Schools Adrift

 

Schools Gone Adrift: Ghislain Chetan on Modern Education

"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."
(Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "The Bugbear of Literacy")

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There is the story of the Cherokee grandfather who sits with all of the children of the tribe and says to them, “There is a battle going on in each and every one of you. It is between two wolves. One of the wolves is beautiful and kind and generous and helpful and luminous; the other wolf is ugly and awful and dirty and mean and selfish and hurtful. Even right now they are battling.” One of the children asked, “Oh, grandfather, but which one will win?” Grandfather answered, “The one that you feed.”

This kind of reasoning in traditional societies and this understanding of the education of the young is fundamentally based on a non-modern conception of the nature of man. This may be termed as "the tertiary nature of man". The tertiary or triple nature of man is as follows: will, intelligence and sentiment or activity, knowledge, love. Man is Spirit, soul, and body (Spiritus, anima, corpus in Latin, or Ruh (Aql), nafs and jism in Arabic). The inner cosmos of man is hierarchical, ranging from the lowly beast in us (nafs al ammara) to the pure Spirit/Intellect (al-Ruh) or, "the God in man". The purpose, the raison de'tre of life requires us to put effort in climbing that ladder from the lower rung of being to the highest of Being, so to speak. Here, the highest form of man is not a machine, not a computer, but a being made “in the image of God”. In secular modernity, and especially post-Descartes, the rationalists and because of the pervasive influence of the ideology of evolution and Progress in the modern West and the modernised non-West, man is not three, but two: body and soul. With the rise of postmodernism and now transhumanism, the reality of soul is also being questioned! Neuroscience based on materialist ontology is insistent that consciousness---which always is, is eternal, and which is the prime, uncreated element in man in traditional civilizations---is nothing but the product of chemical neural mechanisms.

In an excellent book called "Schools Adrift", the French educationist and philosopher Ghislain Chetan has dissected this deep and lingering malaise of modern education. He thinks that something has terribly gone wrong with the modern educatuion systems, that the "schools are ill" and they are so because "modern civilization itself is ill." All the false premises on which this "Satanic civilization" (Gandhi) or "abnormal civilization" (Guenon) stands have led, pendulum like, to ever-changing, fashionable pedagogical theories in an attempt to comprehend the problem but it can't because of those very false premises, especially the faulty conception of the nature of man.

He says, "...students no longer enjoy any viable reference points in the face of masses of relative contradictions. Students do not have the necessary tools to situate themselves...". When it becomes a sin to talk about "Truth" and First Principles, when the young are actually educated to rebel against all authority, or when all authority is undermined, from that of God to the parents, teachers and elders, when "it is forbidden to forbid", then not only educational institutions but whole societies become "adrift", floating on the surface of water, pushed and pulled in every which way by the subjective fads of the time. "For some time now, schools have resembled a boat which, trying to facilitate navigation, (mistakenly) threw out its compass and rudder", he has written.

In chapter three of his book he critiques modern relativism and the so-called "critical mind" in the following manner:
' Indicating a truth to someone and inviting him or her to submit to it, means, for modernists, a manipulation and restraint on his or her individual freedom. On the other hand, telling a person that truth does not exist outside his or her ego and desires, means, for modernists, to liberate a person. This is a curious paradox: on the one hand, the modernist claims to “liberate” the individual, but, in fact, effectively “imprisons” individuals within the limits of their egos. On the other hand, modern people consider true "freedom," that is, freedom from the individual limitations of the ego and the ability to go beyond oneself, which is precisely the goal of all Religion and of all Wisdom, as an “imprisonment.” '

The modern idea of egalitarianism also comes under attack in chapter 8 where he writes,

' Egalitarianism is also found in the endeavor to efface all qualitative differences amongst individuals over the course of their academic education. A child’s academic career unfolds from birth as if everyone possessed grosso modo the same chances. Differences are seen to arise primarily from the social class to which an individual belongs. Differences can even take on a proclaimed “sexist” attitude when one takes into consideration differing academic careers of boys and girls. The egalitarian outlook has resulted in the unquestioned policy of maintaining an integrally mixed form of education throughout the school age years. Yet, it behooves us to recognize that it was during the eras of their decadence that ancient civilizations adopted policies of mixed education, and introduced the concept of a common curriculum where all students are thrown together to follow the same type of instruction. This fact is, alas, ignored by modern educators. The notion of a qualitative selection of students (of sifting the more gifted from the less gifted with a view to the students’ best interests) is seen as not offering equal opportunities to all students. '

(Note: Ghislain Chetan's book is in French. L’Ecole à la Derive: L’Enseignement Actuel à la Lumière de la Tradition Universelle, Paris: Publibooks, 2007. These are selective translations by Jane Fatima Casewit, 2011)

Intellect and Reason

Intellect and Reason

The theologian and writer, C.S. Lewis, once said of man that he is Intellect, reason, imagination and the senses. He was just echoing the traditional understanding of man in both orthodox Christianity and Islam before the rise of secular modernity where man is reduced to mere body and mind. In the post-Kantian, modern Cartesian world with its dualistic logic and extreme forms of skepticisms, reason, or the ratiocinative faculty in man, is often confused with the Intellect which is the highest, intuitive faculty in man. Reason calculates; Intellect sees, like the eye sees. Reason is part of the soul in man, Intellect is the "uncreated in man" (Meister Eckhardt) above the soul in the inner hierarchy in man, the unchangeable, "the Eternal breath" in us. If man is an isthmus (barzakh) between two oceans, one above and one below, as all traditional religions understand man to be, then this reason in him is the tool par excellence to help him "climb" and swim in that upper ocean of the Spirit, Spirit or Ruh being another name for the Intellect.

Reason is like the stars, or like the moon, that shine at night. Intellect is like the sun. Reason is like a lamp that we need as long as we are in the dark of the night, to help us, to guide us, to show us the way. With the rise of the sun, meaning the awakening of the Intellect, the stars and the moon fade away and lose their efficacy in the brightness of day. The lamp becomes useless. Only a fool would insist on using it while the sun shines brightly overhead.

Note: I am using "man" in its previously accepted sense in the world of scholarship, or its generic sense of the "homo sapien", as al-Insan and not as one of the two (or one of the many nowadays) sexes/genders of the species. Unfortunately, one is now required to re-learn the English language every few years!

Read and become ignorant

 

Read and become ignorant!

"Perhaps at no other time have men been so knowing and yet so unaware, so burdened with purposes and so purposeless, so disillusioned and so completely the victims of illusion. This strange contradiction pervades our entire culture, our science and our philosophy, our literature and our art."
(W.M. Urban, "The Intelligible World", 1929, p. 172)

"It is better to have a well-made head than a well-filled head."
(Montaigne )
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The great art historian, metaphysician and perennialist hakeem, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, once wrote, "...it is far better not to know HOW to read than not to know WHAT to read." This may surprise many people and may even sound absurd to many others. But there is wisdom in it, pertinent wisdom for our times.

There was a time when literacy, mainly the ability to read, meant awareness, knowledge, culture and cultivation. To be literate was to have access to information and to become knowledgeable, even wise. Books were prized possessions because they were so rare, expensive and difficult to get hold of. The technology of book and printing, after the invention of the moveable Guttenberg printing press in the fifteenth century, made literacy the sole criterion of success, of fame and fortune, of culture and civilization. Reading and writing became essential, so much so that to be illiterate was automatically equated with being ignorant. That was the context then, long time ago.
We live in a totally different age now. There is no lack of information or of books now. Books are easily available and information, every kind of information, is just a click away. Google, Wikipedia, OpenAI and ChatGPT, social media...all at our service to fetch us within seconds whatever we want to find and know. In fact, we are now drowning in the oceans of information. We have terms like "information glut" and "information overload", choking on it all, as if drinking from a big hose; we are simply overwhelmed by the tsunami of information. So, it is not about literacy anymore, or the mere ability to read.

What the Coomaraswamy sutra means is that literacy is now a kind of burden, or a tool that puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders and conscience. The issue is not "how to read", or not that only, anymore; it is essentially about "what to read". Ignorance now means the lack or the dulling of that discriminatory faculty that can sift through all that "information" with which we are bombarded 24/7, 365 days all year round. We are not faced with the problem of "lack of information" anymore, but with too much of it and most of it is useless and obviously harmful. Not everything is worth reading, but how do we decide? Therein lies the problem and its solution, too. In fact, just saying "information" in an innocent or naive and neutral manner is not helpful anymore; most, if not all, information is now suspect, either as misinformation or as disinformation. Among other things, the critical mind now needs to be able "only (to) connect" as the writer E.M. Forster once said. Everything is fragmented and compartmentalized, especially knowledge in the institutions of learning where specialized disciplines have gained depth in knowing the minutest details of things but have lost breadth and connection with other disciplines or fields of enquiry. It is not an exaggeration to say that a well educated person today lacks the crucial and critical ability to "connect the dots" that are spread all across disciplines and fields of enquiry; practitioners across discipline can't communicate with one another at all and all of them resemble tribes of experts with specialized, even esoteric, vocabularies and discourses and often busy in protecting the boundaries of their fields, something called "gate keeping" inside the academia.

A serious implication of the sutra above, therefore, is that ignorance now, in its compound form (jehl e murrakkab in Urdu), is more likely to be the result of literacy or of reading without discrimination, or without knowing WHAT to read and not the result of illiteracy. In other words, whereas in the past, it was illiteracy that was often equated with ignorance (often wrongly though even then but for different sets of reasons), it is literacy that now leads to compound ignorance.

"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 Rock", T.S. Eliot)

(Dervaish Ali, Quetta walla)

Our childhood and toys, or children then and now

 

Our childhood and our toys, or children then and now

Potali or kencha (marbles), pittu garam (tennis ball and a pile of flat stones), pahari (the grid tag), paisa guchi (played with coins), patta baazi (with old cigarette packets piled one on top of the other), gulli danda, bearing gaadi (home made carts using old ball-bearings and wooden fruit crates) and so on. These were our toys and games then.

When we were kids, toys were not usually bought, but often home made by kids themselves, with whatever material that was then available: discarded shoe boxes, old bicycle and car tires, used ball-bearings we used to collect from the auto-garages on Wafa Road, discarded cigarette packets, wooden sticks for gulli danda and slingshots (ghulail), pieces of leather and cords for home-made catapults (called palkhamo in Faarsi), old metal clothesline wires for "seem gaadi" (the hand held metal guides with a U-shaped head used to roll and steer the used tires) and so on.

Our imagination and creativity then were of a totally different kind and at a different level, involving raw, unsullied imagination and both authentic intellectual and manual effort geared towards making the best possible use of our wits and of the limited available resources for the final products that we carried around in our heads and not on our iPads. There were no iPads, tablets, HDTVs, Playstations and Nintendos. The young eyes then were not trained on navigating the virtual worlds on different kinds and sizes of screens but, scavenger-like, on spotting potentially usable materials to actualize the fuzzy and funny ideas in that thing we carried on our shoulders, our heads. There were no "how to" Youtube and TikTok videos, but there were people, real community people in the form of friends, neighbors, relatives and elders who would help, guide and show us how to make and fix things. Yes, things always got fixed then and not thrown away. Everybody had a skill, especially manual skill, then.

For us kids, toys often meant making our own, and not an expensive visit to the mall or getting gadgets online from Amazon. Time, a lot of it, was spent not on choosing the make, color, design and model, but on finding materials and then putting all of them together in creative ways. It was the entire process, that process of actually creating something from almost nothing, often from discarded materials, that was the most satisfying of all whether it was assembling a three-wheeler cart with old, greasy ball bearings, or constructing a slingshot with pieces of carefully scrapped and neatly wedged sticks and rubber strips cut from used and discarded bicycle tubes, or coating kite strings with finely ground glass and liquid raisin glue (seeraish) to prepare "manja" during the kite-flying season in the brutally dry and cold winter months of January and February. The cold, too, was extreme then, in the Quetta of 1970s.

Just like everything else, the toys were also a reflection of the ethos of the time, of old Quettawaali: simplicity, frugality, humility and modesty, contentment with the essentials of life and a detached attitude towards what was ostentatious, trivial or secondary.

(Dervaish Ali, Quetta walla)

Corruptio, optimi, pessima!

 

Corruptio Optimi Pessima!

There is an old Persian/Farsi proverb that says, "The fish starts rotting from the head down".

"The corruption of the best is the worst" is the meaning of this Latin saying. This means that those with the highest authority, status and, therefore, power, have to carry the heaviest burden of responsibilities and duties both towards the self and towards the other in the world. Neglect, slack or failure on their part wrecks not only them and their kith and kin, but entire communities, nations, societies and even the world.

When the ruler, the king, steals an egg, then the ruled subject thinks he has a duty to steal ten! When religious leaders sell God and faith for worldly gains, then the common man of faith considers every conceivable sin as a pathway to his salvation. When the upholders of law and order and the dispensers of justice practice tyranny and injustice, then the victims think and feel totally justified in disregarding and breaking the rules and the laws of the land. When teachers become the very symbol of ignorance and irresponsibility, when those whose vocation requires them to cure the sick and care for them, when they sell diseases and death because it helps them line their pockets, then society is doomed. When those whose very job is to protect and provide security indulge in corruption and create insecurity and fear, then hope for establishing a sane and humane society becomes a distant dream.

In a society where the fish has already started rotting from the head down, nepotism, sycophancy and mediocrity are the core "virtues" of all, from top to bottom. It is then a society where the reign of "The Shudra" is well established. To borrow the imagery from the Upanishad (old Hindu scriptures) , when the charioteer (Intellect) becomes corrupt and fails to control the reins (mind) as they should be, the horses (the senses/nafs/ego) then start galloping at full speed towards the abyss which means the destruction of all. Of these inverted "virtues", nepotism needs special mention since this was the one evil that saw the downfall of Catholicism and the rise of reform Protestantism in the West. After all, nepotism has its root in the word "nephew": when you disregard merit, talent and justice and start favoring your own, wantonly inbreeding and corrupting institutions with the worst elements in society, then the end is nigh.

History, the past and nostalgia

 

History, the past and the charge of "nostalgia"

Some of my modern and "progressive" readers (and friends, too) have often charged me with being too "nostalgic", or nostalgically romantic about the past and have even accused me of being not enough "realistic", not adequately "progressive" and/or "Tarraqee pasand". I totally agree with them and fully accept that charge.
I have written many times that I do not see the past as a graveyard of superstitions, a mortuary of obscurantisms, a scrapyard full of irrational, unreasonable and junk ideas, values and virtues, or a vast, barren landscape completely devoid of truth, goodness and beauty.
I do not see the journey from the past to our present (which itself will become past as soon as I post this!) as "growing up" only, but essentially as growing old and decrepit: not Progress (with capital "P"), or not only as Progress, but also, and importantly so, as decline and degeneration. History, modern "scientific" historiography, for me is not about coming out of darkness of old cultures, customs and traditions and seeing the illuminating light of modernity, but essentially a cunning of time, a trickery of those who write and preach History and Progress; I see it as a totally ideological and even fraudulent project of knowledge production and consumption about the past that merely displaces our "simplistic outlook" and does not abolish it only to replace it with something better and sophisticated as it always loudly claims. What modern, reductionist historiography does is that it irresponsibly dirties the past wholesale, it violently murders all the other ways of understanding the past---myths, stories, collective memories, epic poems etc.---and sells its own ideological narratives, its own "myths", in the name of reason and science, or wrapped in scientism.

If we are told that there are "pathologies of irrationality", let it be known to all those ideologues of "History and Progress" that there are also much worse "pathologies of rationality"; after all, the twentieth century, a genocidal century of mass murders, pogroms, ethnic-cleansings and holocausts in which more than 100 million were butchered by the secular-modern men of reason, science, culture, civilization, history, progress, was a period of time that was called "the century of terror" by no-less a modern ideologue than the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm himself. Who would know better than Hobsbawm that there was a direct link between "scientific history" as taught at Sorbonne, Oxford and other modern citadels of knowledge production and the killing fields of Cambodia; that the road to the Siberian Gulags was paved with ideas of History and Progress propounded by the leading lights of Hegelian-Marxian worldview, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin et.al; that the thousands of dead bodies floating down the Yangtze River in mid-twentieth century China were of those unfortunate "savage" a-/anti-historicals who resisted those Hegelian-Marxian notions of materialist and scientific history.

I would rather listen to my great grandmother's tales, poems and myths about our own past than to Hegel, Marx, Santayana inspired Eurocentric nonsense!

Modern history and history writing, because it is secular in nature through and through and, therefore, excludes by default "sacred history" and depreciates the cyclical nature of time and other modes of understanding the past that are part and parcel of all the traditional civilizations of humanity, it obscures the eternal in time; reductionist and ideological to the core, it also forces us to throw the baby with the dirty bath water, as if our own time is the final and absolute arbiter and model of perfection, goodness and beauty! Its cunning is thus: it throws its net on the past and what it catches in that net, it presents to us as the total and final story, the whole past, the entire narrative of time past! What it can't catch in its badly crafted net does not exist at all! This is its reductionism.

I stand totally opposed to the modern evolutionary understanding of our nature, of our time and society, and of reality itself; I stand on the side of the great, perennial spiritual traditions of humankind, all of which tell us that time degenerates and things, the essential things and values in life, decay and do not get better. True, there are "bursts" of "progress" what these traditions invariably call "renewal" or "tajdeed" and other similar expressions (because God has promised it!) but overall, there is decline and degeneration: entropy, in other words. I am in full agreement with what a contemporary Muslim sage has said about these two perspectives---the evolutionary/progressive and that of decline and degeneration (the religious)---what he calls secular Modernity and "Tradition" (the religious traditions of humankind): "Modernity is essentially evil and only accidentally good; Tradition is essentially good and only accidentally evil." (Seyyed Hossen Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred).

Silence and Chatter

 

Silence and Chatter

"Who knows, does not say."         Tao te Ching

"Nothing in creation is so like God as silence."      Meister Eckhardt

"So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we're plagued by these days isn't any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. "
(Gilles Deleuze's Negotiations, 1972-1990)
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The most profound conversations are carried out in silence. Language, since it is a form, eventually comes to a dead end. "Language cannot contain reality...we know more than words can tell" says Ali Lakhani. While we must speak and converse, a form, in the final analysis, cannot do justice to the deepest, the highest essences, as sages of both East and West have reminded us. It can't do justice especially because languages in our modern world have lost their symbolic quality, something we see nowadays around us. When thought patterns and worldviews become depleted of their symbolic, mythical and metaphysical contents, then languages also get affected; with the loss of the sacred and the science of metaphysics through which we have access to the sacred---the loss of verticality---languages also begin to lose their symbolic and anagogical richness and end up expressing the flat, one dimensional inner cosmos of the speakers or users of those languages. So much is said these days, but all so weightless, so lacking in profundity, so utterly superficial and meaningless. The continuous, colorless, vapid chatter and especially the speed with which it is carried out by many people, the young in particular, is outright ugly, lacking all the old charm and beauty.