D. H. LAWRENCE AND SRI AUROBINDO ON EDUCATION
Dr. M. S. Ramesh
How little those formalities, to which
With overweening trust alone we give
The name of Education, have to do
With real feeling and just sense.
Wordsworth.
The purpose of this article ‘D. H. Lawrence and Sri Aurobindo on Education’ is to give a comparative account of the two writers’ sense of education as revealed in their criticism of modern education in non-fictional prose writings. The former made his name essentially as a great novelist and critic, while the latter as a philosopher and yogin. Neither of them was a practising academician or a professional educationist. To raise and answer the question “what was it in the nature of the modern age that provoked them to devote so much time to a subject which is normally the chosen field of specialists?” is really to make an honest attempt to come to grips with their sense of life. It is because their richer sense of life reveals itself most effectively in their sense of education and in their criticism of the ‘modern universal education’, a pure product of the mental conscious western civilisation that was introduced later in India also during the British rule. In other words, their criticism of modern education does not exist, and as such cannot be studied, in isolation from their criticism of the modern civilisation in general. Nothing would be more ludicrously wide of the mark than to treat their criticism of modern education without looking into its deeper references - without its subtler relations to their penetrating criticism of the modern age and civilisation and to their profound sense of life.
Sri Aurobindo is also, like Lawrence, too great a mind to treat education as a separate or specialised subject. His speech on “Oxford and Cambridge” on the occasion of the Baroda College social gathering in 1899 shows the rich sense that he has of education - the sense that education is a subject inseparably related to the question of living, and that educational institutions are not merely to impart information, but also to mould the character and the mind of a man. What all this amounts to is that both Lawrence’s and Sri Aurobindo’s sense of education has its deep roots in their sense of life and of its purpose, and that it is only because of this reason that it matters so much to us.
Lawrence is not an educationist; nor is he a scholar of any sort whereas Sri Aurobindo had the best kind of education in England. But despite this vast difference in their educational background, Lawrence and Sri Aurobindo strike us as astonishingly similar in their criticism of the modem civilisation and of the modern education.
It is on two major grounds that Lawrence and Sri Aurobindo come down so very heavily on modem education. First, it does, by giving an air of respectability and universal acceptance to the idea of ‘getting on in the world’, encourage a mad scramble for philistine success now tacitly, now openly. It is steeped in gross materialism, though it professes many high ideals.
The tragedy that this connection between the idea of getting on and modem education has now come to stay. If to the lower class, it is a means of escape from the mines - from the ‘dirty-work’, to the middle class, it is a means of earning their living and a mark of sophistication also. And to the upper class, it is an essential decorative thing - a cosmetic like a lipstick or a scent. And the modem educational system is so cleverly designed as to satisfy the expectations of all the classes.
What good can come out of such a horrible system?
What else could this universal education, which is centred on ‘the idea of
getting on’, do but to produce rank philistines, self-important imbeciles and
unmanly intellectuals?
After the Western impact, the Indians were also infected with this philistinism, and that is why Sri Aurobindo laments, “We in India have become so barbarous that we send our children to school with the grossest utilitarian motive unmixed with any disinterested desire for knowledge; but the education we receive is itself responsible for this” (The Harmony of Virtue 125 - 126). In fact, Sri Aurobindo calls the successful educated man produced by this system an ‘economic barbarian’ and says: His idea of civilisation is comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the encouragement of industry. He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialised industrial existence, Science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comforts, conveniences... (The Human Cycle 87)
The second major reason for which they condemn this educational system is that it crams the mind of a child with facts that have nothing to do with its own experiences, thus mutilating its natural growth and doing it permanent harm. What happens in all modem schools in the name of imparting knowledge is that ideas of all sorts are injected and pumped into the brain, thereby arresting and stultifying true dynamic development. Both are up against this fashionable cramming business and stick to the age-old concept of education. Lawrence points out that the very origin of the word ‘education’ suggests that it means the exact opposite of the meaning attributed to it in the modem days:
Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can’t do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal. Every extraneous idea, which has no inherent root in the dynamic consciousness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a young tree. (Fantasia of the Unconscious 76 -77)
What Sri Aurobindo says about the purpose of education does, even admitting the possibility of many different shades of meaning, coincide with what Lawrence says in essence:
The idea of hammering the child into the shape desired by the parent or teacher is a barbarous and ignorant superstition. It is he himself who must be induced to expand in accordance with his own nature. There can be no greater error than for the parent to arrange before-hand that his son shall develop particular qualities, capacities, ideas, virtues, or be prepared for a pre-arranged career. To force the nature to abandon its own dharma is to do it permanent harm, mutilate its growth and deface its perfection. If anything has to be brought in from outside, it must be offered, not forced on the mind. A free and natural growth is the condition of genuine development. (On Education 20 - 21)
Whoever reads these passages would certainly be struck by the many points of similarity between them. The thing is that these two minds could, with so vast a difference in their family and educational background, strike such a great deal of concord in their sense of education because of their sound knowledge of human nature that expresses itself in their common perception that our object in education must be to know the psychology of the child as he grows into a man and to found our systems of teaching and training upon that basis. But unfortunately we do not know how much harm we do to a child’s mind by forcing into it extraneous ideas and facts.
Sri Aurobindo always laid great emphasis on the cultivation of powers of thought and concentration, which runs counter to the present system of rote learning.
Swami Vivekananda also speaks of it in his own forthright style: Education is not the amount of information put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library. (My India 91)
Lawrence describes the modern school as a very elaborate railway system: School is a very elaborate railway system where good little boys are taught to run upon good lines till they are shunted off into life, at the age of fourteen or sixteen or whatever it is. And by that age the running-on-lines habit is absolutely fixed. The good big boy merely turns off one set of rails on to another. And it is so easy, running on rails; he never realises that he is a slave to the rails he runs on. Good boy! (Phoenix II 579)
It is but too natural for us to fail to see how this parrot compulsion of forcing extraneous ideas at last kills all capacity for real feeling, original thinking and spontaneous action - a perception poetically enacted in Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’. “How the voice of education is too powerful to allow for any instinctive or spontaneous action” is the theme of the poem. It expresses two very ambivalent feelings - there is the ‘educated’ repulsion and prudent common sense urging the poet to kill the ‘dangerous’ snake; against this, there is the poet’s warm, instinctive liking for the snake. Finally, the voice of education triumphs. What wins is the idea that education has inculcated in the human mind that golden snakes, however beautiful and harmless, must be killed, for they are dangerous. Our education has, by making us mentally conscious, killed all capacity for feeling, and in the higher emotional range we feel nothing at all.
A man produced by this modern education will naturally have lots of ideas and theories in his head and he will be, in the academic circle, looked upon as most educated and as a great scholar, but to Lawrence, such a one is not only not educated but most barbaric also. It is true that we are educated, or we think we are, in many fields of knowledge. But for all our education, aren’t we, Lawrence asks, emotionally barbarous, being hopelessly uneducated in ourselves?
Wherein are we educated? Come now, in what are we educated? In politics, in geography, in history, in machinery, in soft drinks and in hard, in social economy and social extravagance: Ugh! A frightful universality of knowings.
But it’s all France without Paris, Hamlet without the Prince and bricks without straw. For we know nothing, or next to nothing, about ourselves. We are hopelessly uneducated in ourselves. [...] We wear our education just as externally as we wear our boots, and to far less profit. It’s all external education, anyhow. (Phoenix 755)
It could thus be seen that neither Lawrence nor Sri Aurobindo deals with the question of education the way academicians or educationists do, with self-interest or academic interest. They are not only non-academic, they are anti-academic, because they know that to be academic is to be dead, and as such they deal with every thing in terms of the interests of life. In other words, their sense of education springs from their sense of life, and is all the more relevant to us at a time when theories and concepts of education seem to be getting more and more distanced from a cohesive philosophy of life.