Excerpts
from Marjorie Sykes, Education in Search of a Philosophy.
From “The Education of the Citizen”
The greatest men of
modern
Tagore’s Letters from Russia, describing his observations there in 1932, say the same thing: “Society can never be made strong by weakening the individual”. Twenty-five years earlier, at the time of the swadeshi movement of 1905-8, he had pleaded that society, as distinct from the state, should recover responsibility for its own life:
We must win over our country from our own inertia. Boons from the
Government only make our inertia more intense, with the effect that our country
is lost to us. For a man’s real homeland
is whatever country he helps to create, by his own wisdom and skill, his
devotion and action...
Our aim must be to restore to the villagers the power to meet their own
requirements. . . their own schools, workshops and
granaries, their cooperative stores and banks, their meeting places for work
and play, where the appointed headman may hear and settle local disputes.
This plea for “building from below” by means of a plurality of centres of local responsibility, instead of waiting passively for benefits to descend from above, was the central theme of the socio-political philosophy of Gandhi and is the basis of the idea of “sarvodaya”.
Vinoba Bhave has laid special stress on the need for education to be free from state control
Throughout the world today, the direction of education is in the hands
of Governments, the teaching given in the schools is controlled by Government.
I consider that this is extremely dangerous. The result is that there is no
public opinion – that is to say, no independent public opinion... Freedom of
thought existed in
Vinoba
is asking, in an Indian context, the same question which John Dewey asked in
Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educational process not be restricted, constrained and corrupted?
Well, is it possible? It is important that teachers should face this question for themselves. We cannot answer it without at the same time considering another question: What are “the full social ends of the educational process”? What is the aim of education for citizenship?
T. P. Nunn answers this question by referring, as Gandhi and Tagore did in the passages we have just quoted, to the social value of individual freedom and initiative:
Nothing good enters the human world except through the free activities of individual men and women. Education must strengthen men’s sense of the worth of individuality — not as a private possession but as the only means by which real value can enter the world... Through its schools, an organ of its life, a nation should constantly submit itself to self-criticism.”
Such self-criticism need not always be negative; the real meaning of the verb criticize is “judge” or “evaluate”. Education should enable young citizens to evaluate all the features of the nation’s life in the light of the nation’s values and standards, and so to create the independent public opinion of which Vinoba spoke.
* * * * *
Let us begin with “democracy”. Both those who advocate and those who denigrate democracy often do so on the assumption that democracy is to be identified with one of its political forms, namely a representative system of parliamentary government, in which “one man, one vote” decides the issue, and the will of the majority is carried out. Consider in contrast the following statement by an American Negro writer:
Intrinsic to the democratic idea is the concept of individual worth and
dignity, the acceptance of differences as valid, valuable and human; and the
unifying force of a common belief in the transcendent value of personal
freedom... Yet we have placed an increasingly high premium not upon individuality
but upon conformity. With the rapid maturing of the industrial age went a
decline of individualism and a substitution of class identity and values.
Freedom of thought and action has been curtailed… materialism, the cult of
prosperity, and a growing nationalism have dominated American thought. (Along with) the abolition of slavery (came)
the birth of new social forces fundamentally
as contradictory as slavery to the democratic idea.
Do you accept the three criteria of democracy listed by the Negro writer? If not, what is your definition of democracy?
Do you accept those three criteria as the proper aims of a good human society, whether you call them democracy or not? Why? or why not?
How far do the values of “the industrial age” (conformity, class consciousness, materialism, nationalism) dominate modern Indian life and educational thought?
To what extent has the political machinery of “one man one vote” strengthened group and class conformities expressed in caste, communal and linguistic struggles for privilege and power? Would some alternative political structure and machinery express the basic democratic ideal better than our present one?
Would you agree that the principle
that differences are valid and valuable means that one test of a democratic
society is its treatment of its minorities? A Japanese social scientist
recently reported to an Asian seminar that in
Can the democratic idea described in the passage quoted, with its emphasis on the intrinsic worth of the individual, be maintained without nurture of the non-material aspects of humanity?
AND, how far does the practice of our school and college communities, in their actual patterns of decision-making and the way in which they manage their own affairs, reflect the values of a democratic society? If we were to find (as we certainly should find in many cases) that the structure of the school is essentially hierarchical and authoritarian, what steps could be taken by the teacher-student community to change it, so that the experience of school/ college life becomes a real training ground for democracy?
These are questions, not answers. An adequate answer to most of them would need a book in itself. The purpose of this essay is not to supply answers, but to indicate the nature of the questions involved in an education for citizenship. They are questions of value, of our philosophy of life.
* * * * *
This raises one of the recurrent problems of human society, that of the inertia of power, the vested interest of the ruler in the status quo ante. How often have the revolutionaries of yesterday become the reactionaries of today — in education as well as in politics. The philosopher A. N. Whitehead warned us against this danger:
Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into
greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then alas it has
proceeded by some educational scheme
to bind humanity with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
If society is to be saved from “inert ideas” and remain open to “the winds of change” the education of its citizens must not be imprisoned in any official “scheme”, but retain its autonomy as an agent, not of the state but of society. “The obligation of a teacher is to serve society, not to protect the existing state from change”.
It is doubly
difficult, however, for those who are financially dependent on the state to
evaluate disinterestedly the need for these changes. There are not many
teachers who have the courage to write to their employers, the Government
departments of education, what Vittorino wrote to Gonzago Duke of
I accept the post on the understanding that you require of me nothing which shall be in any way unworthy of either of us, and I will continue to serve you so long as your own life shall command my respect.
* * * * *
As the agents of society’s
self-criticism, the schools have a duty to say, in face of the inertia of power
and of apathy, “the time has come for change”. They
have a duty to claim, for themselves and others, the right of dissent from the
immediate policies of the state, and the right of public debate on controversial
issues. Real advance in knowledge in any field, scientific or sociological,
depends upon untrammeled thought and free discussion. No one was more strongly
convinced of the necessity, in a free democracy, of this right to dissent and
to debate than Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the U.S. Constitution. “A
nation’s freedom”, he wrote, “depends upon the freedom of its press, which
cannot be limited without being lost... To demand that the censors (i.e. the
critics) of public measures be given up for punishment is to renew the demand
of the wolves in the fable that the sheep should give up their dogs as hostages
of the peace”. No one suffered more than
One of the finest statements I know of the principles we have been discussing was made by Senator J.W. Fulbright:
In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith. Criticism is more than a
right, it is a responsibility. To criticize one’s country is to do it a service
and to pay it a compliment.
No one challenges the value of national consensus, but “consensus” can
be understood in two ways. If it is interpreted to mean unquestioning support
of existing policies, its effects can only be pernicious and undemocratic,
serving to suppress differences rather than to reconcile them. If on the other hand consensus is understood
to mean a general agreement on goals and values, but not necessarily on the
best means of reaching them, then and then only does it become a lasting basis
of national strength.
A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of Government. What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers arc not warned from time to time that its people preserve the spirit of resistance?
Or, as Gandhi reminded us in different words, true swaraj depends on the people’s ability, not to usurp authority, but to resist authority when it is abused.
* * * * *
We teachers must therefore claim
our freedom from the compulsions of state power in order to serve the
compulsions of love, to nurture and strengthen this human community. Radical social thinkers in many countries see
the best hope of mankind in the growth from the grass roots of face-to-face
communities of men and women committed to justice and freedom,
and able in their united strength to resist the pressures of power. Growth of
this kind calls for a many-sided creative endeavour,
and in this task of citizenship the teacher has an essential part to play. In Vinoba’s words he must be the gatuvit, the path-finder, who is
qualified by his objective and dispassionate study of public affairs to act as
guide to the mind and heart of the nation, or, as Camus phrased it, to give the nation her truth. And the
teacher can only fulfil this role when he refuses
either to carry out blindly the mandates of the state, or to withdraw into some
comfortable academic seclusion. Instead, he must “pursue the world-life with
wisdom”. For myself I find the essence
of good citizenship in the words of that great champion of the robbed and
exploited Australian Aborigines, Dr. H. C. Coombs: “Withdrawal is not for me. I remain unwilling to leave the field of
decision to those who profit and those who conform.”