September 3, 2024

Working with hundred students every year, during 1975-85, drawn from the then seven colleges, which included one medical college and one engineering college of Mangalore threw up several challenges while training them for public speaking, organised by Student Orators’ Forum of Action. The sessions conducted on every Saturday afternoon drew our focus on the need for leadership development. Gradually that took over as the more important training emphasis. A group of seven lecturers from all these colleges administered the learning and development interventions. Soon request came from suburban colleges to organise similar learning and development interventions for students which necessitated the need for preparing lecturers or facilitators in such colleges. This resulted in the organization of the first batch of Facilitators Course in Human Resource Development which contained leadership as a unit among many others. This happened in 1986 and very recently the 128th batch of Facilitator Certification in HRD Course was conducted. While the smallest batch was only seven in number, the largest was two hundred and four together.

It was in the mid-nineteen nineties that ‘Skills’ were included as one of the areas of human resource as the research on identifying different areas of human resource was in progress. One cannot deny the dependence on Howard Gardner’s exceptional research on the development of mind including skills as one of the Contents of the Mind. The first book by Gardner was ‘Frames of Mind’ published in 1983 where he propagated that it was bits of several units of the mind that functioned together and that it was not a single mind. His theory of Multiple Intelligences, which dealt with the development of the mind, was acceptable to the intellectuals of the psychological world. Quickly followed a reading of the ‘Society of Mind’ by Marvin Minsky, published in 1986. He developed a theory that several streams of mind unitedly worked for every thinking human. Initially I was unwilling to buy this book because of the size and the number of pages. But when I read him I could not help putting both Gardner and Minsky together and I wondered who was the greater intellectual, could never decide.

During the same time, the training of high school students, during Sundays, started and it was fascinating to see how the students were performing as far as public speaking was concerned and how their leadership also developed. The starting of the Facilitator Certification in Human Resource Development, to train college students and the starting of the high school student’s training simultaneously progressed. Both of them concentrated on Mind Skills Development. Several Mind Skill Exercises were designed and students enjoyed doing the exercises as drills to develop their mind skills. Without much effort, the development of Social Skills and Language Skills also began. Meanwhile, offer of the conduct of Facilitator Certification in HRD started getting organised on a regular basis and that gave plenty of opportunities for action research on effectiveness of the content, structure and pedagogy of the course itself.

Towards the end of the nineteen eighties and the beginning of the following nineties, the Total Literacy Movement of the then South Canara was in full swing. Baligar the then Chief Executive Officer of the Zilla Panchayat, was an exceptionally capable executive. In the first meeting of service organisations that he called, there were several suggestions that I put forward, among which the most important was training of the volunteers for creating proper attitudes in teachers of the illiterate adults. After the meeting, he called me separately and asked me how attitudes could be developed in the volunteer teachers. He was not only a patient Indian Administrative Officer but also an intelligent man. The latter probably ruled him and we had several sessions to design a Master Trainers’ Course to train the teachers of the adult illiterates. Suffice it to say that we designed the Master Trainers’ Course for 360 participants and we worked it out at Mangalore University for a week during October holidays. The most rewarding experience was that a year later, South Canara became the second fully literate district after Kottayam in Kerala. Of course, South Canara lost this honour because it was not declared so, as it was inconvenient to the then Chief Minister to declare it on time. .

The inauguration of the Academy for Intense Motivation for Identifying Natural Skills, Independent Growth, Humane Thoughts and Strategies on 01 November 1992 by litterateur late Shivaram Karanth by conversing with twenty school students who were by then going through ‘FEEL Junior’ programmes, gave greater opportunities for offering learning and development interventions for larger numbers of people. The organisation took a study of the status of primary education in South Canara through an Action Research involving twenty thousand people in sixteen streams as respondents. The Ministry of HRD sponsored this study. Two hundred volunteers were trained to interview twenty thousand people. Here again, the major content was the development of mind skills, social skills and language skills which would help these two hundred volunteers to interview the twenty thousand respondents. The training was intended to develop their competence in interactive communication. Undoubtedly, Mr. Baligar who had by then became one of the Deputy Secretaries of the Ministry of HRD was responsible for the grant of rupees four lakh project to the institution, especially because he was sure that there were enough trained personnel with it. One of the important discoveries of the action research was the question of corporal punishment offered to the students by the primary school teachers and the criticism of it by more than ninety percent of the respondents. It also threw up a discovery that it is the issue of a belief system of the teachers and also their associated attitudes influenced by such beliefs. .

By then, Baligar was replaced by Rajaneesh Goel, an young enthusiastic Indian Administrative Officer who was recently the Chief Secretary of the State till 31 July of this year. The proposals to conduct learning and development interventions for primary school teachers across the district numbering about one thousand six hundred was accepted by him and he was also convinced that the attitudes of the teachers as far as corporal punishment is concerned can change only when their minds are influenced. The training programme for the teachers was conducted in eight taluks of the district for one thousand primary school teachers simultaneously with an intention to influence their minds and create necessary skills to avoid corporal punishment. It was followed by another unit of training for six hundred primary school teachers a couple of months later. All the while, the stress was on attitudinal changes through influencing the mind and its skills. It was interesting when the study was done at the entry point of the training programme which showed that fifty-two percent of the teachers believed that corporal punishment was unavoidable and at the exit point all hundred percent recorded that there was no need for corporal punishment. A possible change in their attitude through influencing the mind and developing associated skills was easily detectable.

A reading of the book ‘Emotional Intelligence’ by Daniel Goleman a couple of years after its publication in 1995 was convincing enough to include Emotional Intelligence as one paper of the Facilitator’s Course in HRD. Initially, the training on Emotional Intelligence was conducted as a two day refresher course for senior facilitators who recommended it to be included in the Facilitator’s Course in HRD on a regular basis. It was a chance occurrence that the reading of ‘Miracle Brain’ by Jean Carper complemented Goleman’s theories. She took human feelings from the heart fully and placed it in the brain, rather in the mind. She completed the revolution on mind skill development started by Gardner, Minsky, Goleman and all four were able to influence our Facilitators on an understanding of the mind and its function. Cognitive resource ruled supreme. Neocortex ruled supreme.

John McCarthy and Alan Turing were the two people who promoted Artificial Intelligence in the fifties and the sixties of the last century. It did not take much time for Marvin Minsky and his student and associate Ray Kurzweil to dominate the world of Artificial Intelligence, of course, soon to be joined by Bill Maris and many others. The growth of the study of Artificial Intelligence became more important by the turn of the century. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it created waves, it was only ripples in the last quarter of the previous century. Through Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil it was brought up noticeably, in the study of the power of the human mind. Neocortex and its four lobes attracted greater attention and more elaborate studies. The neural connections of the brain cells got greater importance than the cells themselves.

All intelligent people simultaneously asked a single question that reverberated the question of even Socrates and Aristotle, not to mention thousands like them in later years.

‘How To Create a Mind’ by Ray Kurzweil, indeed a smaller book than his previous one ‘The Singularity Is Near’ in which he propounded when humans will transcend their own biological existence by the use of artificial intelligence, was better read by many people. He meant that each human creates her or his own mind. The simplest definition that can be offered for a mind is that it is what one’s brain does. Therefore, the quality of mind is decided by the quality of the brain and in the brain, the cells and their neural connections. So, the skills of the mind would matter. Skills are always developed through repeated performances, the more one repeats the greater is the sharpness or the impact of use of the skill. Hence, of all different skills that are developed, mind skills are the most important. Those skills become much more powerful when they are competencies which are products of collected information, knowledge, conceptual clarity and the necessary skills to use the associated tools, just not ordinary skills.

Kurzweil predicted in his book ‘The Singularity is Near’, in about 652 pages, that artificial intelligence will go beyond natural intelligence of the humans. Whereas in his recent book ‘The Singularity is Nearer’ published in 2024, in about 419 pages, he declares that by 2029, the human intelligence and the artificial intelligence may join together on an equal footing to create needed intelligence for human functioning and in manifold replications of performances. The futurist declares in unequivocal terms, and his critics vouch that his predictions have always come true in the last fifty years since his plunging into the world of artificial intelligence, that human existence will be challenged by artificial intelligence by 2045. His newest book is an excellent reading just as his book ‘How to Create a Mind’ was in the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

If Gardner established multiple intelligences of the mind and Minsky referred to the society of mind, it was Daniel Goleman and Jean Carper who brought up the issues connected with human emotions being a part of the mind. As far as Ray Kurzweil is concerned, a student of Minsky, he has gone far beyond his professor, he proclaims at the top of his voice that artificial intelligence will be another mind and before long, the existing minds of the humans will coalesce with artificial intelligence and make the existing world far more effective, productive and blissful.

It is in the light of all these that the existing adult humans, especially those who are associating themselves with the development of the mind skills of the young, who have to think about the necessary competencies that have to be developed in the young to create a more humane and enlightened society where humans will live with artificial intelligence alongside their normal ones. It indeed is necessary that the human mind remains human and not artificial. The challenge for all thinking people, indeed with their own natural intelligence, is how to develop competencies for the humans to live with the support of artificial intelligence with necessary competencies to live in a humane and enlightened society.