Learning the Treasure Within by Jac

Learning the Treasure Within by Jacques Delors, UNESCO, 1996


















REVIEW
While talking of education, we must bear in mind that with the advent of scripts numerous problems have taken birth. Besides who should read what and prepare for a life deprived equally by oneself and the society, numerous complications have apparently surfaced because of religion, philosophy, anthropology and politics. Each one of these areas has made claims on literacy and education. I am deliberately making a distinction between education and literacy because I believe education could not be perceived independently of human existence. Even the primitives must have passed on their `life-skills' to their children and Nature would have naturally yielded treasures at the instance of creativity and innovations. Possibly, even in those times of yore, human had a philosophy of life for guidance.

Literacy, coming along with the advent of scripts, has hastened to confuse the parameters of education. Education is the sum total of one's philosophy, religion, politics and what have you. Whereas literacy is no more than an instrument of political and social response, education covers a wide terrain. The two, therefore, need not be perceived as one beyond accepting the fact that literacy has certain inherent advantages over education like uniformity in learning, storing of information, offering an additional means of communication, etc. But literacy does not exhaust education.

However, the way literacy has created problems should not be over looked. It has helped in building pyramids of learning and class hierarchies solely on the basis of information definable in terms of quantity and quality. Whatever may have been the nature of social structures in the primitive stages of human development, one thing is certain. Their hierarchies otherwise would have been neither all that stable nor so clean-cut as they are today.

Be that as it may, education and literacy have come to be equated and are generally accepted as implicitly interchangeable terms.

The demands on education and the definition of its nature have yielded countless volumes in philosophy, religion, sociology, etc. If we have a group of people who have nothing but admiration for education and for whom it is the only key to resolving all problems we face, there are others who regard it as an instrument of class war, a means by which even the indefensible can be defended, and a trick which takes away one's peace of mind by creating a bug bear of uncertainties of future. The entire concept of market economy versus social welfare is the direct result of the wonder called education.

One wonders whether the uncertainties of future and the unstable nature of nation-states and their politics would ever help individuals regain their peace of mind and yield pleasures of existence even if such pleasures are less than permanent. Even the bodies and organisations like UNESCO have not been free from the pressures which have arisen out of the wealth and the power this wealth has created. We already have divisions in societies demarcated in terms of social classes, quality of information, goals of life corresponding to occupations people have created. In fact, the world itself has been divided on these very bases i.e. of power and pelf, and nation-states are clubbed under the economic terms `developed,' `developing' and `underdeveloped.' These terms cover a wide area of social existence, i.e., of skills, information, quality of life, political power and the like. Not content with this kind of categorisation, we have the terms like Third World countries as contrasted with the first and second world nation-states. This classification implies a condemnation of certain nation-states which are placed as the bottom rung of the ladder.

Interestingly enough, there is yet another dimension to this classification. The state of a nation's development is judged in terms of citizen's longevity, their education, social security cover, etc. These criteria seem to have been evolved more to measure the wardness of the erstwhile colonies than to discover the reasons for the advancement of the few. However, what one is not able to measure on this scale is the happiness of the nation-states. A recent survey, cited in The Times of India (22th December 1998), has revealed significantly that happiness of a people cannot be judged on the criteria evolved and accepted by the rich and advanced countries. While the USA and many European countries were found to be the unhappiest, Bangladesh topped the list of happy nation-states, with India occupying the fifth position. The top consumerist society does not necessarily also become the happiest.

In the quest for refinement of skills and for ever speedy communication of information, we have put an immense burden on the school system. Children are being given more and more information. Selection and distribution of information appear to have become the sole purpose of schooling. Education and schooling are being used as synonyms. Ranking of educational institutions is symptomatic of classification and typology of skills and information. Those institutions which are selective in these matters, put a market tag on their provisions. Consequently, not only we have classes, we have correspondingly a hierarchy in educational institutions. Seen against a world order, in which a few lucky ones are able to lap up everything, educational institutions become status symbols and knowledge/skill a branded marketable commodity.

It is against this drop that we should read Learning: The Treasure Within, a report submitted to UNESCO, Paris by an International Commission on Education for the twenty-first century headed by Jacques Delors. In the opening submission chapter by the chairman, education has been declared to be a necessary utopia. Education is declared to be "the principal means available to foster a deeper and more harmonious form of human development and thereby to reduce poverty, exclusion, ignorance, oppression and war." One would like to agree with Monsieur Delors but he has overlooked the fact that education, coupled with economic power, can itself become a source of terror and oppression. The more Americans are getting quality education, the more their thirst for power seems to become insatiable. They can attack other nation-states at will and can support dictatorships and downright terrorist nations in the name of democracy. If education can result in twisting and skewing the very purpose for which such commissions are set up, there is little hope for mankind to grow into civilised beings. Perhaps this is the reason why Delors accepts yet another reality: "The truth is that all-out economic growth can no longer be viewed as the ideal way of reconciling material progress with equity, respect for the human condition and respect for the natural assets that we have a duty to hand on in good condition to future generations."

Monsieur Delors regards "education as an ongoing process of improving knowledge and skills, it is also perhaps primarily an exceptional means of bringing about personal development and building relationships among individuals, groups and nations."

Being chairman of an international commission has its own compulsions. Therefore one must talk of education in very general, utopian perspectives. Education must be implicitly accepted as a `good' because one cannot go on regarding education merely as a tool for improving one's lot.

The commission identifies a few tensions that it regards will be central to the problems of the 21st century. They are: 1) the tension between the global and the local, i.e., local people need to become world citizens without losing their roots; 2) while culture is steadily being globalised, this development being partial is creating tension between the universal and the individual; 3) the third tension is pretty familiar to Indians the tension between tradition and modernity. Whereas for some the process of change is slow, for others it is not so, thereby creating problems of adaptation; 4) the need to balance between impatient cries for quick answers to peoples' problems and a patient, concerted, negotiated strategy of reform results in the problem/tension between long-term and short-term considerations; 5) tension arising out of human desire to complete and excel and the concern for equality of opportunity; 6) the tension between the extraordinary expansion of knowledge and the capacity of human beings to assimilate it; 7) lastly, another perennial factor the tension between the spiritual and the material.

It is the last tension which the commission thought was necessary to address. In the language of Delors; "There is, therefore, every reason to place renewed emphasis on the moral and cultural dimensions of education, enabling each person to grasp the individuality of other people and to understand the world's erratic progression towards a certain unity; but this process must begin with self-understanding through an inner voyage where milestones are knowledge, meditation and the practice of self- criticism" (p.19).

For an Indian, this paragraph should appear very familiar. One wonders whether Dr. Karan Singh had a role in its evolution. Reading Dr. Singh's write-up (pp. 225-27) one does get that impression. However, the familiar stages through which an individual acquires wisdom or is able to realise truth and face reality are Shravan, Manan and Nidhidhyasan. When one listens or reads, that is the first milestone, meditation the second and reflection the third. I can hear an Indian ring about Monsieur Delors, milestones.

While the commission acknowledges the implicit message in these milestones and the need for the establishment of wider and more far-reaching forms of international cooperation, it does not undervalue the central role of brainpower and innovation, the transition to a knowledge-driven society, the