The Highest Result of Education is Tolerance
I recently sent this piece for an essay competition entry to one of the national broadsheets. Today, I am publishing it on my blog as a personal entry. However, the heading of the topic is from the same essay competition.
Swami Vivekananda believed education to be the manifestation of perfection residing in the hearts of human beings and that this perfection intrinsically held tolerance. Since then, the Indian education system has only succeeded in leaps and bounds due to the negligence of such fundamental principles.
It has been due to the systematic lapses within the politics of the country that education has not been able to enable a person to develop ethics and moral principles of the just and unjust. Going back to the Socratic method of ancient Greece and the Gurukula system of India, discussions and discourses were the only tolerant method of learning and debating ideas. In the 1960s, inquiry-based learning took centre stage of mainstream public education. The contemporary education styles reflect the nuances of the same in the perception driven reality world, but it is not sufficient to seek the post-truth in the world of fake news.
However, the holistic education system always gives equal importance and exposure to sports, culture and arts of which tolerance is a part. But simultaneously, social media and technological outreach have blurred the lines between information, knowledge and wisdom vis-à-vis fact, fiction and perception. The said topic is worthy of all the attention, especially when Indian society has turned into an abode for much-anticipated technological offspring like robotic machines and artificial intelligence. All the while the country continues to re-image the definition of education from the prism of tolerance. Here, I say that if education is a gift of one’s right, then tolerance is the virtue of one’s duty.
It’s important to note that the said topic is a complex question dealing with the current education system and social behaviour, aiming at a cohesive response for an inclusive society. However, the rise of global rights has messed it up for universal citizens. But, this mess will not last long, because machines are in competition with human intelligence. Therefore, there are chances that the machine might hit back its own master.
At the outset, I suppose that the day is not far when the world gives more importance to technological day over Labour Day. In the given context, the current education is failing to produce effective moral citizens because of a constant ideological battle pervading all age groups yearning for their desired lifestyle. However, does that mean even the educated minds sitting at important positions across India may misbehave, exhibit intolerance in their speech and manner only for the sake of their sought after lifestyle?
The current political framework of global rights has gone far to exploit the fact that machines have no ideology; hence they are better off to manage than labour unions. In this case, education begetting tolerance becomes more demanding because it has a dual role in managing intolerance of people against people and machines against people. These two sections of society in India generally face intolerance from either one or both of these groups; and comprises of 2/3 country, only if we go by the previous election results.
Finally, expounding upon the incidences of intolerant behaviour, globally, one may see that these are based primarily on or around certain stereotypical item blocks such as religion, minority group and migrants. Whereby, these item blocks repeat every time a right-wing political leader asserts the leadership of any country.
Education has only one role for any society, and that is to keep the generations moving in the ascending order of knowledge and information. If education by default can enable the character of tolerance, then education transposes to the highest level of seeking the truth. But, is the truth really something a common man demands?
Perhaps, even if it is not, it should be, because “Ye shall know the truth, and truth shall make you free,” as the New Testament said. Samuel P Huntington addresses a parallel topic in his book, Clash of Civilisation. However, in brief, what he predicts is the clash of culture will overtake the end of an ideological clash. Building upon Huntington’s argument of culture and civilisation, I would say that education is nothing but culture and tolerance. India has a long history of tolerance with a capacity to absorb multi-ethnicity.
Since the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation till the coming of the British era, the land of India has been more than tolerant in the conventional sense of the word. It holds a great history of encompassing other cultures and traditions that thrive within its boundaries. Then why in recent years, has suddenly the country been engulfed by the phenomenon of mob lynching at an unprecedented rate?
Why and for what have we become religious in our approach while dealing with the subject matter of primary education to scientific discoveries? What is that we as a country are failing to address? Who is accounting for the systematic transformation to reduce the income gap between classes?
However, here one must be informed to understand that an intolerant approach of any political ideology is lethal if not rejected by the people in due time. Here, I would say, people in groups always have a difference of opinion and preferences, but those were covert and were never out in public.
However, what has happened that this time, across the world, people are out on the streets to abuse other’s pasts and derogate the minorities or migrant groups to their face? This is surely not the sign of civility. Civility is the highest form of education that is capable of begetting tolerance.
Francis Fukuyama in his book, The End Of Ideologies And The Last Man, discusses Plato’s doctrine of thymos (desire) taken from the book Republic. Accordingly, there are two kinds of thymos: megalothymia and isothymia. The former demands authority upon the other whereas the latter seeks equality and rebukes all sort of dominance by any human being.
The rise of a global right-wing across diversely independent states of the world is a message that people with megalothymia are part of the electoral race in the majority of capitalist liberal democracies. However, Fukuyama proposes that the end of struggle between megalothymia and isothymia is a sign that master-slave relationship has also diminished with the rise of tolerant democracies post-Cold War and thus, the end of ideologies is imminent. But, is it that simple?
Both the authors, Fukuyama and Huntington might have succeeded in comprehending nation-state character for the purpose of international politics. Though looking at current times, the liberal democracies are fulfilling Huntington’s idea of a clash of culture by the name of religion and minority attacks but not with other nation-states, instead within one’s own country.
Secondly, according to the current political scene, the master-slave relationship has become more stringent in liberal democracies like India, USA, New Zealand and Belgium as compared to nations not very famous for liberal ideas like China, Russia and North Korea. Here, such an illustration poses a self-explanatory notion of ideology by Fukuyama. This goes to suggest that when we apply these two ideas to national politics of independent nation-states, the outcome is the same, but inverse.
Learning from a tolerant education system, the immediate solution at hand is that we need to expand the horizons of the so-called educated class by including civility as a prerequisite to be called educated. Education can provide a moral framework but can never fully organize morality for the seeker of knowledge. It is up to the seeker to develop the morality within the boundaries of that framework residing on the axiom of justice, equality, brotherhood or sisterhood, and the idea of sharing and caring of others.
Scientifically speaking, a theory is a theory till the time it is refutable. Similarly, if a scientific theory can be tolerant to criticism, then all public discourse deserves the same amount of tolerance by the educated class ruling the less educated one.
Society has to be vigilant about coping up with the idea of intolerance as a whole and not in silos. Society has to be aware of new behaviour that can be introduced in this paradigm shift of education making it more inclusive, especially when the world is standing at the cusp of technological transformation.
Here, India has a long tradition of holding respect for multi-ethnicity and multi-religiosity having the history of open discussions and discourse. Until then, every global and national citizen of liberal democracy shall attempt to be tolerant of acquiring the charity of love.
