The Aim of Education

The aim of education is to make everyone a Genius. Everyone a Genius! Surely, a most ambitious one, almost inconveniently so, and absolutely unheard-of so far. Isn't it? But I mean to stick to it, dear reader, though you be anything, from a 'great educationist,' down to every 'educational reformer.' Your 'incomparable' knowledge of the 'actual working' of universities, contemporary, historic and prehistoric, and your 'unbounded' enthusiasm for the education of 'masses' can be of any consequence and use when, and only when, you realise this. The aim of 'good citizenship' is a fraud. That of 'knowledge for knowledge's sake' is a 'damp squib.' 'Bread and butter' is mean. ‘Character-formation’ is camouflage. These are not all aims, let me assure you. In the name of the first, you turn out a Philistine; that of the second, a pedant; the third, a jobber; and the last, a Puritan. The majority turned out by ‘educational’ factories are so. There are exceptions, however, but they are exceptions, your ‘education’ notwithstanding. And the tragedy of it is that many could have been better if they had escaped this ‘education.’ I know you realise it. Everybody realises it. The very interminable succession of schemes of ‘Educational Reconstruction’ amply bear witness to it. No reformer can dare ignore prefacing all his enterprise with education. No orator can conclude his peroration without emphasising its necessity. No politician can hope to make a successful hit without first swearing by it. All the holiday of modern Governments is spent in dreaming of some educational Utopia or other. And their pocket money, specially that of your Government, invariably goes to no other indulgence than an ‘educational game.’ Why? Because something is wrong somewhere in all educational effort. The story of statistics may be very gratifying. Hundreds of new ‘universities’ grow. Millions of 'school-going' population swell. Percentages and averages show astonishingly tall; but statistics is suspected to be another of the modern superstitions. Something is wrong somewhere. Look at England; look at America; look at every self-contained, self-sustained, self-governed, free country in the world; the only problem that distresses their idealists, practical reformers, etc., is the educational. They feel that all educational effort has been, so far, almost in vain. Instead of wise, cultivated, heroic and contented men and women, they notice clever, vulgar, noisy and omnivorous ones issuing out in their thousands. Instead of a loving human brotherhood, emerging from the modern educational labour of mankind, we find a warring orgy of discordance. Whence is this miscarriage of effort, honest and genuine effort, as it is for the most part admitted to be?

Education is described to be a 'drawing-out,' presumably, of the inner reality of man. It is good, but it is misunderstood. In the process of such ‘drawing-out’ all sorts of ugly tendencies sometimes appear. And these are at once supposed to be alien to that inner reality which is expected to be quite righteous, despite its difference from that in every other individual. While this difference is dismissed out of account after a mere statement thereof, the remedy for such an appearance of undesirable tendencies is sought in a change of system. When such changes become as futile as their predecessors in the attempt, all effort resumes its despair and assures humanity of an alleged ‘inherent’ weakness of all mundane endeavour. Thus the merry procession of constructions and reconstructions has been going on, ever since man undertook conscious educative action.

His ancient agency for the task was the monk in Europe, and in India, his counterpart, the Brahmin. These were invested (or more correctly, assumed) with almost illimitable power over the soul of man, which, after an age-long endurance of drugging with superstition and dogma perpetrated by them, had just emerged from its chronic stupor into a dim consciousness of its reality and realm revealed by their downfall, when almost immediately it found itself obliged to walk into the educational prisons of its former mentor's successor, the Bureaucrat. The soul, however, found that the State's pretentions over itself were not so importunate or aggressive, and that so long as it accepts the expediency of agreeing to a dismemberment of itself from the ‘body’ and being a silent witness of all the uses and. misuses to which it might be put by the avarice and cupidity of the State, it can have a free fare and even an occasional self-indulgence of sorrow and prayer. The State entrusted its task to what is called ‘science’, and science has chosen to be too vulgar, too egoistic, too narrow, too cruelly callous or ‘disinterested’ to deal with the soul of man. It has been a slave to the machinery it brings into being. It has lacked the touch of life, as its fundamental aim, admitted or no, is the utter annihilation of life. It has not aimed at creating life, as in that case it became art. To pretend that it aims at construction and not destruction is camouflage, as construction is never creation and hence lacks life. Science is the swagger of intellect while life is incomprehensible to it, except partially. Church was preferable therefore to State in being employed as the agency for education, as in Church, man, living man, however malicious, selfish, cruel or callous he may be, is still human man that is the mentor, while in State, a soul-less machine does it. I know, of course, it will be taunted that even in the so-called machine of the State, it is men that operate. True, but it is not an individual but a collection of men; and a collection need not have any individuality. Organisation is never identical with organism. Organisations sometimes do possess an individuality that is a complete all-comprehensive principle, that is unquenchable, that effects and regulates every department of life, without exception, of its members, that can bring into being a unique form, feature, expression, and aspiration that characterise the life of every member; a principle where the point of contact is the very one of those of the circumference of life; one, which is indeed the soul, a very real soul of the community. But this is the religious principle. Christianity, Islam, have all such collections or groups of men, which are individuals in reality. But this means that the Church is a better agency. And the organisation of the Church, when it is uncorrupted, is identical with the organism conceivable for it. The Church therefore has greater potentialities for operating education successfully than the State, Both the agencies, rightly enough, directed their attention, when they could feel free from any enterprise about their self-protection and self-prolongation, towards the education of man as their first ‘primary’ sanction, Indeed both shouted their very existence was intended for the education ofthe individual. And curiously enough, again, both prove themselves to be the main obstacles in its way. It is indeed a tragic, a very tragic disappointment to man, that both the products of his moral achievement have so far proved to be futile and even fatal luxuries. Man is baffled and wonders how else he can help himself through this world ofdiscord, uncertainty and death.

There was a time when Churches and States and educational departments or universities did not exist; when education, though not so noisily conscious, flowered; when nature with the aid ofher sublime laboratory trained men to their destinies with infinitely more ease and less cost than our modern soul-sergeants; when forests formed the universities; when starving sages solved and researched the eternal problems of life to their sishyas; when churches and temples were merely the storehouse of art and beauty, and States, the social monuments of applied wisdom; when education was presupposed by Churches and State and not vice versa! and, when indeed, life itself was understood to be an unceasing educational process calculated to enable man to rescue him from phenomenal bondage, samsara: the attainment of moksham, liberation, being its graduation, the four asramas being the four disciplines leading thereto. But these times held the object of education to be something absolutely different from that of the modern civilized fashion. If it is a drawing-out of righteousness, it is not one of a dull, colourless, uniform mediocre variety suited to the humdrum plodding-on of life, but a power, living, unique, profound and of keen colour and quality, which may use even life itself for ends transcending it and incomprehensible to it. That is Genius, and that is to be worked out by educational process. It must be quickened into being. It must be reinforced to shake off its seeming shackles forged on it by chance and circumstance. Its brilliance and purity must be safeguarded against the inroads of self-satisfied custom and self-justified prejudice. Its uniqueness must be shielded against flippant mediocrity and democratic dilettantism. Above all, its destiny must be insured against being snapped by want and misery, not so much of the wherewithal of life, but of free environment. If this is not aimed at, education is a positive waste and danger to the well-being of humanity.

Yes, every individual is a Genius, in that it has a unique mould and function in the scheme of things, incomparable with any other, except empirically. Humanity is supposed to be a common factor, however. But, pray, is it not a zoological conception? Is not its real essence the mere fact of an erect vertebra? A purely empirical classification! Many a heart has broken, many a soul tortured in the name of this horrible hollowness! Guerillas and orang-outangs have not yet been admitted into it, possibly because they have not enlisted into the human electoral register, though they have long ago proved their kinship, with us, with Darwin as witness! I remember, however, having seen some of that tribe entertaining British and European audiences with their histrionic talents in the carnivals and pantomimes of the latter. Whether they have humanity or not, they are also geniuses in their own way and they can be fit objects of education. Indeed, some of their tribe were the greatest educators of mankind, at least in this part of the planet. Hanuman, was one of our greatest Brahmacharins, and Vedantins. It is significant that a horse (Haya-griva), an elephant (Ganesa) a snake (Adi-sesha) were amongt the greatest of the educators of this blessed land. It was a fish (Matsya-murti) that rescued the Vedas from the grip of an unscrupulous robber. Forus humanity is not the common factor: Life, Chetanatva, is.

Genius is nota quantitative thing. It is notthe prodigy. It is the originality, if you please, but that which is notrare or accidental, but accessible everywhere. It is uniqueness, as

varied in its mould and function as nature is. In its uneducated and uncut stage, it is as fresh and gross as common earth. But when subject tothese processes, it yields all the known and yet-to-be-discovered gems. We have noright to assume against it, and condescend to honour it when it reveals itself accidentally. If we mean what we do, we must realise it first and proceed. It is not the residuum obtained after eliminating humanity, 'common humanity'. It is the whole. Nor is it super-humanity or inhumanity. It is life, vitality and variety, that breaks out in its countless multiplicity from that elan vital.

Do two men look the same, do their profiles agree, do their tastes agree, do their destinies agree, do their circumstances agree? Why do men shut their eyes and suspect all tobe uniform and perpetrate on them a murderous education? "Oh, it is impossible toeducate" they howl, "if everyone is tobe dealt with thus severally." But who on earth impelled them to?They have noresponsibility, at least, those who did not realise the reality of things. They haven't created men. They can't be answerable if these gowrong? Why should they lead them into wrong paths so deliberately? The democratic idea of equality has been responsible. Every individual is equated toevery other without the least hesitation. Even when the co-efficient is obvious, the democratic arrogance is so obstinate that it would rather indulge in a self-righteous modesty, and declare that the apparent difference is due to its own unsound power of perception than honestly- realise and assimilate the fact. Apostles of modern democracy, however, declare that it is the equality of opportunity that is intended and not one in itself. But though this is a clever explanation, it is by itself incomplete, as equality of opportunity is to be mated to sufficiency of variety and quantity of fact or object pursued. Opportunity is only a clearing-house directing every will to pursue its particularised end. It is the labour exchange of the will. Opportunity is a permit for the will so pursue its own destiny. But opportunity may manage to connect wrong wires as in a telephonic exchange. That is why opportunity is not enough. It must be supplemented by intelligent direction. This is lacking in modern democracy. A conscious legislator or educationist in his democratic enthusiasm may ruthlessly break all existing orders and make ample room for equality of opportunity, but if he fails to secure the latter, viz., the sufficiency of object and propriety of selection, he will soon realise he is leading his unconscious dupes into a sterile competition and suicidal gamble. For, competition cannot obtain where every individual has a special unique object to pursue, where an office is particularly earmarked for him to fill; where his province is pre-determined and exclusively kept apart. And this is the case with Nature's plan, if, indeed, there is at all harmony permeating it, and discordance itself flowering into variety and distinction of name and form to fit in and facilitate its flow. When this equality of opportunity understands itself to mean not only to pursue an object Unhindered, but also to aim at that object which is suited to its taste and determined for its destiny, all gamble ceases. Education then reflects Nature's intention and sets itself to make everybody a Genius. Education is to enable one to live one's life as one ought to. As life is a continual self-expression, the function of education is to classify and safeguard the idiom of such self-expression, be it individual or national. Churches, States, or whatever agency that is destined to preside over the activity of mankind, if they realise this and fashion their direction accordingly, can become beneficial, efficient and moral, and thus justify their existence.