Education for Freedom

                                    Education as a human right for freedom

Summer time, when outdoor activities hardly beckon us, is the best time to catch up with reading- or re-reading books that we had lost touch with for many decades. For me it was serendipitous to come across two great books- Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861)and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited(1958). Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 and followed it up with the sequel Brave New World Revisited in 1958. Huxley’s projection of a remote future world has become real today in India and also in most parts of the world. The basic difference between Dickens and Huxley is the former writes about the reality of his timewhile Huxley projects a picture of a remote future (which, albeit is today’s picture). As we read Huxley, we increasingly recognize that the future he had predicted is not a grim fantasy, and in less than half a century, it has become an actuality.  While we are far removed from the Victorian age (including its prudery) our proximity to Huxley’s Brave New World cannot be ignored.

We are no longer in the Victorian times that Dickens presents in Great Expectations and we are in the 21stC world where the word “brave” as ironically employed by Huxley is to be understood as “bluster” or “swagger”. Ours is a world of bluster and swagger, full of bombast and bravado. We live in times of turbulence, overlaid with propaganda. Times have changed and Australia referred to by Dickens in Great Expectations is no longer the “penal colony” as it was then known. Today it is one of the highly developed countries and one of the wealthiest in the world and has the world’s fifth-highest per capita income. It is no longer the Dickensian country where convicts from Britain were transported. Pip’s mysterious benefactor Abel Magwitch was one such convict, causing Pip shock and embarrassment when he learns that he was the source that helped him gravitate towards the upper class. Today’s world is very different and there are no such anonymous benefactors like Abel Magwitch. Our society has very few philanthropists and none whosoever bequeaths his largesse as an expression of his gratitude like Abel did. So comparing the two different worlds of Dickens and Huxley may seem like comparing oranges and apples and hence I offer a cautious apology not to have illusory great expectations from this article or a vaunted entry into a brave new world of ideas.

I will limit myself to four issues that are common to both the books:

      1. The pursuit of happiness in a world of social inequalities and human failings, as juxtaposed against a pre-engineered paradise of universal happiness.

2.   Child’s Rights In Victorian times

3.  Education –its challenges in Charles Dickens’ times and the certainties as prescribed by Aldous Huxley.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

4.  The two books as a commentary on human destiny and human conditioning and its role in defining our lives, as we take a quantum leap into the future.

The first three can be subsumed under one caption: Education as a human right for freedom. The fourth raises the philosophical question about human destiny (that comes with birth) and human conditioning (that comes from nurturing).

In a world of vast social inequality, economic inequity and intellectual disparity, the pursuit of happiness hits a cul-de-sac if education is denied to a vast majority because of their poor and weak economic and social status. This is true of India today just as it had happened in the 19^th century Britain, particularly during the 50 years reign of Queen Victoria when England was making rapid strides towards industrialization. The 19^th century was also a period of urbanization and together with industrialization, there was a shift from agriculture to industry. This resulted in a vast majority of people with their children moving into towns from their rural base. Child labor was not new to the 19^th century, but as industrialization continued it became more visible, as masses of ragged, stunted children crowded the city streets.

Child’s Rights in the Victorian Age was basically the beginning of an idea that children have the right to education and freedom which the state should protect. Though such a right seemed unrealizable at the dawn of the nineteenth century, by the time Queen Victoria died in 1901, it had gained significant support.  There were calls for reforms and many Victorian writers, in particular Charles Dickens expressed his intense concern over the exploitation, vulnerability and shocking living conditions of the poor children. Thanks to the pressure built on the government and society by reformers and writers, the English Parliament brought in a number of reforms. Though slow to begin with, the idea that childhood should be a protected period of education and play gained ground and made it possible for nearly 90% of children to be in school by the end of the Victorian Age. Education was conceived as the enabling means to free children from poverty, inhumanity and unhygienic living conditions.

But when Huxley speaks about education for freedom in the second half of the 20^th Century, he looks at freedom not just from intolerant physical conditions but from intellectual and moral internment. Education, he says, is built on values that are founded on facts and it has to find appropriate techniques to transmit those values to the young in addition to fighting those who resist values and deny the facts.   Today we often hear the ubiquitous phrase in all educational institutions- value education. But no one has a clear view as to what those values are that have to be imparted.  There is no clarity in the use of this phrase that is bandied about as the Institution’s core social responsibility. Huxley is clear in his enunciation of values that have to be the centrality of education. For him the important values are (1) value of individual freedom (2) value of clarity and compassion based upon love for fellow beings and (3) value of intelligence “without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable.” 

To recognize the importance of education and values, it is axiomatic to affirm that there are inequalities both in society and in individual capabilities. This, inter alia, implies that it is not possible for everyone to have access to quality education either due to non affordability or due to difference in individual mental potential. Education is the means to free the mind of prejudices in respect of those who are different and gives us the first lesson of life that every individual in this world is biologically unique and is therefore unlike other individuals. “Freedom is therefore a great good, tolerance a great virtue and regimentation by governments, dictators, authoritarians and professional mind-manipulators to reduce human diversity to a controlled and manageable uniformity (italics mine) is a great misfortune.” It is only the educated and cultivated mind that can distinguish truth from falsehood, correct knowledge from false propaganda, rational argument from irrational bluster, logical collectedness from passionate hysteria. Education also helps us to cultivate proper use of language and symbols to guard ourselves against mind manipulators who pervert language to wheedle us into thinking, feeling and acting as they want us to think, feel and act. The science of thought control has the power to curtail our freedom and to pressure us into falling in line with a desired and manageable sameness and unchangeability. Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited makes a plea that mankind should educate itself for freedom of thought and ideas, freedom from servitude to those in power who manipulate our minds, and freedom to cultivate compassion, love and humanity towards fellow beings in spite of  the genetic differences in the intellectual, physical and emotional quotients that contribute to the heterogeneity of the human race.

The comparison between the two books takes us to the fourth issue on human destiny and human conditioning.  Both Great Expectations and Brave New World as it first appeared in 1932 belong to the novel genre while the sequel where Huxley revisits his brave new world is essentially one long essay, subdivided into twelve chapters. Great Expectations is a factual presentation of the 19^th century English society, its humungous growth in industrialization and urbanization due to large scale migration to towns from the rural areas and the seamy side of London with its sordid and squalid living conditions of the poor.  Brave New World Revisited is a more of a crystal gazing into the future in the context of new theories and developments in science and psychology and set in the background of the totalitarian dictatorship of Hitler and Stalin. Both the books in different ways deal with the question of nature versus nurture. Huxley ‘s shocking analysis of a new world presents new forms of control that includes genetic manipulation to bring in uniform babies to standardize humanity where individual human behaviour would be nurtured and made to order rather than allowed to develop according to his/her  genetic nature. This is the biggest threat to humanity as prima facie it negates biological variability which is the basis of all evolutionary theories. Huxley terms it as Will to Order, “the desire to impose a comprehensible uniformity upon the bewildering manifoldness of things and events.” In this scientific dictator education, there will no longer be free thinkers, revolutionaries, change seekers, but everyone will be brain washed into accepting servitude and not dreaming of a change. Science has the power to provide men and women with a better quality of basic living conditions- what we call in our idiom Roti, Kapda and Makan(food, clothing and shelter).  At the same time by satisfying their basic wants, it has the power to destroy human freedom to aspire for greater expectations from life. Men and women of Huxley’s Brave New World make a new chorus of their demand: “Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty”.  Huxley is here echoing the great British philosopher, political economist and social theorist, John Stuart Mill who wrote nearly a hundred years back in 1859: “It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect… It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” Under a scientific dictator education, most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

The difference between nature and nurture that Huxley talks about is well borne out by Pip, Abel, Estella in Great Expectations. Pip is born and brought up in a poor family of a blacksmith. He is apprenticed to his sister’s husband and learns the trade, though deep within him there is a burning desire to be educated and become a gentleman to prove worthy of Estella whom he loves and whom he thinks to be the daughter of Miss Havisham, a wealthy eccentric lady living forever in the past and plotting revenge against men because she had been abandoned on her wedding day by her fiancé. As things turn out, Pip learns that Estella is not Miss Havisham’s daughter, but that of Abel Magwitch, the convict-turned benefactor of Pip and that Miss Havisham had trained Estella  to break men’s hearts as revenge for her pain caused by Compeyson who deserted her on the day of her wedding.  Pip’s instant attraction for Estella, his ambition to grow up into a gentleman to be worthy of her are the two sides of his personality- a simple, loving and caring person by nature and nurtured into becoming a part of the elite class. His initial revulsion for Abel when he learns that his benefactor is not Miss Havisham of the genteel class,  but a convict whom he had helped when he was a boy reveals his simple basic nature that cannot see anything other than in black and white. For him a convict is a convict and this makes him despise Abel. He feels outraged and embarrassed that he had gained entry into the gentlemen class by tainted money. Once he moves into the elite society, the natural bonding and affection that he had for Joe, his sister’s husband, gives way to a sense of shame of having belonged to the poor family. But as the great expectations of Pip crumble, he realizes the gratitude, generosity and goodness of Abel, and feels ashamed of his betrayal of a person with genuine human bonding. What we see at the end is the return of the original Pip, educated and more liberal in his outlook, freed from temporary aberration from his basic humane nature. Abel, the convict turns out to be a man with a soul who had dedicated his life to making Pip a gentleman, and had worked hard to make a fortune in Australia for that very purpose. Nature cannot be erased even if the community brands him a criminal. Estella’s nurturing by Miss Havisham is her undoing, making her cold and cruel leading her to an impulsive failed marriage with a worthless man. At the end the real Estella returns – like her convict father, she discovers her basic warm and affectionate nature that had been overpowered by Miss.Havisham’s scheming manouevers to make her toy with men’s affections and jilt them at the end. Her sad kindness at the end is proof of her natural quality inherited from her father. If we look at Dickens work, we understand that human destiny cannot be forever undone by artificial conditioning. Education, as Huxley defines nearly a century after Dickens, reiterates this fact and makes a plea for education to factor in individual’s genetic nature, his behaviour, his intellectual and creative endowments, his aspirations and his potential. Nurturing is a controlled scientific-psychological process that denies hereditary patterns of behaviour and individual’s special abilities for music, art etc which run in the families. This goes against the laws of nature that govern our lives. A simple analogy of how nature operates can be seen in the different colours of flowers we see blooming in green plants. The hibiscus plant produces only red coloured flowers and not yellow or blue or white, the  jasmine yields only  white and not red flowers, lilacs are pale purple and not green or orange.  By and large the flowers stick to the colours as per the genetic code imprinted on their respective seeds. It is the same with human beings. To defy the genetic code and replace it with artificial conditioning is disastrous. Huxley’s long essay concludes that education that negates heredity, the inborn human desire to preserve our individual autonomy and our genetic love for freedom is a threat to humanity. What we need is a balance between nature and nurture, what Aurobindo terms as svabhava (our own intrinsic nature) and swadharma (our own right action in the world). Education should build on the strengths of the inherited and familial human traits in order to resist the numerous dictatorial methods for curtailing individual freedom and withstand mind manipulation that forces men and women to accept the controlled uniformity imposed on them.

Great Expectations is an open-ended novel. Readers are left to come to their own conclusion as to whether Pip and Estella will or will not part again. Will natural bonding bring them together with Great Expectations for the future or will they move into Huxley’s Brave New World and opt for servitude in place of freedom and become less human than before? I pause for a response from all educationists as to what can be done for this core issue of Education for Freedom.