“Possibilities and Probabilities in Higher Education of Asia”
ISBN 978-623-91211-3-6
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HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE CULTIVATION OF
enlighten us. To be enlightened is to be cultivated through knowledge and to be free from prejudice. Immanuel Kant in his essay ‘On enlightenment’ (1784) said enlightenment is an emerging from one’s own self inquired inability to make a use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. To be dependent is to entertain a kind of sluggishness to understand, willfully disowned once responsibility. To Kant it is the lac of resolution and courage. Man of enlightenment must have the ability to trust one’s own judgement and he must be courageous to sustain on his judgement. It demands responsibility and perpetual alertness, while explaining this Kant said “if I have a book that understand for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me. A doctor who decides a regimen for me, and soforth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need note think, if only I can pay, others will readily undertake the irksome business for me”. This is sheer sluggishness, cowardness or in modern terms to be a victim of one’s own comfort zone. Not to be enlightened is a refusal of one’s own understanding. To Kant “Nothing is required but freedom, freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” To be enlightened is to resist any condition which would not allow to enlarge one’s possibility to think. Nothing should be accepted as sacrosanct. This potentiality will create the age of enlightenment which is the age of hope. Wherein, freedom, courage to question, public responsibility and progress would be the virtues and values of enlightenment and this will create a better world. To be self reflexive, at the every individual and social act, is to be enlightened. With this insight the project of modernity was chartered, but modernity has minimize the domain of reason and freedom. Our society is measured not on qualitative change or transformation. We are adequately dependent on the quantitative parameters like material wealth, technological progress, infrastructural development, resource management and ruthless manipulation of technology and technological delusions. It is impoverishment of human freedom, human dignity and potentiality to inquire. Authoritarianism has empowered human being. Man has become submissive to technology, bureaucracy, market and media and knowledge has become a skilled management. We live today in a close mind syndrome wherein suspension of reason is it’s hard core. The resultant according to Saul Bellow is that
“civilized discourses has suffered scorchingly” (Allan Bloom, 2012 : 18)
It has offered ‘a troubled man’. T.S. Eliot – a great poet of in 20th century – expressed his anguish :
“Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the dust.”
Higher Education as a hope :
Against this existential scenario of despair and dispersion the only hope that is education – Higher Education, which would create and cultivate democratic spirit. Education alone can monitor and enchant our soul. Higher Education asserts firmness of mind, creation of prosperity, earnest endeavor, friendship, knowledge and wisdom.
In Higher Education Truth is not a solution but an inquiry. Higher Education fear from absolute assertion about knowledge and wisdom. Higher Education is a quest of openness
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and tolerance which are basic democratic values. Here truth is not a capital ‘T’ but small
‘t’. It is a non authoritative expression of truth. Higher Education should treat students as a potential germinating point who can go beyond itself. This to Allen Bloom is the source of hope because in Higher Education students are not born but created. They are the agents who can dispel the dictating code of convention and prejudice. Learning in Higher Education must create a virtue of self reflexivity. What is required in Higher Education must have irrepressive aspiration for knowledge and an inquiring mind and a questioning spirit. Allan Bloom has rightly said “The liberally educated person as one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers. Not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration. (Allan Bloom, 2012 : 21)
Education in this respect is open to all, it is an egalitarian pursuit. It can invite all, and can explore new life style, new ideology and create a fair hope for mankind. Allan Bloom has rightly said “There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything” (Allan Bloom, 2012 : 27)
Higher Education has to combat against academic and ideological absolutism and nihilism and to create tolerant relativism which will sustain, strengthen and substantiate academic freedom. It is a vital thread of democracy and higher education both.
It is truism that the tone and texture of absolutism to assert one’s own opinion, as the valid claim is an academic arrogance or academic fascism and it abducts human dignity and freedom. This arrogance of academic fascism has led humanity to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, myopia and chauvinism.
Suspension to think is criminal to democracy and higher education. This kind of doctrination in Higher Education is a dismissal of the spirit of Higher Education and will make the educator either to conform or be silent. In this respect the spirit of Higher Education demands openness and to be critical. Higher Education must have faith that even in confusion and turmoil there is still an open channel of soul, which can pass independent judgement and will not to lean or sweptaway by any external compulsion. Against the noise of history, subjugation and destruction against negation and hostility, souls like Yajnavalkya or Socrates can become the torchbearer of the future and can lead humanity to betterment. This kind of yearning and its culturation must be made by Higher Education. Higher Education is not and should not be a warehouse of opinions and ideologies. It is an offering of the free spirit made by autodidact to have and to preserve one’s own sacred voice. It is the very soul of Higher Education. So Higher Education should not subsume only to the wish of students, not to be suppressed by the demand of a particular society and should not be dependent on the vagaries of the market.
To go beyond these dictates is to create an ever green renaissance and that is the hope and future of Higher Education.
When teaching becomes a thread of philosophizing the self-searching inquiry become the corner stone of liberal education. It is an utmost tender act wherein learning enriches the horizon of knowledge without enforcing. It is a real liberal thrust of Higher Education. Here no answer is obvious yet not simply unavailable. It is not a terrain of easy preferred and preached answer but a terrain of self-searching. It is an autodidactic quest wherein other considerations are also to be welcomed for inquiry. In this respect Higher Education is the home of vision and the self-search for a good life, a real motive of Higher Education.
Higher Education is an exercise to create social well-being wherein compassion and tolerance are the richest value to be accepted and executed. Higher learning understood in a Socratic sense is a life time learning and an uneasy labour, for that recasting of the structure of knowledge is needed. We need an academic surgical strike wherein sluggishness to think should be evaporated. The monolithic structure of learning is an exercise of alienated academic discourse, which is singular and not secular. The secularization of knowledge will be possible when we treat academic non singularity as a welcoming gesture in the pursuit of knowledge. Higher Education cannot honour exclusion as an academic value. Plurality should be taken as a fact of existence and knowledge. Academic pursuit should welcome other discipline and its discourses and truths are to be sympathetically accepted for the pursuit of knowledge. Similarly quantification should not be treated as a pride of research but should be censored and should be de-limited by reason. Only quantification creates a blind alley of research, which defy the very pursuit of research because it creates data as reality and what is being quantified becomes the claim of truth. The ontic plurality cannot be studied by the method of epistemological singularist methodology.
Academic discourse of higher education ought to be nonsingular and should honor pluralist ontology and pluralist research methodology and must entertain elasticity in the pursuit of knowledge. Academia has to honour and execute multidisciplinarity as an apt way of looking and viewing reality. We have to fight against compartmentalization of knowledge and should delimit its assertion and scope. It creates openness and tolerance for other discipline. We must resist the sigmantic logic of the discipline and should cultivate secular learning as the hard core of higher education. This will lead to the growth of knowledge particularly in humanities. To have a multidimensional personality we must have multidisciplinary and multidimensional system of learning.
Multidisciplinarity should be open to the good. The loyalty to be human demands its quest of knowledge should play in the corridor of goodness. To be aware of the good is one thing and to have the desire to possess goodness is to have a priceless humanizing acquisition given by culturation. This culturation cannot remain contented with what is given by culture.
Humanity cannot be a prisoner of culture alone. Humanity has to transcend and has to go beyond.
Dr. Radhakrishnan has rightly said “Man is not body and mind alone. He has in addition the spiritual dimension. As long as nature of man is interpreted by societies, natural and social and his life and world are shaped according to these concepts, the essential free spirit of man is overlooked and yet it is this free spirit that accounts for the waywardness and unpredictability of history” (S. Radhakrishnan, 1992 : 122)
Multidisciplinarity has to take in to account the thrust of spirit to go beyond the boundaries of disciplinarity and should earnestly discover one’s own real being which is demonstrated through various disciplines. Culture has to encompass his written and studied disciplinary trajectory. What is needed is a cultural shift from the rising of close and stipulated set of culture. A voyage from closeness to openness is essential. It is a cultural imperative to rise above one’s consolidated horizon.
Openness and expansion is a cardinal need for cognitive cultural shift. Higher Education has to expand his wings for cognitive cultural shift. In this respect higher education with the spirit of democratization can execute the cognitive shift and can guide the spirit of mankind.
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Openness as the key for cultural cognitive shift and also necessary for the cultivation of democratic spirit :
For the embodiment of the democratic spirit indiscrimination is a moral imperative as the opposite of it is discrimination. In this respect it is an equalitarian gesture and whose thrust is for openness. This openness needs deeper reflection. Openness usually turns into relativism but relativism extinguishes the real motive of education and the real motive of higher education. Its real motive is the search for good life. But relativism by distinguishing culture as different and hierarchical sets a new kind of imperialism which is spur to learning.
Openness has to create one’s own lifestyle which logically means we do not need others.
So the great opening turns into the great closing and its obvious indifference and learning becomes a disciplinary propaganda. Here we do not subjugate cultural difference but the pathological hegemony of culture, because to them culture is ethnocentric and every culture treats one’s own culture as superior and all others as inferior. Love towards one’s own culture is obvious; man must love and be loyal to their family and their people in order to preserve them. This serves as a demand of an inquiry in to the importance of roots. But it is difficult to avoid decomposition. Science which was a liberating enterprise becomes a threat to culture.
That is a fear. Science would uproot the established culture.
The discourse of cultural studies is lost between goodness of knowing and goodness of culture. It is a dichotomy between loyalty and quest for good life. This is an unresolved tension in life, society and culture. The awareness of the good and the desire to possess it, according to Allan Bloom “is a priceless humanizing acquisition of the mankind”. Bloom has rightly said “Man cannot remain content with the what is given to them by culture, if they are to be fully human”. Plato in Re-public shows the image of cave. A culture is a cave and for that history and anthropology is not of much value. It asserts and gives dogmatic assurance that thought is culture bound. Here philosophical inquiry a self-searching episode can light the path. The road well established by thinkers like Socrates and Kant that “One has to be superior to one’s subjectness”. To go beyond is the cry not even of culture but also of higher education. To establish oneself as a cultural being is to invent the self and liberate it from cultural bonds. What is required is openness to seek good. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit to openness as the goal makes openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both culture of one’s own and the sense of goodness. To grasp everything and through reason and science and to grasp human situation through cultural relativism, historicism and the fact-value distinction are according to Allan Boom “The Suicide of Science”. One has to save culture and the higher education. In this respect culture and higher education both teach openness to closeness.
Cultural relativism has successfully destroyed the western intellectual imperialist claim.
True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know and to be aware of one’s own ignorance. Openness are of two kinds.
1. The openness as indifference.
2. Openness as the quest for knowledge and certitude.
The first alternative is a dejection of desire while the second alternative increases the desire.
Cultural cognitive shift is the secret thread of higher education. Real currency of openness is to be open to knowing if learning goes with the flow of the present it ought to be an
accommodative learning. In this respect the true openness means closeness to all the charms, it is found comfortable in the presence. Here opposite to prejudice is to take bath in the brilliant light of truth. The cognitive shift that higher education is to set questions, inquire and able to philosophize. This is the need of the day, for the cultivation of real democratic spirit.
The truest representation of the searching mind is just to ‘follow the brush’.
References
Allan Bloom (2012), The Closing of the American Mind, New York : Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
Heiner Rindermann (2018), Cognitive Capitalism – Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations, New York : Cambridge University Press.
S. Radhakrishnan (1992 Rep.) Occasional Speeches and Writings – October 1952 – February 1959, New Delhi: The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.
“Possibilities and Probabilities in Higher Education of Asia”
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