Do Nothing Parenting

In 1990, Jinan stopped reading.

While studying engineering and design, he began questioning the modern "teaching" paradigm. He suspected that everything he knew had arrived secondhand, packaged as ready-made information. So he went to find people whose knowledge had not.

In 1993, he moved into Aruvacode, a potters' village in Kerala. What began as a design project became a thirty-year education. The potters could not read, but they could do things he couldn't explain, and they had learned all of this without a single formal lesson.

That became his question, and he has not let go of it since: If these people learned this way, what exactly are we doing to our children?

He started observing children the way he had observed the potters. Not testing them or teaching them, but simply recording what they did when no adult was directing them. He now has more than 4,000 videos and photographs of children drawing, building and playing, and in them he demonstrates a pattern that no curriculum accounts for. He realized that our modern educational paradigm is based on how to teach and not how we naturally learn.

Jinan has now spent over 30 years living with learning communities of artisans and is relentless in his search for the process that enables knowledge creation. He founded the Existential Knowledge Foundation to carry out his research.

He currently leads workshops and in-person retreats, and has spoken to design and architecture students at IIT Bombay, IIITDM Kanchipuram and IIM Calicut. Jinan is also the author of Initiating Enquiry: Reclaiming Ourselves, Saving Our Children and Seeing with Hands: How Children Use Drawing to Make Sense of the World.