“Ignorance is the greatest tragedy….The learned man is alive
among the dead; the ignorant is dead among the living.” Imam Ali (AS)
“Learn what you are and become it.” A Pindaric injunction Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
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Words come into existence because there is a felt need to describe or explain something. The word education is no exception. Etymologically speaking, the term “education” derives from the Latin root “ex” which means “from” or “out of”, and “ducere” which means “to lead” or “to guide”. So, what we have is, “to draw from” (something) or “lead out” (something). Before the rise of the secular age of modernity, which first arose in the West and then spread everywhere, this “something” always had a religious meaning and connotation. In other words, the “leading out” or “drawing from” always presupposed a source and for the faithful this source was what the human carried deep within him or her. All education was the “drawing out” of, or from, what we already carried within our being, which, for a Muslim, was placed there by the Divine Creator through His “breath” at the time of creation. This primordial “breath” is what we know as our fitrah. According to the Islamic tradition, the names that God taught the first human being, Adam, is the quintessential form of knowledge according to which that created being sees things “as they really are”: “And He taught Adam the names of all things” (Qur’an 2:31). In Islam, the gravest sin, the “fall of man”, or the primordial man’s expulsion from Heaven, is often explained in terms of forgetfulness and heedlessness in this world in which we now live. True learning and teaching, or real education, is therefore nothing if not a constant reminding and remembering of the “names of all things” that we carry within our being.
Ours is a world of numbers, plans, diagrams, flowcharts, strategies, targets and policies. Modern school systems, even when they are functional, are now part and parcel of vast bureaucracies and teachers are not much different from number-crunching desk clerks in the numerous matrix-like mega-machines of industrialized societies. Teachers everywhere now spend more and more time on mind-numbing paper work, documentation and filling standardized forms, making and using a range of quantitative rubrics and templates, than on actual qualitative teaching and learning. Teaching is now just another routinized, salaried “job” ---exchange of hours for dollars---rather than, even as opposed to, a committed, life-long, qualitative vocation as it once was.
To reiterate, education that can truly be called qualitative
and integral will always have a deeply ethical and spiritual character. Anybody
with a rudimentary understanding of the history of peoples in different traditional
civilizations can attest to the validity of that claim. Education so conceived
in traditional cultures as taleem o tarbiat or ilm o amal in Islamic
societies, always involves some form of interiority, of spiritual training and self-realization.
This is primarily because of the very different conception of man---his origin,
end and his ultimate purpose in life. I cannot overemphasize this point about
the true nature of man; only by asking who we are, what our origin is and what our
end is, by seeking answers to and by understanding these deeper issues, can we
make education truly ethical and transformative. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the doyen
of Islamic intellectuality, has written that, “…how we choose to live in this
world---how we act and think and how we develop the latent possibilities within
us---depends totally on the answer we provide for ourselves to this basic
question of who we are. For human beings live and act for the most part
according to the image they have of themselves.”
In the classical Islamic world, for example, among other ways of developing the latent potentialities of a student, a traditional madrassah education that always stressed the importance of tarbiat and marifat (and hence also amal or practice) would often employ a two-step process. This usually meant a long and arduous regimen of exercises, both cerebral/intellectual and otherwise, essentially to develop humility and to sharpen the skills of discernment. Typically, the first step in this process would be that of takhlia, which was an emptying out of all the negative traits and tendencies of the ego (self) in the student. This was followed by tahlia which was meant to adorn the emptied self of the student with (positive) virtues. A well taught and integrally educated student would be someone who had undergone a rigorous training process during which he or she was emptied or cleansed of the limiting and suffocating elements of the self and adorned with the re-awakened or realized virtues, all of which would shine through the words, acts and the whole being of the pupil. In certain countries of East Asia, especially in Japan and Korea, but also in China, school kids still perform a lot of similar chores like cleaning, including cleaning toilets and common areas, taking care of plants like weeding and watering, assisting school staff and community elders and so on. All of these demanding activities are meant to inculcate humility and to sensitize the students to the importance of community, co-operation or collective effort for responsible, harmonious and healthy living. In these societies, the young are made aware of the fact that no man is an island, and that a rugged, highly individualistic type of morality will eventually result in both the destruction of the individual and the society to which he or she belongs. Seen as a form of tarbiat, these tasks temper the negative and petrifying tendencies of the untrained self in the young.
I have mentioned the word madrassah above. What I have in mind is
not what we hear about or see nowadays. It is unfortunate that this term madrassah
has now acquired totally negative connotations and even considered by many,
Muslims and non-Muslims alike, a kind of extremist producing factory, an efficient
assembly line the only function of which is to churn out violent terrorists and
suicide bombers. But in the traditional world of Islam a madrassah was an
almost sacred place of learning and teaching, learning not only about the world
but also from the world; it was once a sanctuary of art, of the sciences, philosophy,
theology, and so on. The fate of this word in our time is similar to that of another
important Islamic concept, “jihad”, also an essentially spiritual concept but
which is now so sullied that it is anything but. The reasons for
the degradation of these terminologies are complex and many, something that I
will discuss separately in the future, inshallah.
Words come into existence because there is a felt need to describe or explain something. The word education is no exception. Etymologically speaking, the term “education” derives from the Latin root “ex” which means “from” or “out of”, and “ducere” which means “to lead” or “to guide”. So, what we have is, “to draw from” (something) or “lead out” (something). Before the rise of the secular age of modernity, which first arose in the West and then spread everywhere, this “something” always had a religious meaning and connotation. In other words, the “leading out” or “drawing from” always presupposed a source and for the faithful this source was what the human carried deep within him or her. All education was the “drawing out” of, or from, what we already carried within our being, which, for a Muslim, was placed there by the Divine Creator through His “breath” at the time of creation. This primordial “breath” is what we know as our fitrah. According to the Islamic tradition, the names that God taught the first human being, Adam, is the quintessential form of knowledge according to which that created being sees things “as they really are”: “And He taught Adam the names of all things” (Qur’an 2:31). In Islam, the gravest sin, the “fall of man”, or the primordial man’s expulsion from Heaven, is often explained in terms of forgetfulness and heedlessness in this world in which we now live. True learning and teaching, or real education, is therefore nothing if not a constant reminding and remembering of the “names of all things” that we carry within our being.
We have similar notions in other religious traditions, both
in the east and in the west. For example, Plato’s theory of education, known as
anamnesis, literally translates as “remembrance” or “recollection”. In the
Chinese Confucian and neo-Confucian traditions, this recollection takes the
form of a search for, or recovery of, one’s “lost heart”, or one’s lost
humanity. The whole of this eastern tradition is founded on the cultivation of
ren and on becoming a ru. The former can mean anything from the human heart
to the most elevated of virtues and the latter as “realized man”, “virtuous
man” or
“perfect man”---a being who “is conversant with earth and heavens” or
what in the Islamic tradition is called Al-Insan al Kamil. And in the Christian tradition, Christ’s
saying is well known: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”, which points to
the same reality that is in the center of man’s being.
For a traditional Muslim, this “remembrance”, the “leading
out” and search, always means remembering that fitrah of his being which he
keeps forgetting. The leading out means coming out of ignorance, darkness, and
other vices that serve as veils over the essential virtues all of which are inherent
constituents of that fitrah. In other words, this traditional form of education
was once meant to bridge the distance between the aspirant and the source of
all virtues within him, to bring him closer and closer to him-self, so to
speak. This leading forth towards his true nature was often done through the
efforts of a wise teacher, starting with the parent---the immediate teacher,
almost always the mother---who herself or himself was a self-realized
individual. The task of such an instructor was often described in colorful
language, for example, as someone who would “dust” the souls of the students or
someone who would “polish” their souls. This model of education was profoundly
ethical and geared towards not only the intellectual growth of the pupil but
also his or her spiritual self-realization; its aim was training the pupil in the
art of living wholesomely, which was inclusive of, but not limited to, learning
vocational skills for earning a livelihood.
This understanding of education based on a non-modern
understanding of the nature of man may be termed as “integral education”. Its
fundamental aim is educating the whole being of man and is not just limited to
providing him with some skills and techniques needed for earning a livelihood.
It is in sharp contrast to secular-modern pedagogical theories and practices
that are often utilitarian in nature with purely materialistic ends. Mainstream
modern theories of education start with a tabula rasa or a “blank slate”
conception of the human being, like a brand new hard disk of a computer that
needs to be formatted and filled with data and information! There is no “recollection”, no “remembering”,
no “leading out” and “recovery of the lost heart”, but the task is often to
fashion a new being out of nothing, a being who serves worldly institutions and
interests, from the bureaucracies of the state to the modern, capitalistic
factories. The “compulsory” in compulsory education stresses those values and
skills that make students ready for the modern office or factory and their
impersonal and alienating bureaucracies, as both Karl Marx and Max Weber have shown
in their sociological tomes.
This brings us to the question of means and ends. What are
the ends of education? What means are required to achieve those ends? While for
traditional education the issues of ends and means were clearly defined by religious
doctrine and practice, by a holistic combination of theory and praxis, modern
education is marked either with the confusion of the two, or defined in purely
mundane and materialistic fashion. In these conceptions, ethics is often
reduced to technical issues with mechanistic solutions, as add-ons (called
“professional ethics”, for example) according to the whims of the majority or
some such consensual formula since religion is no longer considered as a source
of values for ethics and morality. In short, this is an instrumental view of
education, operating with a reduced vision of man, as if man lived “by bread
alone”. Truth here is irrelevant; there are no meaning giving certainties;
there is no moral tuition in the old sense because in this system of worldly
cost-benefit calculations, there is no higher purpose, only worldly goals and
targets and self-seeking strategies to achieve them. It’s a Cartesian and Laplacian mechanical
universe. The story is told of a famous exchange between Napoleon and the great
French scientist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Upon hearing about the
scholar’s work, Napoleon said to him: “M.
Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the
universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace, who definitely
was a master of diplomatic tact, was, nevertheless, stiff as a martyr on every
point of his science and philosophy. He drew himself up and answered bluntly to
Napoleon: Je n'avais pas besoin de
cette hypothèse-là. ("I had no need of that hypothesis.") (this version from Wikipedia)
The old system taught that one’s main purpose in life was to
live in accordance with first principles, to search for and know Truth, to go
beyond oneself, or to transcend oneself. In fact, traditional pedagogies always
tried to fulfill that deep yearning for transcendence that lies at the center
of our heart. This was not at the cost of our worldly vocations that are always
necessary since we have to live and sustain ourselves and those who depend on
us in this world; it was because classical education, both in the east and in
the west, meant at the same time grappling with deeper existential questions of
our origin and end---who we are, where we have come from and where we are
going----a necessary struggle that would result in the salvation or deliverance
of the human being. Knowledge in traditional Islamic world meant knowledge of
God, first and foremost. Says a famous Hadith, the saying of the Prophet of
Islam (pbuh): “I seek refuge in God from a knowledge that has no benefit.” Ultimately,
no knowledge can be beneficial for our final and most important ends in life if
it ignores or is cut off from the knowledge of God. Modern education is often about
“consumption” of information, career planning, (CV)-resume building and
self-marketing! As C.S. Lewis once
noted, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man
a cleverer devil.” The famous Muslim sage, Mawlana Jalaludin Rumi, has said that
reason (aql) serves humanity that is educated but in the absence of moral tuition
and inculcation of values this reason is just like a candle that serves a thief
while he is stealing!. The great Indian art historian and proponent of
traditional/religious education, Ananda Coomaraswamy, stressing the importance
of religious values, sensibilities and what in the Muslim tradition would be
called tarbiat once said: “From the earliest times, Indians have thought of the
learned man, not as one who has read much, but as one who has been profoundly
taught.” Through his numerous articles and
books, he demonstrated that there is no essential link between literacy and
culture and he used to caution the blind enthusiasts of modern education on the
Indian sub-continent by arguing that, “We overlook that ‘education’ is never
creative, but a two-edged weapon, always destructive, whether of ignorance or
of knowledge depending upon the educator’s wisdom or folly. Too often fools
rush in where angels might fear to tread.”
It is interesting to recall that in societies that have yet
to be affected completely by modernity and its forces that operate in all
domains of life, education is always conjoined to or appended by another term
which is rooted deeply in the soil of religion. We used to say taleem o tarbiat
or ilm o maarifat not long ago in a country like Pakistan. Now it is just
education. This truncation or reduction is very telling. It is not just a
matter of convenience or simplified language. The language itself reflects
monumental changes within. It is because of a much deeper degeneration in
thought patterns or modes of understanding which are in turn reflection of an
impoverished mode of being since knowledge always depends on one’s mode of
being, as Aristotle has said. Modern languages are now less and less symbolic
and more and more concerned with exteriority, suitable only for expressing the
simple, the obvious and external, and lacking in complexity, sophistication or
elegance that are required to express interiority or our rich, inner universe. The
modern obsession with efficiency, productivity and convenience etc. which we see
everywhere nowadays is in fact a tendency to turn quality into quantity,
something about which I have written in a separate blogpost here. Ours is a world of numbers, plans, diagrams, flowcharts, strategies, targets and policies. Modern school systems, even when they are functional, are now part and parcel of vast bureaucracies and teachers are not much different from number-crunching desk clerks in the numerous matrix-like mega-machines of industrialized societies. Teachers everywhere now spend more and more time on mind-numbing paper work, documentation and filling standardized forms, making and using a range of quantitative rubrics and templates, than on actual qualitative teaching and learning. Teaching is now just another routinized, salaried “job” ---exchange of hours for dollars---rather than, even as opposed to, a committed, life-long, qualitative vocation as it once was.
In the classical Islamic world, for example, among other ways of developing the latent potentialities of a student, a traditional madrassah education that always stressed the importance of tarbiat and marifat (and hence also amal or practice) would often employ a two-step process. This usually meant a long and arduous regimen of exercises, both cerebral/intellectual and otherwise, essentially to develop humility and to sharpen the skills of discernment. Typically, the first step in this process would be that of takhlia, which was an emptying out of all the negative traits and tendencies of the ego (self) in the student. This was followed by tahlia which was meant to adorn the emptied self of the student with (positive) virtues. A well taught and integrally educated student would be someone who had undergone a rigorous training process during which he or she was emptied or cleansed of the limiting and suffocating elements of the self and adorned with the re-awakened or realized virtues, all of which would shine through the words, acts and the whole being of the pupil. In certain countries of East Asia, especially in Japan and Korea, but also in China, school kids still perform a lot of similar chores like cleaning, including cleaning toilets and common areas, taking care of plants like weeding and watering, assisting school staff and community elders and so on. All of these demanding activities are meant to inculcate humility and to sensitize the students to the importance of community, co-operation or collective effort for responsible, harmonious and healthy living. In these societies, the young are made aware of the fact that no man is an island, and that a rugged, highly individualistic type of morality will eventually result in both the destruction of the individual and the society to which he or she belongs. Seen as a form of tarbiat, these tasks temper the negative and petrifying tendencies of the untrained self in the young.
It is, therefore, with this idea of education, as taleem o
tarbiat, as ilm o amal, that non-modern cultures see their end product as
attainment of freedom by the student and this freedom is nothing if not spiritual liberation.
This liberation fundamentally means the subsuming of the self into Self, of the
lower self into the higher self, and is quite different from the modern ideas
of quantitative "education as freedom" or "education as power". For
example, take the case of freedom that is claimed to come from education. What
is this freedom? Whereas in traditional cultures, authentic education means
freedom from the self, in secular-modern settings it is often freedom of the
self. This is a crucial point of difference, and has been observed by many
non-modern thinkers including the French classicist and linguist Ghislain Chetan
who has rightly pointed out that in the modern system,
"...pupils are locked into the narrow framework of
their egos and a sort of autocracy is encouraged. This tends to make young
people gradually insensitive to things other than their own opinions, the
expression of their own personality and individual freedom" and that
"...the most formidable of all prisons which confine the youngster is his
own self--a cell bound on all sides, as it is with every other individual. The
student is therefore prevented from breaking out of the cell lest he lose what
is called freedom, but which in reality is the worst of all slaveries."
(2011, p.123)
Similarly, “education as power” or “knowledge as power” can
have two very different meanings, depending on the way education/knowledge is
understood. The classical traditions of humanity, from Greek to Hinduism to Far
Eastern Chinese and Japanese to Christianity and Islam, all religious traditions
have stressed the importance of “knowing thyself”. In their often differing
worldviews, power and domination over the self (khud shinaasi, self-control, and
self-domination) is seen as the most noble path to true liberation and its
opposite, power and domination over others without any ethical moorings or without any responsibility (in the sense that Francis Bacon meant when he declared, "knowledge is power"---over others, including nature), is seen as the logical outcome of
an education that is inattentive to, or neglectful of, the self, an education
that is cut off from ethical instruction and practice.
Dorothy L. Sayers once lamented the “lost tools of
learning”. In her famous 1947 Oxford lecture with the same title, she lambasted
the disjointed, compartmentalized and reductionist pedagogical culture of her
day. One wonders what her assessment of our present pedagogical condition of education-as-algorithm would be, were she alive today. This is a condition where her tools of learning are increasingly dictated and dominated by the non-human, by the dehumanizing machines, where the classroom is replaced by YouTube videos and the teachers and instructors by "like" seeking, solipsistic social media influencers. But it was the poet T.S. Eliot who best captured the same sense of loss
and decay in his poem “The Rock” that I have cited elsewhere in one of my
earlier blogposts, and with which I want to end this one, too.
The Rock by T.S. Eliot
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
Note:
In this blogpost and elsewhere I use the word “man” (and all the subsequent gendered
pronouns) in its old, conventional sense, meaning man as homo, mensch or as insan,
all meaning person, which is inclusive of both the sexes of the species. No
“sexism” or gender bias is intended.
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