I was recently having a long conversation with one of my friends who is also teaching and is generally interested in education and related issues. We talked about Gandhi's Hind Swaraj and it that context he was wondering if by educating the children the way it is now, are we doing more damage. I was desperately trying to convince him that it is not so, that unlike Gandhi that I was fully embracing modernity (though I have to say I have not read Hind Swaraj but I have read a review of it by T.S.Ananthu). I was later wondering about why the essential messages to structure society has always failed throughout history. Messages from Sangam Literature like Purananooru (400 songs about how to live life with regards to the society) or Tirukkural, messages from Plato, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammad or later from Marx or Gandhi all seem to have fallen on deaf ears. I find it not surprising.
My thesis, is simple. Human society, like life, has evolved and has not been designed (well, if you are one of those crazies who subscribe to Intelligent Design you would not be reading this post in any case!). It would continue to evolve and cannot be designed. By that I mean that it will take small steps that would be advantageous to it in the short-term. Evolution does not know about the long-term. All these folks tried to prescribe a design and not surprisingly it has not been adopted. On the other hand, if you look at free-market capitalism, it is by nature evolutionary where choices of individual agents make a system. There is no overall design as such. You can see now why it has been readily adopted so widely!
Our cultural evolution has brought us to a stage where we actually employ some design to organize our societies. This might sound contradictory but if you think carefully we could have just blundered into constitutional democracy and found it beneficial. So the contemporary human society finds itself equipped with some possibilities for design.
That said, what are we to do now? Those who are interested in pushing the society in a specific direction can and should do it only in small steps. Evolution has never made radical changes and our societies would also never accept radical changes. Rather than having grand (grandiose?) goals of an utopia let us take small steps to make each individual a thinking and tolerant member of the society.
Coming to education, the focus on education should remain on the individual. If we have a grand design of a society and we build an education system to create such a society, it is bound to fail due to the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraphs. So, focus on the individual and hope for the best...
P.S. - I was actually tempted to keep the title as “It is not teleological” but my wife somehow hates that word, especially when I use it....
