Unforgivable

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There are few things that strike me as being completely unforgivable. One of those things is how individuals and society as a whole treats children and adolescents.

Be it deliberately stripping them of agency on all matters in their everyday life, not out of benevolence towards them, but out of convenience.

Having them, under threat of consequences, devour continuously to the pursuit of what the adults in their life find is important for them. Knowing that they’ll loathe the sight of these things, whether actually important or not, for the rest of their life.

Or requiring them to put up with the tight-fitting encasement of school, which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinch and bruise the nature of children on all sides and at every turn.


I am not the only one who believes this. In fact, if you look at the autobiographies of a wide variety of people, you’ll come across these ideas again and again. It almost seems that every great personality at some point in their lives has written a critique of formal education. Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Rabindranath Tagore, and Bernard Shaw. Just to name the ones who have a Nobel Prize in Literature. [1] All of them could very well have said this. In fact, they have. What you read in the introduction is me paraphrasing each of them.

It is amusing to think that what most unites these four men, and perhaps all exceptionally able people to ever have lived, is not a particular political belief, nor the country in which they have lived. No, it is their dissatisfaction with what masquerades as “education” and the conviction that there is something wrong with it.


Albert Einstein

To begin, let’s first look at Albert Einstein. Few words in his memoir are dedicated to his personal life. What stands out is that he doesn’t refer to his mother a single time, and to his father only once (when he got a compass from him). But he takes his time to write in considerable length about the coercion he had to endure in the name of “education”:

“This coercion had such a deterring effect (upon me) that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.” [2]

When Albert Einstein wrote this, he was already nearing the end of his life. And what a life it had been. Not to imagine if he had not devoted his time and energy to scientific endeavors.

Frighteningly, it seems to have come very close to this. One can only wonder if even a person like him could be temporarily alienated from what he loved most through coercion, how many people who don’t possess his strength have we irretrievably lost to this.

Albert Einstein also intuitively understood what needs to be done to change this:

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.” [2]

How powerful, how simple. An education building upon what Albert Einstein describes would not tell us what needs to be known, what is important versus what is trivial. Instead, it would place the “agency” of the individual in the center of everything, acknowledging its crucial role in deep learning experiences.

In the context of education, this means the freedom to choose what to learn, where to learn it, with whom to learn it, as well as how to learn it — and, perhaps most importantly, if to learn at all.

It is a shame that 70 years after Albert Einstein’s death, this vision has not yet been realized. But perhaps it is an idea whose time has now finally come — in a world that is fundamentally different from the one Albert Einstein left in 1955.


Rabindranath Tagore

Once you start looking, these ideas can be found everywhere. A superb writer and one of the founders of modern Bengali literature, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote this:

“[School] is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life’s line is not the straight line [...]” [3]

He expanded upon it:

“So my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement.” [3]

Maybe this isn’t entirely true, but there are good reasons to think it is. How terrifying considering that shoes that are too tight cause numbness and irreparable (spinal) deformities.

Likewise, children who’re systematically deprived of agency in an educational context and in their parental environment develop an unnatural relationship to failure and a bias for inaction.


Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw who famously thought of schools as being “in some respects more cruel than a prison”, also had strong opinions about coercion in an educational context:

“With the world’s bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: A book from which no human can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.” [4]


Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill, who decisively shaped the course of history with his stubbornness towards Nazi Germany, had to fight battles on a smaller scale before that.

He had to fight his teachers, who had “large resources of compulsion at their disposal”, whereas he had only his “stubbornness”. Ironically, a situation not much different from his struggles in WW2.

“My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.” [5]

The enforced attempt to have someone read something, have someone learn something, without the motivation coming from the students themselves. That can’t work properly. It tries to produce the effect without the cause.


Conclusion

These were stories of some of the most brilliant minds we had, and they were each stunted in the growth of their own curiosity and interests through coercion in education.

Education today isn’t built around the needs of exceptionally able children and adolescents. Perhaps the only ones who feel remotely content with it are (intelligent) conformists. In absolute numbers, the vast majority — measured in accomplishments, a tiny minority.

If the world consisted only of intelligent conformists, then the future of the Homo Sapiens would look bleak.

Because with a somewhat acceptable level of independence and originality in a narrow field, you may be able to become an executive at IBM, but you’ll certainly not push the human species forward. The ones who do, they’re non-conformists by definition.

What strikes me as the greatest loss are not the scientific breakthroughs never accomplished, the works of literature never written, but the squandering of the human spirit.


On a final note, I would like to share a story with you that I encountered while reading Peter Gray’s “Free to Learn”. A story that unfortunately involves the suicide of a 13-year-old girl:

“After missing fifty-three out of the required one hundred and eighty days of school, she was told that she would have to return to school or appear before a truancy board which could then send her to a juvenile detention center. She decided the better alternative was to go into her bedroom and hang herself with a belt.”

In a just world, she would have had the freedom to learn on her own terms. But in a world of compulsory “education”, she is deemed collateral damage.

The story above strikes me not even as a tragedy, but as something more inhumane. Someone wanting to decide for themselves, in a country that is purportedly all about freedom, and having to pay with their life for it.

I do not think this 13-year-old girl will forgive us. And I do not think we should forgive ourselves.

Notes

[1] Correction: Albert Einstein does not have a Nobel Prize in Literature.

[2] “Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Paul Schilpp, ed. (1951), pp. 17-19 © 1951 by the Library of Living Philosophers, Inc.

[3] “My School,” in Personality: Lectures Delivered in America (London: MacMillan and Co., 1921), pp. 114-115

[4] “A Treatise on Parents and Children,” preface to Misalliance (1909), reprinted in Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, volume IV (1972), page 35

[5] My Early Life, pages 8-9, 12-13