The Violence of Education

To call education a form of violence is, in a certain sense, a stretching-too-far of the term 'violence'; nevertheless, education often leaves behind in its trail certain violent repercussions in a person's later life, especially because of the commonly held association between 'education' and the ambiguous notion of 'sanity'. In spite of all their internal disagreements with one another, educationists will hardly wish to deny that one purpose, at least, of education is to make people more 'sane'. One of the most common ways in which this claim is understood is through the perspectives of a 'black-box model' of the educational system : you put children into it at one end, and they come out 'sane' at the other end, say ten years later.

What is forgotten in the process is a series of important issues.

(A) Firstly, the crucial fact that sanity is not a static accomplishment to be attained once and for all, but a dynamic process that goes on as long as we are alive. To exaggerate slightly, we must continuously keep on striving to preserve our sanity. Perhaps sanity and insanity are but the extreme points on the same continuum, and we traverse through various resting-places on this continuum during different stages of our lives, and perhaps, these days, even on different days of one week. That is, sanity is a 'project', albeit one that can never be perfectly attained.

(B) Secondly, a lot depends on how this term 'sanity' is defined. At its narrowest, a person is 'sane' if s/he follows some kind of a 'scientific rationality' (though defining the latter in precise terms is itself yet another headache). If this were truly to be the canon for sanity, the number of people who would have to labelled as insane is truly mind-boggling. So in a less restrictive sense, let us define 'sanity' as some kind of 'logical consistency' : a person is sane if the beliefs s/he holds do not directly inhibit the attainment of goals that follow, implicitly or explicitly, from such beliefs, or if s/he holds a set of views such that it is not possible to derive both a theorem and a negation of this theorem within this very set.

Once we are prepared to understand sanity in such terms, we can appreciate that different world-views will require us to define and re-define the word 'sanity' with due respect to the surrounding context. Here is just one example. Religious believers have received, over the last four hundred years in Europe, a lot of bad press : they are, to put it bluntly, simply insane. However, consider the following set of beliefs/practices :

Belief 1 : There is a supra-spatiotemporal Reality called God.
Belief 2 : God has given us, through a Revelation, some rules to follow in our lives.

Practice 1 : We must therefore live in accordance with these rules in order to reach God, the supreme Goal of our endeavours.
Practice 2 : Following these rules is our symbolic way of expressing our gratitude to God.

In other words, here we have a perfectly consistent 'system' of beliefs and practices, and since we have defined sanity in terms of such internal consistency, there is nothing insane about having the above consistent set of Beliefs and Practices 1 - 2. To be sure, one may reject Beliefs 1 and 2 on various grounds, and hold them to be unjustified. Nevertheless, unless one defines sanity in terms of rejection of the belief that a supra-spatiotemporal entity can exist, there is nothing insane in holding Beliefs 1-2, and thereby taking up Practices 1-2 in accordance with these Beliefs.

(C) So far, then, the point is quite clear : Sanity is a statistical construct. Why, for example, did religious believers run the risk of being labelled as insane in the Moscow of 1970? Simply because there were, statistically speaking, more people who described themselves as anti-religious (in fact, as 'militant atheists') than people with the opposite self-definition. On the other hand, in a small town in Utah in USA or in Abu Dhabi in Saudi Arabia in the year 2004, it might be atheism which is regarded as insane out there, and this because there are more religious folk there than 'blasphemers of God'. There is, however, a more interesting point : Sanity is also a gendered construct.

To put it bluntly, sanity is the special privilege of women. In most cultures down the centuries, women, more regularly than men, have been associated with some form of insanity. (St Joan D'Arc and Ophelia are only two names that come immediately to mind.) Such beliefs have, of course, now been swept under the carpet by the force of legal measures which have compelled the menfolk to become 'politically correct' overnight. However, it remains extremely doubtful to what extent 'we, the menfolk' have really overcome our age-old notion that women are more prone than ourselves to suffering from 'fits of insanity'. Perhaps somewhere inside us we continue to harbour the suspicion that, appearances notwithstanding, women 'deep below' are really sentimental, irrational and ureasonable. A woman's beauty, they used to say, is but skin deep; in this case, perhaps, we men still suspect that a woman's sanity could be but skin deep, that under her 'fair skin' there lie vast, unexplored, and 'untamed' resources of dark, seething and 'uncivilised' insanity.

(D) So far I have been taking 'sanity' and 'logical consistency' to be largely co-terminous. However, any student of the history of ideas will know that even this is too restrictive a definition. Some of the greatest ideas have come out of thinkers/artists/philosophers/composers/scientists/writers who were regarded by most of their contemporaries as being insane. So much has this association of 'greatness' with 'insanity' become entrenched in the 'popular psyche' that we have the most ironical spectacle of some academics, who for all their high-talk about the importance of sanity, force themselves to behave in a way that they know will appear to be insane to their compatriots and students. Such people condemn themselves to the agony (or is it a bliss?) of leading two parallel (and, consequently, unconnected) lives : they continue to swear by sanity to maintain their academic credentials, on the one hand, and try to establish their insanity, on the other hand.

Be that as it may, the basic point here is that 'mere consistency is not enough' and that such consistency is, as it has been said, the hobgoblin of small minds. I am not denying, of course, that there is a supreme aesthetic beauty in a set of inter-related views that are consistent with one another (much of the scientific enterprise is, in fact, based on the search for such highly formalised beauty). However, most 'paradigm changes' have been initiated by people who were dissatisfied by the level of consistency attainable within an earlier paradigm, and strove to attain a higher consistency within a newer paradigm. In other words, the very notion of 'consistency' is itself historical, so that what seemed consistent enough to our intellectual ancestors does not seem so anymore to us.

(E) Consequently, the question-begging association of 'education' with 'sanity' is one that must be vigorously resisted. Our schools and colleges have become temples to Sanity which 'we, the menfolk' have erected as a God in our own image, and demanded that billions of students who come out of these institutions shall pay homage to this God at all costs. As a result, the world becomes more and more a fragmented place where those who happen to be left behind in the rat-race, or those who may consciously choose to stay out of it, or those who for various reasons are never even to able to join it, are cast into one gigantic heap of anonymity, a heap summarily dismissed as being 'insane'. A very popular reading of the Christian 'Dark Ages' runs as follows : these were the miserable, unenlightened times when millions of guilt-ridden monks and nuns crossed themselves at the altar to the unknown God seeking expiation for their sins. It is not my intention here to point how this is yet another 'atheist myth' which is shamelessly peddled in the public square masqueraded as 'dispassionate historical truth'. Rather, even if that reading were to be accepted, it is also true that our own educational institutions have now become the old monasteries of yore where billions of sanity-obsessed students are churned out every day, to live the rest of their lives paying unquestioning obeisance to that newly-invented divinity called Sanity. A few do somehow manage to raise some rather impolite questions about this Deity, but these questions are immediately downplayed with abuses such as archaic, mediaeval, uncivilised, and other unspeakable heresies.

Am I then arguing that we deliberately revel in 'insanity'? A very common post-modern argument runs as follows : X was rejected by modernity, so let us now celebrate X. As applied to specific instances such as feminism, post-colonial theory and so on, that is very good advice : women, the Blacks, and the 'third world' must now be allowed to speak with their 'own voices'. But if that argument were to be accepted as an absolute rule, its dangers become evident at once. Among the notions that 'European modernity' rejected, though somewhat hesitatingly, are those of slavery, persecution of social-religious dissidents, and Ptolemian cosmology. Shall we then revive, in the 'spirit' of post-modernism, the last three with the claim that these are 'repressed voices'?

In other words, the mere fact that modernity rejected X does not give us any straightforward access to making the claim that we must now accept X. Much will depend on, in addition to other things, what this X actually is. Similarly, to claim that 'insanity' must be revived by us post-moderns simply on the grounds that modernity had suppressed expressions of it would be too trivial an argument. The basic questions that we must first deal with in this context would be : (a) What exactly is sanity? (b) Where do the 'boundary lines' between sanity and insanity lie? (c) Who has laid down these lines? (d) Why is sanity a value? (e) If insanity is valuable, for what reaons?

To summarise the whole of the preceding in one sentence : we human beings are forced to suffer so much because of our Sanity. Does 'liberation' then lie in insanity? This is, allegedly, the Romantic approach taken by some English poets and some German savants, but even this will not do, for it assumes all too easily that there is a strict dividing line between sanity and insanity. Instead, we must realise that the relation between sanity and insanity is far more 'dialectical' than we, the sanity-ridden products of 'education', are willing to admit.

We must be sane enough not to try too hard to remain sane, for it is precisely such an attempt that leads to insanity. On the other hand, we must be insane enough to persistently question where the limits of our sanity lie, and having realised those limits try our best to accept them as a part of the 'human condition' and humbly live within the horizon of this sanity.