(D. A. V. College, Sholapur)
One of the concepts that post-war education must
embody is that of freedom. The war has been such a menace to the freedom of
nations that freedom acquires a new value. For its security and preservation no
price should be too high. Though intense love of freedom is a legacy of the
war, freedom is a permanent good; it is no temporary utility or emotional
relief sought after the high strain of a total war. “Freedom is an immortal
idea, which does not age with the spirit of the times and vanish.” Freedom,
being a spiritual asset, naturally finds an effective ally in education which
sways, men’s outlooks and loyalties. What, however, is freedom in relation to
education? How is it to be fostered?
The schools should be regarded as autonomous
institutions. They should not be mere appendages to the state or the
bureaucracy as in India. The prevailing system of education in India was
planned with an eye to the administrative needs of type bureaucracy. As a
reaction came experiments in national education which did not succeed any
better, because essentially they did not differ from the bureaucratic type in
their curricula and methods of work. Control of agency is not the essence of
national education; nor does it consist in minor modifications such as the
adoption of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction and the shifting of
emphasis in the subjects of the curriculum. The application of freedom to
educational theory has little validity or meaning, when the country itself is
politically not free. Self-government is the first postulate of all educational
reform. The achievement of political freedom, however, does not necessarily
bring with it a charter of educational freedom. To assume a possibility, the
indigenous State may prove no less tyrannous. The State in the last analysis is
just a mechanism of administration, a police organization securing for the
individual the condition requisite for his growth. The perfection of the individual
is the one justifiable aim of all co-operative effort, all concerted action.
The State can but erect the framework of social life. It is not competent to
invent a moral order or evolve an ideal social polity or formulate any theory
of life. These belong to the individual whose completion and fulfillment the
State should envisage as the single good of its economy. In a free society an
individual will find his proper place and function, the State merely figuring
as the mean or majestic background of his activity. Corporate being is rich in
proportion to the varied elements of its composition, the diverse and specific
types it can hold in harmony, the widest and largest differences it can
accommodate within its elastic framework. The individual in an atmosphere of
freedom tends to express himself in his own fashion, determined by his peculiar
bent of mind and soul, while the State has a procrustean tendency to
regimentation. Education in a totalitarian State does not make for freedom,
because it does not encourage discussion and free play of ideas. Writing from
an educational point of view, Bertrand Russel says: –
“Our Modern State education is mainly designed to
produce convenient citizens, and therefore dare not encourage spontaneity,
since all spontaneity interferes with system. There is a tendency to
uniformity, to the suppression of private judgment, to the production of
populations which are tame towards their rulers and ferocious towards the
enemy. Even if our civilisation escapes destruction in great wars, this
tendency of State education to produce mental slavery will, if it is not
checked, kill out everything of value in the way of art and thought, and even
ultimately of human affection, and it inevitably kills the joy of life, which
cannot exist where spontaneity is dead.”1
It is notorious that Nazism and Fascism by
capturing the schools have simply reduced them to institutions for
manufacturing spirited automata.
The State, however, has its express duties and
obligations in respect of education. It must accept education as the first and
most considerable charge upon the revenues. The State may well be held guilty
if there is a dearth of facilities for learning. No village without a
pre-school and elementary school, no taluk without a secondary school, no
district centre without a college of arts and technical and technological
studies,–that is the ideal to be aimed at. It may not be practicable at once,
but the policy must be shaped to this end. Every citizen, born has a right to
be educated. Equality of opportunity ought to be the axiom of the new
education. The capabilities of each individual must be developed to the full.
There should be no class discrimination or any bar except that of limitation of
native endowments. Education of the future must cater for the mass; it must be
socialized, nationalized. It is not enough if a particular class or a few men
achieve pre-eminence. The acid test is the elevation of the masses. So alone
can freedom and peace be guaranteed. The masses today are credulous and easily
misled the victims of catchwords and party shouts. A few men occupying
positions of advantage engineer factions. Interested persons, selfish and
shortsighted politicians and the capitalist class create and precipitate war situations
in which the masses are caught. This could be remedied only by education on a
wide scale and education of the right type, something more than the capacity to
read, write and cipher, making the masses intelligent, politically conscious,
and socially responsive. As Mr. H. G. Wells puts it: –
“Before he (the citizen) can vote he must hear the
evidence; before he can decide he must know. It is not by setting up
polling-booths, but by setting up schools and making literature and knowledge
and news universally accessible, that the way is opened from servitude and
confusion to that willingly co-operative State which is the modern ideal. Votes
in themselves are worthless things. Men had votes in Italy in the time of the
Grachi. Their votes did not help them. Until a man has education, a vote is a
useless and dangerous thing for him to possess. Education is the adapter which
will make the nomadic spirit of freedom and self-reliance compatible with the
co-operations and wealth and security of civilisation.”2
The process of socialization will be incomplete if
it does not extend to the women of the community. The late Mr. Gokhale
held,–and anyone who considers will readily admit that the education of girls
is of greater social urgency than the education of boys. Girls come of age much
earlier and their influence in the sphere of the Indian home as it is
constituted today is not inconsiderable. It can be nothing but retrograde and
reactionary if they are not abreast of contemporary ideas and forces. Educate a
man, you educate but an individual; educate a woman, you educate a whole
family,–the statement expresses a fundamental truth.
The coming of the masses and the women into the
foreground decides once for all the linguistic claims of the mother-tongue to
the first place amid the Babel of tongues that clamour to be heard in the
Indian schools today. This is no narrow question of method only but the
psychological basis of all education. An education making for freedom and
addressed in the first instance to the masses and the women can find no
effective substitute for the mother tongue to compare as a vehicle for this
expansive philosophy. Nothing else can achieve a baptism in freedom. The
acceptance of freedom as a motto in education, or directing education to this
end thus incidentally settles many subsidiary issues like the enfranchisement
of the masses and the women and the question of language in education.
The principle of freedom will have been dubiously
honoured if the social cleavage between the masses and the classes continues.
There can, of course be no dead leveling of capacities and gifts, but a
generous interpretation of equality of opportunity will go a long way to
democratising education by ensuring to each one his maximum of efficiency. The
Report on “Post War Educational Development in India” by the Central Advisory
Board of Education unambiguously recognises this principle: –
“If there is to be anything like equality of
opportunity, it is impossible to justify providing facilities for some of the
nation’s children and not for others. In the first place, therefore, a national
system can hardly be other than universal. Secondly, it must also be
compulsory, if the grave wastage which exists today under a voluntary system is
not to be perpetuated and even aggravated. And thirdly, if education is to be
universal and compulsory, equity requires that it should be free and
commonsense demands that it should last long enough to secure its fundamental
objective.”
Freedom will have no significance in any narrower
context.
The merit of a scheme like the Wardha scheme is
that it primarily considers the masses and gives them “fundamental brain power”
through craft centred education related to their socio-economic environment. No
system of the future after this orientation can go back or ignore the toiler
and the craftsman. The Wardha scheme is the first realistic approach to the
education of the masses, untrammeled by academic notions and penetrating to the
core of their needs, actual conditions and possibilities.
No Church should claim the individual for its
purposes either. The Church has no more right than the State to compel the
individual to its own pattern. It should provide the favourable climate or
environment for spiritual growth. That is all. Freedom of worship and freedom
of conscience are the substance of religious freedom by which each individual
can nourish his soul. Tolerance is the sovereign rule for guidance in this
field. There was a time when the Church wholly controlled the education of the
individual. It took Europe centuries to cast off clericalism, medievalism and
monkishness and secularize her education as it was under pagan Rome.3
The process is still not complete. India had its epoch of sacerdotal oppression.
The priestly class monopolised learning and imposed their version of truth on
the rest of the community, arrogating to themselves the spiritual custody of
the race and by no means discharging it disinterestedly.
In the India of today with its multitude of faiths,
there are special risks of religious discrimination. Mass conversions by
missionary agencies, exploiting the ignorance of the people or their economic
distress or social inferiority, are a common enough type of the religious
menace to the freedom of individuals and groups. No single sect or denomination
should be admitted to political or other privilege on the ground of professing
particular creeds. An ignorant populace can ill resist the lure of the
missionary. Conversion for spiritual solace is different from conversion for
extrinsic advantages. All this is not to say that religion must not be provided
for or should not assume an institutional form. Both are necessary, only the
spiritual good of the individual must be the criterion and there should be a
minimum of control. Religious absolutism being barred, what religious teaching
needs to be imparted, who should be the instructors, and how it should be
taught are questions for special consideration. Here it need only be stressed
that while spiritual weal is provided for, no attempt should be made by
religious institutions or organizations to force particular dogmas or doctrines
on the individual. There should be room for dissent and free religious inquiry.
The school should not be the handmaid of any
particular Church or faith. Sectarian institutions, as Madame Wadia
distinguishes in The Aryan Path for October 1943, fall into two
classes,–those which impart instruction on a particular creed to whosoever
comes, e.g., the many missionary schools teaching the Bible to non-Christian
children, and those of a second class like Parsi schools for Parsi boys, Hindu
schools for Hindu boys, Muslim schools for Muslim boys, etc. The practice of
neither is to be approved. Nor is moral instruction in place of the catechism
or the teaching of doctrine anyway a solution; it is found to be insipid and
altogether ineffective. Total secularization too is no remedy. Religion cannot
be excised from life though it may be from the curriculum. There are peculiar
difficulties in Indian schools regarding religious instruction, the main
problem being to provide for such instruction without impinging on the
religious freedom of the schools with heterogeneous elements. How they do it in
the U.S.A. confronted with similar conditions, and its application to India, is
clearly set forth in an article on “Need our Schools continue Godless?” by Dr.
J. M. Kumarappa in The Modern Review for January, 1934. Dr. Kumarappa
suggests that, as in America, there should be separate schools for religious
instruction which the pupils from the general schools should be allowed to
attend according to their different persuasions at stated times in the week,
that such schools should be situated in the vicinity of general schools, and
that only specially qualified instructors should be employed. This would be a
way of solving the difficulty, no doubt. But if the general schools provide for
no religious instruction at all and content themselves with permitting the
pupils for purposes of religious instruction to foregather in special schools
outside, there is a risk of their coming to regard the general schools as
irreligious, while day by day the special schools claim their religious
allegiance and confirm them in their particular faiths. That way sectarianism
is imbibed and an impossible double loyalty is asked for. To obviate this risk,
it is very necessary that the elements of comparative religion are taught in
the general schools. The course, while on the one hand helping each sect to
understand its own religion all the better in the light of comparison and
contrast, will be a corrective to sectarian prejudices by bringing home what a
universal need religion is and what a variety of religious aspiration history
records.
The point is clear that the individual should not
be hampered in his growth, nor subjected to political arid social disabilities
on grounds of particular religious beliefs, but should be left to pursue his
spiritual good of his own choice if he wills.
If the authoritarian action of the Church and the
State is not in the interests of the individual, what then is the norm for him?
The single norm is the norm of the individual himself. The freedom of the
individual is curtailed by other factors than the State and the Church. In the
limited home circle many a parent plays to his son a Sir Austen Feverel to
Richard, making a very “ordeal” of it indeed. Parents in their blind affection
take it upon themselves to determine the future of the young. As Emerson has
it, “A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his
character and fortune.” This is delectable and flattering to the parent, no
doubt, but does irreparable injury to the child. A notion of the right of
property may be seen to be subtly mixed in this wish of the parent to dispose
of his child’s educational destiny. Writing on self-determination, Sri
Aurobindo Ghose comments thus: -
“The child was, in the ancient patriarchal idea,
the live property of the father; he was his creation, his production, his own
reproduction of himself. The father, rather than God or the universal Life in
place of God, stood as the author of the child’s being; and the creator has
every right over his manufacture. He had the right to make of him what he
willed, and not what the being of the child really was within, to train and
shape and cut him according to the parental ideas and not rear him according to
his own nature’s deepest needs, to bind him to the paternal career or the
career chosen by the parent and not that to which his nature and capacity and
inclination pointed, to fix for him all the critical turning points of his life
even after he had reached maturity. In education the child was regarded not as
a soul meant to grow, but as brute psychological stuff to be shaped into a
fixed mould by the teacher.”
So the individual needs to be rid of the domination
of the State, the priest, the sect, the parent and the teacher. He must be
aided to unfold all his possibilities. His swabhava, the expressive
Sanskrit term, will prescribe for him the line of his evolution, his dharma.
He must achieve an integrated personality. This was what Swami Vivekananda
meant by a “man-making” education. Education in terms of personality and not in
subordination to doctrines or institutions is the real burden of it all. “It is
the manifestation of the perfection already in man.” Character is a behaviour
pattern, a bundle of habits easily made. Personality, on the other hand, is a
complex: interplay and adjustment of the instincts and impulses of our nature,
not mechanical but spontaneous, and by a law of glad and willing progression
achieving in the end an unpredictable synthesis of its own, a unity of feeling,
willing and aspiration.
Education so conceived becomes a spiritual process.
It is the exploring of one’s own nature with a view to its rhythmic play in
life. It calls for much imagination, insight and self-effacement in the teacher
subscribing to this ideal of freedom with its emphasis on personality. He shall
have to be something more than a secular guide, a mere purveyor of lessons or a
Gradgrind species. He must himself possess personality. Only personality can
evoke personality. In the words of Bertrand Russel: -
“No man is fit to educate unless he feels each
pupil an end in himself, not merely a piece in a jig-saw puzzle or a soldier in
a regiment or a citizen in a State. Reverence for human personality is the
beginning of wisdom in every social question, but above all in education.”
Indian tradition ascribes to the Guru powers of
intuition, capacity for spiritual direction and skill in bringing into visible
and active play the potential genius of the pupil under his care. In a modern
community, no teacher can fitly discharge his duties unless he is financially
unencumbered and commands social esteem. The authors of “Post-War Educational
Development in India” rightly regard the training of teachers, their salaries
and status as the pivot of all reform. The right men should be attracted to the
profession, which is now mostly the refuge of those who are not fit for any
other jobs. Education being essentially a human business, personality is all in
all.
Given this interplay of personality, education puts
on a positive aspect. It is not a matter of inhibitions and taboos. Genius for
discovery, speculation, the flow of inspiration from a personal fount are all
the fruit of freedom in education. Education for freedom is an emphatic plea
for creative effort creative imagination. It means a rejection of cram, dull
imitation and low motive. Creation is the sole test of freedom in education.
Education is the free and abundant expression of life.
Personality, no doubt, is the whole object of the educational endeavour. No individual in modern times can hope for an integrated personality without accessory material conditions. It has its basis in economic security. No freedom without securities, economic, political and social. The rights or association, freedom of speech and expression are all necessary elements of a free community in which the individual can play an effective part. Economic security is a particularly vital consideration in India, where poverty is the general rule and education is sought by most as an avenue to employment. Stranded without a job, many an educated young man may be seen to have developed a cynical attitude to education itself. Education qua education may or may not have relation to considerations of employment; a school is not a bureau for providing jobs. But utilitarian aims have to be accepted as a legitimate part of education in the modern world. Education must attract by its material rewards and compensations too; only these latter should serve as means and not be the summum bonum. The secular objective of education in India is not all the outcome of the policy of religious neutrality of the government; so expensive is schooling and so much a strain on the resources of the average middle class that education is judged by its monetary returns in the end. Organized as society is today, the personality of the individual is maimed unless he can pay his way, i.e., unless he has economic freedom. Such freedom will be assured only when there is a more equitable distribution of income and a juster social order prevails. An appreciation of others’ rights and a feeling of social justice are the inspiration needed. Such a thing as poverty should cease to exist if progress is to be orderly. It is only by educative propaganda and the popularisation of these humane ideologies that a new phase of social history can be ushered in. Among the tasks of the educator, not the last will be the hastening of this era of social Justice by altering the convictions of men and their ways so that no man shall be afflicted by want, but every one, rid of the struggle for existence, turn to build his personality and contribute his unique something to the general stock. Within the schools it will mean a systematic training in occupations, basic crafts and technical and vocational courses which will equip every one passing out of the institution to earn his bread and at the lowest keep off want.
Neither the subjective aspect of personality, nor
the external conditions of material well-being exhaust the concept of freedom.
Freedom is still partial if, with political and economic reparations, it helps
the individual to achieve his personality but takes him no further. “For what
is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
(St. Matthew, Chapter 16, 26). Freedom aided by economic incentives must
broaden to spiritual horizons. As the individual evolves, he will realise that
the nation and humanity are only part of his Self, that what seems to divide
him from the rest is the wall of the ego, that the extinction of the ego is the
fulfillment of the individual. The freedom of the individual becomes complete
only when freedom is universalised. No one can attain salvation unto himself.
Lord Buddha repudiated Nirvana for himself as long as a single jiva remained
bound.
At whatever point education may begin,–that depends
on the evolution of the individual,–and whatever the rate at which he advances,
which again is bound to vary with the inherent capacity of each man, education
becomes complete only when the whole human universe–the nation and humanity–is
comprehended. The Indian ideal of liberation is the highest and largest
interpretation of freedom, embracing all other freedoms, giving the educative
process just that sense of values which it lacks today. That is not to make an
ascetic of the individual. The Upanishadic philosophy is a philosophy of large
acceptance and affirmation, a doctrine of fulfillment. We must visualise man in
his complex, manifold nature, ignore no part of his constitution, assign each its
due place, and fashion out of them all an ascending harmony. Man is a pilgrim,
life a quest, nation and humanity are but collective manifestations of the
Spirit. Any false simplification of educational theory or a truncated
conception of freedom will, to that extent, limit our vision and lower our
achievement. It is up to us to meet the problem squarely and solve it with
wisdom and candour.
1 The Prospects of
Industrial Civilisation –p.260
2 The New and Revised
Outline of History. (Garden City
Publishing Company, New York, page 740)
3 For a rapid sketch of
the movement to secularization, refer to The Truth About Secular Education,
Its History and Results by Joseph McCabe.
4 Arya, Vol. V, No. 2.