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)