Schooling and free thinking

While schools are considered the intellectual, educational and civilisational nurseries - being a prerequisite for furthering the journey of human civilisation that had started from the barbaric Stone Age and has reached the age of artificial intelligence — they are also the barriers against the human civilisational retrogression which is marked by the clipping of the wings of imagination and by the unabated moral turpitude ending on animalism. The regress was precipitated when schools started using fear as a tool to administer the instruction. Over time, schooling has become synonymous with policing the human mind.

Schooling and human civilisation have been concomitant to each other. Both complement each other through the agency of mind, as Bertrand Russell writes in his essay The Functions of a Teacher, "Civilisation, in the more important sense, is a thing of the mind, not of material adjuncts to the physical side of living." To bolster the cause of a civilised humanity is made possible only through fostering in learners a spirit of free thinking to resist the powers that are hellbent upon depluming man of his unrivalled status of being the paragon of all creatures. Free thinking has to be made the raison d'être of schooling because only then is it possible for man to come up with plans to deal with the challenges threatening his peaceful existence.

For the pursuit of free thinking, the likes of Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Mark Zuckerberg and many Nobel laureates like Alvin Roth had bad school experiences of being either backbenchers or dropouts, as free spirit resists being imprisoned. Despite all the odds, their eminence in the fields depending upon education raises questions or perhaps doubts about the role of schools in early education. One common factor is school formalism stipulating conformity. Schools don't let children think and do what they want to. The restrictions restrict their spirit counterproductively.

Here, one may argue that what is taught under authority at this age becomes educationally part of mind and memory. No doubt about it, but if administered by force or under fear, it gets ossified, not to be recalled for building connectedness between thoughts — the connectedness in cognitive streams is the raw material for creating something new out of something (creativity) and sometimes out of nothing (intuition).

The real problem lies in schooling, not schools. The need is to bring a sea of change in the way young minds are schooled. For the transformation to occur, authority must be acknowledged, not enforced or asserted. The gradual attribution of physical discipline, strictness and punishment to schools has rendered schooling a punitive treatment to tame the spirit, the untameable. This ideological warping of schools came into existence when knowledge was transferred through words only. When words are not inspired by actions, the physical presence of pedagogues fails to inspire students. A patina of harshness is used to blur the gap between a pedagogue's words and actions.

This adopted persona of ironclad harshness is a ploy to subdue free expression. When conformity is sanctified as obedience and disagreement is reproved as impertinence, the human mind, over time, gets stunted. Free thinking miscarries when intimidating authority muzzles freedom of expression. It would be the beginning of the end - the backslide of human civilisation. Suppression of truth, fearing its unavoidable reality, proves more menacing than the reckoning of truth: the former is more apocalyptic than the latter. Rather, the unpalatable truths provide opportunities to recognise and remove the incongruity between thinking and performance. Authoritarian pedagogues, writes B Russell in Education and Discipline, 'tend to become sadistic disciplinarians' whose 'pupils acquire horror of knowledge' because of 'the well-grounded hatred of the authoritarian pedagogue'.

A school is a country in microcosm. The values taught or propagated there are inherited from the higher echelons of control and transferred to future generations. Education is usually conducted as instruction, but when administered in fear, it turns into indoctrination.