Education for Freedom

BY A. V. SASTRI  M.A.

(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?

State Control

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 ground 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.

Socialization

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 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.

Education and Organized Religion

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.

Individual Freedom

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.”

Personality and Freedom

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.

Freedom and Security

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.

Freedom and Spirituality

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.