Words for you, young student, wherever you be

I notice that you always have questions; that you interrupt the class everyday, at every opportunity, in fact relentlessly, until you are given answers, detailed answers often irrelevant to the syllabus, or to the examination you will sit for.

Your teachers complain, students complain. And while you’re at it, your classmates exchange looks of disapproval, then display their annoyance and voice their protests.

They expect me to admonish and discipline you, so that you may let go, give up, and align yourself with the demands and norms of this institution that brought us - you and I - together.

Let me tell you that we don’t belong here. We are better off wandering outside the confines of this miserable jail, learning, exploring and connecting every part to a whole, a wholesome whole.

We no longer live in the Renaissance period of Leonardo da Vinci, when it was possible to be master of all disciplines, draw, paint, work out complex mathematical equations, be familiar with the annals of Greek philosophy, medicine and astronomy and understand the subtleties of the human mind all at once.

Our world today, knowingly or unknowingly, is hinged on reductionism, not holism; it fosters specialisation of skills and knowledge, not a coherent understanding of everything. In other words, today’s genius can only be the genius-of-a-part. Amid this world of specialists and specialisation, you predictably feel broken, incomplete, alienated.

I understand these feelings. Jacques Maritain in “Education at the Crossroads” (1943) writes: “The overwhelming cult of specialisation dehumanises man’s life.” You aver that nothing connects to the exterior, and nothing explains how man has come to be the way he is now.

You’ve reached a point where you don’t want any more of that knowledge that you are made to ingurgitate and regurgitate robotically; or those assignment questions that pretend to be open-ended but force you to adhere to strict and often senseless rules; or those tests whose straightforward questions appear too simple and end up distracting you, often to your detriment when you try to be original.

That’s why you feel that you are not getting what you really want out of our system of education. If you think you are the only one who feels this way, rest assured that this is not true.

While there are several reasons that explain the deficiencies of today’s system of education, I will limit myself to citing a few for the purposes of this in-depth message to you.

Firstly, our practice of assessing the value, purpose or motive of every action, deed or process accounts for what education has come to mean. Aristotle called it “telos”. This utilitarian approach has had an important function in determining right from wrong, and hence, has guided the outlining of laws and morals to govern society.

It hasn’t spared education either. Education has been formulated to be useful to its subjects, and it is deemed to be so, only insofar as it allows them to be employable. Therefore knowledge for the sake of itself is relegated to that fundamental objective.

The education you receive today produces a technocrat, a useful unit of production; it pays lip service to self-development, individualism, and all those ideals you cherish, which to the ears of the pragmatic sound abstract, romantic and purposeless. Who is right, who is wrong in being at the service of this rather materialistic aim?

I would love to say, dear Student, that you are right and they are wrong, but my role is merely to show you what aims they have in mind.

Let me begin by saying that these aims are as noble as yours. Man needs to fend for himself before he can live in the comfort of philosophy and exert his mind to the pursuits of the noble arts. It is formal education that provides those means.

Activities important to human life

Herbert Spencer in “What Knowledge Is Of Most Worth?” (1860) set down a sensible and laudable hierarchy of activities important to human life, and applied it in formulating a programme of education:

1) Those activities which directly minister to self-preservation;

2) Those activities which, by securing the necessities of life, indirectly minister to self-preservation;

3) Those activities which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring;

4) Those activities which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations; and

5) Those miscellaneous activities which make up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings.

What you seek, dear Student, lies at the vertex of these rungs, while the aims of the majority tend to naturally, and quite understandably, point to its base. Elementary laws of demand and supply dictate that the education system should not be interested in you as much as you wish it would, and is focused on catering to the masses.

You might argue, at this juncture, that it is the task of policymakers to modify the system, and introduce elements that ignite your interest in the development of individualism.

This is indeed valid, but we can’t always apply the belief of equality in all affairs of human beings. Maybe you must embrace the truth that most of your classmates are not interested in that which is of interest to you, or have in them that which you have in you.

Before I move on to the next point, I would also like to draw your attention to another argument. I am usually doubtful of the motives that we attribute to human beings when they make decisions.

To evaluate use (in the context of the “use of education”), for example, to seriously engage in assessing the long-term and short-term benefits of enrolling in one programme over another, requires time, patience, intelligence and even experience, which most parents and students don’t or can’t expend.

A light of suspicion

My question is: Do we, as largely unthinking beings, seriously give a thought to use, or utilitarian objectives, in exercising our freedom of choice?

Spencer casts a light of suspicion on utilitarian objectives by saying: “Among mental as among bodily acquisitions, the ornamental comes before the useful... Not only in times past, but almost as much in our own era, that knowledge which conduces to personal well-being has been postponed to that which brings applause.”

If the emoluments of a jeweller were similar to those of a locksmith, what would you rather be?

In fact, hasn’t it been proven that if you had to choose between more money or a better job title, you would most likely choose the latter?

One can aver therefore that education, in its capacity for ornamental pleasure, has evolved according to the fashionable, ranging as widely as the learning of philosophy, poetics, logic, etc, in the era when Greek philosophy was at its climax, to the prestigious professions of law, architecture, engineering and medicine today.

Maybe the reason why you wish for something beyond that which is taught in class is because you know deep down that you will excel at that, rather than in those conventional professions that are available through the current education market.

Maybe deep down, you know that that is the easiest way for you create an impact in your environment, because, in the words of Spencer, “we are none of us content with quietly unfolding our own individualities... but have a restless craving to impress our individualities upon others…”

In the end, therefore, your aims are not necessarily more noble than that of your classmates who seek the ornamental (or the useful); what you crave is similar to what they crave, in that all of you wish for that which optimises the potential within you.

Tomorrow: Part II - You, student, are the inheritor of 3,000 years of history

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SABAH CARRIM is a law graduate currently writing her PhD thesis on War Crimes Tribunals. Her works, both academic and of general interest, have been published in magazines and journals across the world. She has authored two novels: Humeirah and Semi-apes. -Mkini