Education and Democratic Citizenship: Saving Freedom of Mind

[T]he object of education is the freedom of mind which can only be achieved through the path of freedom — though freedom has its risk and responsibility as life itself has.
   -Tagore, "School" (lecture published in Personality)

I'm worried about education, all around the world. Educators who care about the continuous development of children's powers of action, thought, and imagination have always had an uphill struggle against the forces of bureaucratic inertia that seek to define education in easily quantifiable terms, and also against the forces of tradition and conformity that seek to define it in terms of the internalization of received wisdom. But under the influence of the great progressive educators, above all John Dewey in the U. S. and Rabindranath Tagore in India, we had come to a shared understanding that democracy needs citizens who are truly self-governing, and that this requires progressive education. By this I mean an education that teaches by active critical engagement with the world, including participation and imagination—not merely technical proficiency or the cramming of a conventional syllabus. Now that shared understanding is coming apart, and I fear for the future of democracy around the world as a result. The legacy of progressive education is healthier in the U. S. than in many other nations, where chasing the prosperity made possible by technical skill has become a full-time occupation, driving out all other educational concerns. In the U. S. too, however, the role of education in forming independent self-governing citizens is increasingly ignored, in favor of the sort of learning that leads to financial success and political docility. Some of the crucial ingredients of Dewey's and Tagore's program are being cut to the bone: the arts, in particular, are the losers when the market calls the tune.

In this talk I want to do three things. First, I'll offer two schematic examples of education gone wrong and education gone right; second, I'll analyze three values that are urgently needed, if schools are to prepare citizens for responsible democratic citizenship in this complex world. Third, I'll ask tentatively where we are in the U. S. with respect to these values, and how the Lab School can play a leadership role here.

Education gone wrong. This example is so bad that you will hardly believe it, but I assure you that it is very common all over the world. It is the example of state-run schools in India. One place to see it in action is in Lalit Vachani's excellent twenty-minute documentary, The Boy in a Branch, and this is the case I'll describe, from middle-class Nagpur, in Maharashtra. The children concerned are around twelve years old, but they might have been older or younger. So: these children go to school. They sit at desks in rows. A teacher, who seems utterly bored is standing in front of them. Without making eye contact, she paces back and forth, reciting an account of Indian history that comes from one of the textbooks nationally prescribed for examinations. Students are then grilled on whether they have memorized the book. State examinations will test the ability to regurgitate the narrative of history contained in the book, so there is no point wasting time on critical analysis, the tools of historical inquiry, or anything like that. The kids look really bored, and the point of Vachani's film is that this boredom feeds into the ability of the quasi-fascist organizations of the Hindu Right to lure them in, using games, theatre, and music to teach an ideology of hatred and violence.

Second, education gone right. I could give many examples from India here too, mostly from nongovernmental organizations working with the rural poor, where the state curricula have not yet exercised a deforming influence. But let me instead take one from my correspondence with an Indian-American software engineer, who is trying to explain to me what he felt his own education in India lacked, and what his nephew's, in North Carolina, has. The topic in the North Carolina classroom is the civil rights struggle in the U. S., and, through this lens, the broader topic of race in American society. In a manner totally unsurprising in the post-Dewey U. S., the kids approach this subject by putting on a play in which they reenact Rosa Parks's famous bus ride. They first act out various roles, and then discuss how they felt, when they were made to sit in the back of the bus, and how this made them think about issues in their own society. Imagination and critical thinking are closely linked, as the children learn about a topic vital for democracy through their own activity. These kids have absorbed something that may possibly prevent them from enrolling in a hate movement of the sort that our country, too, offers all too plentifully. The propositions involved in non-violence and mutual respect are taken in beneath the mind's surface. As Dewey would say, real unfolding, real growth, was taking place, in a way that, in turn, prepared students for further growth.

Nothing could be more crucial to democracy than the education of its citizens. Through primary and secondary education, young citizens form, at a crucial age, habits of mind that will be with them all through their lives. They learn to ask questions or not to ask them; to take what they hear at face value or to probe more deeply; to imagine the situation of a person different from themselves or to see a new person as a mere threat to the success of their own projects; to think of themselves as members of a homogeneous group or as members of a nation, and a world, made up of many people and groups, all of whom deserve respect and understanding. So it is not surprising that education has been so emphasized in recent political debates in many developing and developed countries.

Much of this debate, however, has been taking place on a very narrow terrain, that of basic skills, and particularly the type of skills required for success in science and technology, which the middle class the world over regards as the key passports to personal and national success. The dream of a middle-class Indian family is to have a child at IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology. A child who studies literature or music, or who becomes an artist, is something of an embarrassment. So those skills are simply not essential, and when cuts must be made, the arts and humanities are cut away. The U. S. has not moved as far in this direction as many poorer nations. Particularly at the college level, we have intact traditions of liberal education that protect us, and traditions of private philanthropy that, in turn, protect those traditions. But things are clearly moving in the Nagpur direction. Even those urging reform in education rarely mention the arts and humanities. In a recent column in the NY Times, Thomas Friedman decried our low success in science and math, never for a moment mentioning that there are other skills, essential to the health of democracy, that we might be in danger of forgetting. Now I'll argue that abilities connected with the "humanities" and the "arts" are crucial to the formation of citizenship. They must be cultivated if democracies are to survive, through educational policies that focus on pedagogy at least as much as on content.

Let me begin with the model of education for democratic citizenship that I elaborated in my book Cultivating Humanity. It has affiliations with the ideas of progressive educationists John Dewey in the U. S. and Rabindranath Tagore in India, who in 1905 founded a progressive school in Santiniketan outside Kolkata, which had striking similarities with some of Dewey's experiments and which greatly influenced progressive education in England.

Three capacities, I argue, are essential to the cultivation of democratic citizenship in today's world. First is a capacity stressed both by Tagore and Dewey: the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one's traditions, for living what, following Socrates, we may call "the examined life." This means a life that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit, a life that questions all beliefs, statements, and arguments and accepts only those that survive reason's demand for consistency and for justification. Training this capacity requires developing the capacity to reason logically, to test what one reads or says for consistency of reasoning, correctness of fact, and accuracy of judgment. Testing of this sort frequently produces challenges to tradition, as Socrates knew well when he defended himself against the charge of "corrupting the young." But he defended his activity on the grounds that democracy needs citizens who can think for themselves rather than simply deferring to authority, who can reason together about their choices rather than just trading claims and counter-claims. Socrates compared himself to a gadfly on the back of a noble but sluggish horse: he was stinging the democracy to wake it up, so that it could conduct its business in a more reflective and reasonable way. Modern democracies, like ancient Athens, but even more so, given the nature of modern media, are prone to hasty and sloppy reasoning and to the substitution of invective for real deliberation. We need Socratic teaching to fulfill the promise of democratic citizenship.

Critical thinking is particularly crucial for good citizenship in a society that needs to come to grips with the presence of people who differ by ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and sexuality. We will only have a chance at an adequate dialogue across cultural boundaries if young citizens know how to engage in dialogue and deliberation in the first place. And they will only know how to do that if they learn how to examine themselves and to think about the reasons why they are inclined to support one thing rather than another—rather than, as so often happens, seeing political debate as simply a way of boasting, or getting an advantage for their own side. When politicians bring simplistic propaganda their way, as politicians in every country have a way of doing, young people will only have a hope of preserving independence if they know how to think critically about what they hear, testing its logic and its concepts and imagining alternatives to it.

Students exposed to instruction in critical thinking learn, at the same time, a new attitude to those who disagree with them. Consider the case of Billy Tucker, a nineteen-year-old student in a business college who was required to take a series of "liberal arts" courses, including one in philosophy. Interestingly enough, his instructor, Krishna Mallick, was an Indian-American originally from Kolkata, familiar with Tagore's educational ideal and a fine practitioner of it. Tucker was a freshman in college, but these same skills can, and indeed should, be cultivated from a very early age in age-appropriate ways—I hope you will discuss this in your break-out groups. Students in Mallick's class began by learning about the life and death of Socrates; Tucker was strangely moved by that man who would give up life itself for the pursuit of the argument. Then they learned a little formal logic (something that kids as young as 5 or 6 have been shown to be very good at), and Tucker was delighted to find that he got a high score on a test in that: he had never before thought he could do well in something abstract and intellectual. Next they analyzed political speeches and editorials, looking for logical flaws! (Again, this would be lots of fun in younger classrooms.) Finally, in the last phase of the course, they did research for debates on issues of the day. Tucker was surprised to discover that he was being asked to argue against the death penalty, although he actually favors it. He had never understood, he said, that one could produce arguments for a position that one does not hold oneself. He told me that this experience gave him a new attitude to political discussion: now he's more inclined to respect the opposing position, and to be curious about the arguments on both sides, and what the two sides might share, rather than seeing the discussion as simply a way of making boasts and assertions. There are lots of ways to work this sort of debate into the curriculum, and it is also present in extracurricular activities such as Model U. N., at which Lab excels.

This transformation is precisely what Socrates, and Tagore, had in mind. The idea that one will take responsibility for one's own reasoning, and exchange ideas with others in an atmosphere of mutual respect for reason, is essential to the peaceful resolution of differences, both within a nation and in a world increasingly polarized by ethnic and religious conflict. It is possible, and essential, to encourage critical thinking from the very beginning of a child's education. I've seen it cultivated in little girls who cannot yet read, and in adult women who work in the fields all day. This freedom is of particular urgency for women, who are so often encouraged to be passive followers of tradition.

But now to the second part of my proposal. Citizens who cultivate their capacity for effective democratic citizenship need, further, an ability to see themselves as not simply citizens of some local region or group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern. They have to understand both the differences that make understanding difficult between groups and nations and the shared human needs and interests that make understanding essential, if common problems are to be solved. This means learning quite a lot both about nations other than one's own and about the different groups that are part of one's own nation.

The international part of this ability is particularly difficult to cultivate in the U. S., since Americans are so resistant to serious learning about any other country, insulated by America's size, wealth, and power. But from the early years of primary education it can and must be cultivated, by appropriate choices of stories, historical narratives, and also, later, a basic understanding of how the world economy works and what globalization is. This analytic understanding must always be accompanied by literary and artistic works, and films, that bring other parts of the world to life.

Still more delicate, perhaps, is the related task of understanding differences internal to one's own nation. An adequate education for living in a pluralistic democracy must be a multicultural education, by which I mean one that acquaints students with some fundamentals about the histories and cultures of the many different groups with whom they share laws and institutions. These should include religious, ethnic, social and gender-based groups. Language learning, history, economics, and the study of politics all play a role in pursuing this understanding, in different ways at different levels. Awareness of the history of cultural, economic, religious, and gender-based differences is essential in order to promote the respect for another that is the essential underpinning for dialogue. There is no easier source of disdain and neglect than ignorance and the sense of the inevitable naturalness of one's own way.

This is where good textbooks are indeed important. A good textbook will convey fact in a balanced and accurate way and will give all the narratives their due. It will reveal the complexity of the nation, both past and present, and it will help students understand the internal complexities of groups (Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, evangelical Christians) that might easily be viewed in too simplistic and monolithic a way. This task includes showing students how and why different groups interpret evidence differently and construct different narratives. Even the best textbook will not succeed at this complex task unless it is presented together with a pedagogy that fosters critical thinking, the critical scrutiny of conflicting source materials, and active learning (learning by doing) about the difficulties of constructing a historical narrative. Students should be using source materials and learning for themselves how complicated the task of historical evaluation and reconstruction is.

This brings me to the third part of my proposal. As the story of the civil rights play indicates, citizens cannot think well on the basis of factual knowledge alone. The third ability of the citizen, closely related to the first two, can be called the narrative imagination. This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person's story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have. As Tagore wrote, "We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy#133;But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed." Dewey, similarly, spoke of a conventional education in which "Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being, and the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside." It was Dewey's view that imagination is crucial to any serious learning. "An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct physical response is the sole way of escape fro mechanical methods in teaching."

The narrative imagination is cultivated, above all, through literature and the arts. Reliance on the arts was the most revolutionary aspect of Tagore's and Dewey's proposals, which used theater, dance, and literature to cultivate the imagination. Through the imagination we may attain a kind of insight into the experience of another that it is very difficult to attain in daily life—particularly when our world has constructed sharp separations, and suspicions that make any encounter difficult.

The arts offer children opportunities for learning through their own creative activity, something that Dewey particularly emphasized. To put on a play about the civil rights movement is to learn about it in a way that is likely to seem more meaningful to a child than the reading of a textbook account. Learning about hardship and discrimination enters the personality at a deeper level. The arts are also crucial sources of both freedom and community. When people put on a play together, they have to learn to go beyond tradition and authority, if they are going to express themselves well. And the sort of community created by the arts is non-hierarchical, a valuable model of the responsiveness and interactivity that a good democracy will also foster in its political processes.

Finally, the arts are great sources of joy, and this joy carries over into the rest of a child's education. Amita Sen's book about Tagore as choreographer, aptly entitled Joy in All Work, shows how all the "regular" education in Tagore's Santiniketan school, which enabled these students to perform very well in standard examinations, was infused with delight because of the way in which it was combined with dance and song. Children do not like to sit still all day; but they also do not know automatically how to express emotion with their bodies in dance. Tagore's expressive, but also disciplined dance regime was an essential source of creativity, thought, and freedom for all pupils, but particularly for women, whose bodies had been taught to be shame-ridden and inexpressive.

There is a further point to be made about what the arts do for the reader or spectator. As Tagore knew, and as radical artists have often emphasized, the arts, by generating pleasure in connection with acts of subversion and cultural criticism, produce an endurable and even attractive dialogue with the prejudices of the past, rather than one fraught with fear and defensiveness. The great African-American artist Ralph Ellison, for example, called his novel Invisible Man "a raft of perception, hope, and entertainment" that could help the American democracy "negotiate the snags and whirlpools" that stand between it and "the democratic idea." Entertainment is crucial to the ability of the arts to offer perception and hope.

At the heart of all three of the Tagorean (and Deweyan) capacities is the idea of freedom: the freedom of the child's mind to engage critically with tradition; the freedom to imagine citizenship in both national and world terms, and to negotiate multiple allegiances with knowledge and confidence; the freedom to reach out in the imagination, allowing another person's experience into oneself. Many politicians the world over don't like educational freedom: they seek the imprisonment of children within a single "correct" ideology. We have reason to fear a creeping orthodoxy, to the extent that national standards lead to the prescription of national content.

These ideas have roots in many traditions, old and new. But there is no more wonderful depiction of what is wrong with an education based on mere technical mastery and rote learning than Tagore's sad story "The Parrot's Training."

A certain Raja had a bird whom he loved. He wanted to educate it, because he thought ignorance was a bad thing. His pundits convinced him that the bird must go to school. The first thing that had to be done was to give the bird a suitable edifice for his schooling: so they build a magnificent golden cage. The next thing was to get good textbooks. The pundits said, "Textbooks can never be too many for our purpose." Scribes worked day and night to produce the requisite manuscripts. Then, teachers were employed. Somehow or other they got quite a lot of money for themselves and built themselves good houses. When the Raja visited the school, the teachers showed him the methods used to instruct the parrot. "The method was so stupendous that the bird looked ridiculously unimportant in comparison. The Raja was satisfied that there was no flaw in the arrangements. As for any complaint from the bird itself, that simply could not be expected. Its throat was so completely choked with the leaves from the books that it could neither whistle nor whisper."

The lessons continued. One day, the bird died. Nobody had the least idea how long ago this had happened. The Rajah's nephews, who had been in charge of the education ministry, reported to the Raja: "'Sire, the bird's education has been completed.'

'Does it hop?' the Raja enquired.
'Never!' said the nephews.
'Does it fly?'
'No.'
'Bring me the bird,' said the Raja.
The bird was brought to him, guarded by the kotwal and the sepoys and the sowars. The Raja poked its body with his finger. Only its inner stuffing of book-leaves rustled.
Outside the window, the murmur of the spring breeze amongst the newly budded asoka leaves made the April morning wistful.

This wonderful story hardly needs commentary. Its crucial point is that educationists tend to enjoy talking about themselves and their own activity, and to focus too little on the small tender children whose eagerness and curiosity should be the core of the educational endeavor. Tagore thought that children were usually more alive than adults, because less weighted down by habit. The task of education was to avoid killing off that curiosity, and then to build outward from it, in a spirit of respect for the child's freedom and individuality rather than one of hierarchical imposition of information.

I do not agree with absolutely everything in Tagore's educational ideal. For example, I am less anti-memorization than Tagore was. Memorization of fact can play a valuable and even a necessary role in giving pupils command over their own relationship to history and political argument. That's one reason why good textbooks are important, something that Tagore would have disputed. But about the large point I am utterly in agreement: education must begin with the mind of the child, and it must have the goal of increasing that mind's freedom in its social environment, rather than killing it off.

To what extent has education for freedom, as I have described it, become a reality in the world today? Tagore's actual influence has not been widespread. Several reasons can be found for this: the relatively narrow reach of the Bengali language and the poor quality of many English translations of Tagore's work; Tagore's own personal charisma and artistic distinction, which made it difficult to convert Santiniketan into a mass movement; and his distaste for bureaucracy, which meant that, unlike Dewey (who was not a creative artist but who was a capable entrepreneur), he did not try to have a mass movement. Even in Santiniketan today, education is routinized; even the dance performances contain little creativity. Dewey, by contrast, has had widespread influence. In every primary school in the U. S., and in many other nations who are aware of his influence, one will see at least some of Dewey's ideas realized, as young children learn by doing rather than by rote learning, as they use drama and literature to probe difficult historical and global issues. NGO's the world over use such ideas very creatively, knowing that their task is not to stuff their pupils with facts but to produce minds that seek out learning on their own. The fact that NGO education is purely voluntary makes them seek out techniques that enliven curiosity.

Dewey's legacy, however, is fragile. Even here at the Lab School, the very cradle of his ideas, you all know the pressure that comes from parents aspiring for success for their children: a pressure for college admissions and for ultimate material and status achievement, all of which can easily distort the educational process. Elsewhere things are far worse. All over the U. S., the arts are being phased out as useless frills, by contrast to the "real" stuff of education. This hasn't exactly happened at Lab, but what I do know is that as children get older, the pressure of homework at Lab is so intense that there is less and less time for extracurricular activities, as the arts most commonly are. And while critical thinking has not been displaced by rote learning, there is so much content to be mastered, and such difficult skills, that crucial arenas for critical thinking, such as Model U. N., also become merely extracurricular, and suffer by competition with the real "meat" of the curriculum. My daughter went to the Cambridge School in Weston, Mass., a Dewey-inspired school that has in many ways remained more radical than Lab has, and cultivates a group of counter-cultural parents who whole-heartedly subscribe to Dewey's ideals. At Cambridge School, the arts are required and graded full-credit subjects, and there is a set of demanding requirements for graduation in a variety of different arts. Moreover, the whole curriculum is on a module system, which facilitates learning by experience in all areas, since the long blocks of class time can be used for field trips, for experiments, and for lots and lots of critical thinking. Just at present, Cambridge School is building a new science building: but, in keeping with Dewey's heritage, it will not be the usual sort of science lab building, but a Science and Art building, where constant interactions and collaborative projects will indicate the necessary synergy between creative science and the use of the imagination. Cambridge School, rather like Tagore's Santiniketan, is regarded with some skepticism by the upwardly mobile, who fear that so much emphasis on arty things is going to damage the real root of happiness. It has managed, however, to carve out a market niche with the ex-hippies of Massachusetts, and so it has been able to remain true to its principles in a way that is perhaps more difficult for Lab.

Science and technology are important, and nations are surely right to focus on the prosperity that they promise to bring. It would be disastrous, however, if the other parts of a liberal education were short-circuited in the process, producing nations of smart engineers who have little capacity for empathetic imagining and for critical thinking. Such impoverishment of mind would nourish the politics of obtuseness and hatred, all over the world. In the U. S., it would nourish both political detachment and complacency and a tendency to polarization, as people mistrust the ability of reasoned debate to bridge differences.

Progressive education, emphasizing critical thinking and imaginative learning, exacts high financial and human costs. It requires very individualistic focusing on each child's experience, and it requires constantly attentive and imaginative pedagogy, which means, I think, attracting people who can do it by paying them well enough to make it worth their while to do it, a problem that U. S. schools have certainly not solved. But the importance of progressive education for the health of democracy is out of all proportion to these costs. Moreover, my experience in NGO's around the world shows me that the imagination is a hardy plant. When it is not killed, it can thrive in many places, without a lot of fancy equipment, as it thrives in so many utterly impoverished NGO programs I've observed. If NGO's that have no equipment and no money, only heart and mind and a few slates, can accomplish so much, there is no excuse for the public and private schools of this wealthy nation to lag behind. I can best summarize my wish for the future of education in today's world, and particularly in my own country, with a poem of Tagore's addressed to his country:

Where the mind is without fear
And the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken
Up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving
Stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
Has not lost its way into the
Dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward
By thee into ever-widening
Thought and action —
Into that heaven of freedom,
My Father,
Let my country awake.

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