On education and freedom

As John F. Kennedy once said, Liberty without Education is always in peril, Education without Liberty is always in vain.

What did he mean? Does it imply that we shouldn't teach people in undemocratic countries, or that in countries where education is failing liberties should be taken away out of fear of misuse?

Totally oppositely, as you might have guessed, JFK merely meant to express in simple terms a very straightforward truth: we need to be free to learn, and we need to learn to be free. The world has been driven by two powerful forces: Man's desire of freedom and Man's desire to know.

How do these two forces interact? The possible interpretations are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert, but let me pick one of them and look at it in detail.

Education is not all about mnemonics. You might learn whole books by heart and still never understand how to apply the general knowledge you have acquired. Whether you know that 2+2 is 4 doesn't mean you grasp the principle behind addition.

Education is the development of a human mind into something unique, powerful and independent. The whole purpose of teaching children to read is to enable them to acquire further knowledge later in both academic and independent study. A teacher's purpose is to teach students to ask themselves questions, and seek answers.

But what happens when you ask yourself questions, and seek answers? You don't think just about the elementary things in life; you might wander into the abstract realms of philosophical thinking, taking human nature and the world to bits in order to analyse it.

Here's where liberty becomes essential. Philosophical and independent thinking in general require no boundaries for it to be set, to foster exploration and discovery of new concepts and doctrines. Had the ancients surrounded their lands with walls assuming there was nothing beyond, Columbus would have never been an explorer.

Free thinking, independent philosophical analysis and knowledge development occur only in those societies that are prepared to accept or debate the new findings in order to establish their validity. Where this is not the case, human beings drift into a state of idleness, performing only subsistence tasks without challenging the marvellous ability given to us in the form of critical thinking.

What is then the purpose of breeding new thinkers and educated people if we will deny them the right to develop their thinking talent and share their findings with us? Whereby we deny the liberty to think in a novel way, we take all purpose away from education beyond the level needed to carry out basic subsistence tasks such as counting the money at a rural market stall. This is unacceptable and is an insult to the human nature of Man.

Taking a look at the problem from the opposite direction, we notice a different focus. Whereby we have the freedom but not the infrastructure to deliver education and knowledge, people find themselves in an awkward situation of handling the precious gift of freedom without knowing even which way to hold it. We witness this situation in recently freed countries such as de-colonised Africa. Leaving aside the many responsibilities of the colonising powers in creating today's problems, we notice a particularly worrying trend.

Sub-Saharan Africa's crippling or non-existent education is an endemic problem brought by many factors such as unrest and poverty, and there's a vicious circle which makes these countries spiral deeper into trouble. Let us take a part of this chain, lack of education.

What happened? With de-colonisation, peoples who were used to some sort of domination (foreign, tribal or other) were bestowed with a precious gift which was independence and freedom to run themselves as a country. However, their critical thinking had not been fostered (full blame goes to the colonising powers), thus the newly-acquired freedom was squandered by loyalties arising along ethnic, religious or other lines instead of becoming a loyalty to the newly-freed community. As if this wasn't enough on its own, unscrupulous (and frequently uneducated but ferocious) leaders indoctrinated their people to believe that the only way to settle a dispute is to kill your opponent.

We left these populations at the mercy of unscrupulous warlords, unaware of how precious independence and liberty were to give them away. Had we educated these populations and opened their minds to the vast ocean of knowledge that centuries of civilisations have helped to fill, the value of freedom would have been much more appreciated.

All this serves to prove one essential point, grasped fully by Kennedy. As much as we need to set no boundaries to human thought and independence, we also have a moral obligation to empower people to cross known boundaries and explore the world outside their mindsets. Miss out on one of those commitments, and all your efforts are vain and result in nothing but waste and disaster.