely re-orientating the principals to this approach. And then over the next 2 years, all the teachers in the entire country would be brought in for various workshops on this whole approach. In the mean time, all these other auxiliary functions would go in. Websites with all kinds of supportive material and development of curriculum to support this, and so forth. None of us had ever seen that kind of responsiveness by any kind of an organization to the work that happens at a workshop, you know. In fact they had invited funders from the United Nations and from various private foundations to the workshop, and by the end of the workshop all these funders had agreed to support this initiative. Because Bhutan is not a wealthy country so it relies a lot on, on outside support. It was just completely phenomenal what happened and how quickly it all happened. We were all just blown away.

Vince: Wow. Wow. And what, I’m wondering, what are some of the main things, I mean, you mentioned the curriculum and you mentioned sort of bringing teachers involved, what kinds of things do you think they’ll end up doing in those different workshops or different facilitator trainings?

Richard: Well, I think a lot of these details still have to be worked out, you know.

Vince: Sure. I’m surprised they’re not already done. [both laugh]

Richard: Yeah, me too. They probably are. [both laugh] I haven’t looked at my computer today, so they may be finished already. But the main thing that struck them was that meditation needed to be part of the whole educational journey.

Vince: Wow.

Richard: You might think in a Buddhist country that’s not such a big deal. But in traditional Vajrayana Buddhist countries most of the meditative practices happen in the monastery.

Vince: Right.

Richard: They don’t happen in the village. There’s a lot of devotional practice that happens among the people, there’s a tremendous support for the monasteries, but people don’t meditate. You only meditate if you go to the monastery. So the idea of bringing meditation so the teachers, principals, students are all practicing everyday, 2 to 3 times a day, is a huge change. If you’re starting with meditation and you’re slowing down enough to really connect with the students, with the material that you’re reading, to really understand it on an intellectual level, on a personal emotional level, on a group dynamic level. How can we bring what we’re studying to life in our community, right here in this classroom? So that when you go out and you graduate, then you can do the same thing with it in the world. You know, we’ve got to have a microcosm of that approach in this classroom. And it starts with the teacher.

You know, the teacher, in a sense, has to re-learn how to study, has to re-learn how to listen to the students. That’s a very demanding process because it requires inner reflection. And it’s not something that’s generally understood in the world as being something that’s valuable. In most educational systems it’s all in what you can produce out there. And that’s, of course, extremely important. But from a contemplative perspective, if you access your inner richness and bring that to what you’re producing out there, it becomes not only richer and more valuable, but more sustainable. Because it’s not something separate and isolated that you’ve created out there. It’s something that you have a heart and mind connection with, and other people do too. It’s that kind of depth that they suddenly got, they realized that this was part of their heritage, Buddhist country’s heritage, and that they really wanted to bring it in as a way to sustain what they’d been so blessed to have there in that country.

Vince: You already mentioned that prior to this full-reform movement, meditation was something that happened in the monastery. So it’s sort of separated out someway. Have you noticed any other things that were different in their original Buddhist based education, that are in different in what we’re calling contemplative education, that they’re different principles that they’re now adopting?

Richard: Yeah, this is such an interesting thing to me because we at Naropa, for example, learned contemplative education from Naropa’s founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He was Tibetan and he came to the West and realized that Western education had incredible value and richness, but that it was missing these other dimensions. Naropa University, Naropa Institute originally, was founded on how you can bring those two together. So for the last 35 years we’ve been working on that at Naropa. How to, not just become a Buddhist school, because that’s not relevant for the West, but how can you take the principles and practices of awareness, mindfulness, and compassion and enrich the educational approach in the West? That’s what we’ve been working on very diligently at Naropa all these years.

So you had a place like Bhutan who realizes that they need someone else. They can’t just go into the monastery and get it. They have to come here because we’ve done the processing work and bring it back. Because they want a culturally integral society based on Buddhism, but it’s not a Buddhist society in the way the monasteries are. It’s a secular society with rich cultural, and religious under and overtones. They want it to be something that works in the world, they want to be able to build hydro-electric plants, and they want to forest properly. They want to do all these things that are very much secular functions, but they want this dimension there so that there is that real depth, that it’s not something that happens just on the surface.

Vince: Yeah, that’s so fascinating, and it’s neat to hear about that happening on a country scale.

Richard: Yeah.

Vince: Makes me think in 20, 25 years their greatest export will be happiness or contemplative education, that they’ve been able to experiment with and refine what you guys have been working on for so long at Naropa. That’s exciting.

Richard: It’s very exciting to have something like this done on that scale because up until now it’s just been individual schools in the West that have adopted this approach. There’s never been a school district, let alone an entire country. Granted it’s a small country, but still it’s got all the complexities of any other large governmental organization.

Related Posts:

• BG 086: How Did Descartes Die?
• BG 161: Happiness – There’s an App For That
• BG 049: The Scholar-Practitioner: Joining Theory and Practice