Friday 24 November 2006

Education and the Fear of Freedom

Education, particularly university education, suffers from fear of freedom. To adapt Francis Bacon (and with apologies to this worthy) academics fear freedom as children fear going into the dark. Or else would we have so many universities where courses of study have remained unchanged for decades?! And experience shows that even Zeus cannot save you from the Furies if you have the temerity to start academic programmes that do not have paternalistic sanction.

They tell us that the ‘knowledge age’ has dawned—and yet education and educators continue to live in the eclipse of the industrial age. Note the sacrosanct division of ‘labour’ between the teacher and the student. Note our fear of originality, our veneration of conformity, our concern for the product and equal disregard for the process. In the ultimate all these are indicators of our fear of freedom. We may cry ourselves hoarse that education is not industry yet we continue to be slaves to the ‘sequential curriculum process’ that is reminiscent of the assembly-line process of the industrial age. And so we continue to be content with a learning that is merely ‘taking in information’ (‘survival learning’) and never graduates to a participation in the creation and re-creation of our world (‘creative learning’).

This fear of freedom is particularly evident in our paternalistic prescriptive approach to pedagogy which is then reflected in the manner in which we confuse teaching with learning, skills with knowledge, information with wisdom, degrees with competence, fluency with the ability to think afresh, and marks with merit.

So where do we begin? Perhaps we could begin by affirming that education is a holistic progressive accumulative continuum. We may divide it into various sections for better understanding but we cannot treat these sections as complete in themselves. A sectional, and therefore truncated, approach to education results in a definition of ‘merit’ that too is truncated and therefore highly unsatisfactory. While ‘classroom’ work has to remain an important concern of education, the activity in co-curricular clubs and societies, as also on the playing field, must find equal space on the ‘merit’ chart. Then perhaps our definition of merit may become a little more pragmatic and real. Francis Bacon (he sure is looming large today) divided books into three kinds: those to be simply tasted, those to be chewed, and those to be swallowed and digested. This description applies as aptly to life in college as to books. Some activities are meant to be savoured and passed over, others to be dissected and analyzed while there are those that are meant to be assimilated and internalized so that they remain with us to be mulled over for years to come. Thus there are aspects of academic life that are of immediate consequence while there are others that may not germinate for years after one graduates. Yet these are the experiences that feed the soul and promote critical thinking, interculture sensitivity and civic responsibility. These in turn promote that degree of perception, discernment and intuition that are the hallmark of a truly ‘educated’ person.

But the point is – how does one factor these into a practical and workable understanding of education?

Perhaps the first move could be liberating education from the fear of freedom. This would involve a rejection of the paternalistic prescriptive apparatus and replacing it with creative responsibility coupled to a generous measure of autonomy. As long as this does not happen our educational processes and programmes will continue to be dogged by issues of relevance, quality, and accountability.

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