Education: Humanities and Science

There has been a spirited debate triggered by Mark Slouka’s essay (Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School) and in this post I am setting down what I have taken away from the discussion.

Science and the humanities are both ancient and great traditions and I doubt if there is anyone who would set them up in an antagonistic zero-sum confrontation the way people tend to do in the case of science and religion. Both are vital and necessary elements of a balanced education. That much should be a statement of the obvious. It is only when we focus on their different strengths that we enter into an interesting discussion.

To posit their differences very starkly one can oversimplify a little and adapt the argument of a recent article on religion and science: humanities ask about the why, science explains the how; science researches matters of empirical fact, while the humanities are concerned with matters of ultimate values; scientists use empirical techniques and theories to account for the physical and material world, whereas the humanities are concerned with the non-material aspects of life. Science cannot provide the answer to our metaphysical questions and the humanities cannot explain how nature works.

The same article uses the example of the global climate crisis to show how the two are related. Human beings will only be able to respond appropriately to the crisis when the best scientific information is combined with the values and motivations that emerge out of asking what it means to be human, who we are, and how we should act in the world. Questions like these are at the heart of the humanities and in an excellent article Stanley Fish shows how just reading Milton can help us get to grips with almost all of them. (It was the inspiration for the Ghalib Project on this blog.)

An important issue in our discussion has been realization of the importance of critical thinking as a necessary condition for the achievement of a just and ethical society. While the importance of critical thinking is beyond question, its relationship to science and the humanities has not been articulated clearly. I would argue that one must differentiate between strands of critical thinking that are peculiar to the domains of science and the humanities. The critical thinking that goes with the pursuit of science has to do primarily with speculation and reasoning; in the case of the humanities the focus is on abstraction and analysis. One cannot do good science without the ability to think critically – all the great scientists were also great thinkers – but science may not be the best vehicle to teach the kind of critical thinking that was the concern of Mark Slouka, i.e., the thinking needed to investigate the nature of our humanity.

I think it is important to realize that critical thinking cannot be taught theoretically – one cannot have a Critical Thinking 101 and hope to be successful. Critical thinking is learnt by osmosis and while science and humanities nurture their own domain-specific types of critical thinking, well-rounded human beings need an exposure to both. We need to know the shortest path between two points and we also need to know where the two points ought to be located.

Some of these differences stem from the varying nature of enquiry in the sciences and the humanities. Science involves the search for truth and scientists dig deeper and deeper to uncover that truth – but there is, in general, only one true answer to a proposition in science. This is most obvious in mathematics, the purest of sciences – the answer to a math problem is either right or wrong. One speculates about the possible answers and reasons and experiments the way to the one that is true. In the humanities, on the other hand, there is no right or wrong answer – there are multiple answers, some more coherent or persuasive than others. In getting to terms with these multiple answers one learns the qualities of tolerance, detachment, openness, and equanimity, and gracefulness.

One can visualize these very different perspectives by imagining a class in mathematics and in literature. Both subjects are intrinsically beautiful but the nature of the interactions between peers is quite different. In the former one is seeking a certainty, in the latter learning to deal with doubt – what Claude Levi-Strauss terms the “philosophical attitude par excellence.” His description of the trauma of ‘anthropological doubt’ should be very familiar to those who have been part of a tutorial class having to read an essay to a half dozen peers ready to tear the argument to shreds: “This doubt consists not merely in knowing that one knows nothing but in resolutely exposing what one knows, even one’s own ignorance, to the insults and denial inflicted on one’s dearest ideas and habits by those ideas and habits which may contradict them to the highest degree.”

Needless to say, neither the creative scientific attitude nor the nurturing of open thinking in the humanities can be achieved without teaching of high quality. But one can infer from the above why the teaching of the humanities might be that much more onerous. In a class in science, one finds out sooner or later that one’s answer to a problem was wrong – and that information is enough to make one seek the source of the mistake and to correct the thinking that led to the error. Nothing like that process of self-directed learning exists in a class in the humanities – the instructor has to provide the feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the argumentation, its logic, and coherence. If the class is too large, if the teaching assistants are not sufficiently advanced, if the mid-term assignments are not returned till the final, virtually no real learning may take place in a course except a superficial familiarity with the works of a particular author.

When one combines this inherent difficulty with the fact that school teachers in the humanities are accorded a lower status than those teaching math and science, that students and parents have come to think of the humanities as of little worth in the competition for jobs, that society encourages the best and the brightest to gravitate to well-paying professions – it is only then that one realizes the gravity of the challenge that Mark Slouka highlights in his essay.

It should also be recognized that because the ability to reason and the capacity of being open minded are imbibed by osmosis, the intellectual make up of a young adult is more or less determined by the end of high school. The style, the content, and the quality of South Asian school education are all devastating in this regard – it is no surprise that we are producing excellent technicians who are quite out of their depth in fields outside their narrow specializations and that the quality of political leadership has declined rather than improved over the years.

Mark Slouka is right to raise the danger flag even though, at its best, American school education is very much structured around open enquiry and colleges ensure that every student, no matter what the final choice of major, takes enough courses across the humanities and the sciences to measure up to the needs of an educated citizenry. Slouka’s concern is that the increasing orientation of society geared to the corporate bottom line – a phenomenon very well articulated by Lewis Lapham – is ‘dumbing down’ the humanities, transforming them from the engine of subversive thinking to a toothless appendage of big business.

This may well be true. If so, America would lose its cutting edge and become more like South Asia – a huge pool of technically qualified people with diminished creativity and its democracy would begin to fray at the edges. But this drift in the orientation of society cannot be attributed to the dominance of science. It has very different causes and the causality runs in the reverse order. It is the dominance of corporate interests that is dictating the allocation of resources in education with the balance shifting away from the humanities. One only has to look at South Asia where this is already the case although for somewhat different reasons.

There is one last aspect that needs highlighting. Critical thinking, whether the variant nurtured by science or the one by the humanities, is a capability that is independent of ethics and values. It is necessary to question the greed, cruelty, injustice, and the spurious ideologies that riddle our society but it is by no means sufficient. Values and ethics belong to the realm of social conscience that has its roots in a different domain – and the search for that domain has an interesting and tortured history.

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Education: A Critique of Mark Slouka

Mark Slouka’s essay (Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school) comes across as a persuasive argument that the humanities have lost out to math and science in American schools and that this does not bode well for the future of democracy.

The fact that the essay is persuasive should be no surprise – Slouka is a professor of English and he employs the art of rhetoric at its finest. The language is so elegant that one can read the essay just for that pleasure alone. But one should not allow the intoxication of elegant prose to overwhelm reason – as public policy, Slouka’s essay suffers from at least two major flaws.

Slouka’s main point has validity – the framework in which we reckon the value of things, the thrust of our education, our very language, has become excessively economistic. When we evaluate systems or programs or arrangements or plans, we more often than not ask whether they are efficient or cost-effective; we rarely ask whether they are just or fair. And this interpretive frame that has come to dominate our outlook does have definite negative consequences.

Others have made the point convincingly as well. Lewis Lapham, in his essay, ‘Achievetrons,’ ascribes this attitude as the reason that the ‘best and the brightest’ in America have repeatedly led it into disasters. In his talk on social democracy, historian Tony Judt identifies the same tendency for the growing disenchantment with governments and the increasing appeal of fringe movements that promise their own variants of justice.

Having made this point, Slouka then makes a leap of logic that is unwarranted – he associates the dominance of this economistic framework to the dominance of math and science and to quantification. By implication he associates the framework of qualitative values like justice and fairness and ethics to the humanities. And thus is set up a confrontation of cultures – science and maths on one side and humanities and the arts on the other. This is an ironic thought but could it be Slouka’s relative lack of exposure to math and science that has led him into this error?

In his comment, our reader Balasubramaniam has pointed out the fallacy in this formulation by Slouka. The central issue here is that a meaningful education needs to nurture the ability to think, to ask questions, and to analyze critically. There is no reason why math and science cannot be taught in ways that accomplish all these objectives. Bertrand Russell was obsessed with mathematics and at the same time was one of the most critical minds of the twentieth century.

It is equally possible that one could teach the humanities in ways that fail completely to develop the critical faculties. So the conflict is not between mathandscience (as Slouka terms it) and the humanities but between good teaching and poor teaching. And here we might have a different problem because good teachers are few and poor teachers are many.

The fact that our evaluative framework has become very economistic and bottom-line oriented has little to do with math and science. In fact many of Lapham’s ‘Achievetrons,’ including the neo-cons, must have majored in the humanities from the best schools. There are some other factors at work here that Slouka has missed out and this constitutes the second big gap in his analysis.

It seems reasonable to argue that education does not lead; it follows and adapts itself to the needs of production – in actuality to the needs of the ruling elites who control the means of production (and also the institutions of education for that matter). Therefore we have to look for what might have changed in society that was reflected in the changing focus of education. One can point immediately to the fact that the world of production at the beginning of the modern democratic era in the West was one of small firms. Universal general public education responded to the needs imposed by the societies of that period. Over time we have seen the emergence of the giant publicly owned corporations with their very different needs, both in terms of management and of performance. These needs, in turn were reflected in the changes in education with the growth of business schools with their bottom-line orientations. The impact of the military-industrial complex has been not only on education but on the very nature of democracy itself via the proliferation of lobbying by narrow but well-endowed interest groups.

But beyond economics lies the plane of politics that Slouka has not considered at all. There is no education that is independent of politics. Even creativity is a need of the political order in societies that are competing for global dominance because countries that cannot innovate inevitably fall behind. Thus critical thinking is to be nurtured – but critical thinking is a double-edged sword because it can also challenge inequities at home. It is no surprise that critical thinking is so carefully rationed and made available only to the extent it is needed – education can be made universal but not critical thinking.

This is not just the case in capitalist systems – countries that revolted against capitalism in the name of the masses were just as strategic with education using it as a means to political ends. And non-competitive countries based on oppressive systems, like most in the Islamic world, had no need to nurture any critical thought at all – all they needed were well-trained technicians or ideologically indoctrinated followers. In contrast, as Tony Judt has argued, social democracies in small homogenous societies (for example the Scandinavian countries) could afford to be much more liberal with their education because of their legitimacy and marginal role in global politics.

Slouka is right that “Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP. It’s about investing in our human capital” and he is just as right to desire instead a world in which we “invest our capital in what makes us human.” But Slouka errs in thinking that math and science have brought us to this pass. In fact, education was always about the GDP – it is the composition of GDP and how it is produced that have changed dramatically over time, a change that is reflected in the nature of our education.

Slouka makes the case for the humanities by quoting Epictetus – “Only the educated are free.” That, no doubt, is true but the way our societies are constituted they cannot afford everyone to be free. Even revolutions from above have not bought us that freedom. Only when we free ourselves will be able to get the education that we need and deserve.

The three essays mentioned in this post (by Slouka, Lapham and Judt) are all archived on The Best From Elsewhere page (# 28, 42 and 25, respectively). For our extension of Lapham’s theme to South Asia see Hearts and Minds. For a related essay on this blog about education in South Asia see Why is Pakistan Half Illiterate?

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On Language and Communication

In the context of the Cairo speech, I had asked the question whether President Obama ‘got’ his audience right. The question was prompted by a conviction that speakers of different languages had subtle differences in how they saw and understood the world.

It is quite a coincidence that just a week later I found a fascinating study that has empirically tested this hypothesis.

Here are some (unconnected) excerpts from the article describing the study:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.

The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That’s a lot of stuff!

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people’s minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

Let us go back to what I had written in the post on the Obama speech:

Knowing one’s audience is an issue that has significance beyond the Cairo speech and beyond politics – it is at the heart of all communications, all attempts at persuasion, and all efforts at marketing.

Some socioeconomic situations make it easier to realize the nature of this phenomenon. Take a country like Pakistan with a colonial history where there are two broad groups in society – the English-educated, English-speaking elite and the others who communicate in languages other than English. The ways of persuading these two groups to a point of view require very different approaches. Again, if the constraint was to generalize with a one-word characterization, it could be argued that the first group is swayed more by deduction, the second more by precedent.

This might be difficult to accept as a first reaction. Try an experiment. Take an English language op-ed that you find particularly convincing. Translate it into a local language and give it to a local language speaker not familiar with English. Ask him or her the degree to which the message was found to be convincing. It is not that the local language speaker cannot be convinced or is impervious to logic; it is just that he or she has to be convinced in a different way.

This would be a great experiment for a journalism class.

In the post I had not mentioned how I came to feel that language had an impact on our thought process but in the context of the study mentioned above it is worthwhile doing so.

Many years back I happened to meet an editor of a local language newspaper at a time when he was planning an English language edition. My question was how he intended to deal with the scarcity of good opinion writers in English. He answered it would not be a problem because he would have the local language op-eds translated into English.

We met some years later and he told me the experiment was a failure. An op-ed translated literally from the local language to English seemed to lack something critical. It had to be fixed by someone who thought in English.

So I had empirical evidence of a limited nature.  Subsequently my own experiences of translating content from English into local languages for study groups strengthened the belief that it was necessary to understand how a person from a different language group thought before one could succeed in convincing him or her.

It is very exciting to see a systematic study attempting to deepen our knowledge of this complex phenomenon. It also tells us how we can go about understanding complex issues better by testing our hypotheses after we have argued and speculated about them.

The article by Professor Lera Boroditsky is also archived in The Best From Elsewhere section of the blog.

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Obama and his Audience

There can be many responses to the Cairo speech each depending on how one wished to incorporate it in one’s agenda for the future.

This is most obvious in the realm of politics: some want to see it as a hopeful point of departure and do not wish to be critical; others see in it the need to support Obama in his struggle with his domestic constituency that restrains his genuine aspirations; yet others read it as a reiteration of the Bush policy couched in more sophisticated words. Depending on the agenda some wish to emphasize the positives, others the negatives.

This blog is not about politics. Our focus is pedagogy and analysis that serves the interest of pedagogy. We often choose political themes to illustrate pedagogical points simply because students engage readily with issues that are topical and of wider significance.

Our perspective on the Cairo speech was determined by our pedagogical orientation. It simulated a classroom exercise in which the text was given to a group of students who were to think of themselves as part of a non-Western audience affected negatively in the past by American foreign policy. The group was asked to identify the points in the speech that such an audience would find weak and unconvincing.

This was a very academic exercise and one of our objectives was to highlight the importance of keeping one’s audience in mind. As we had mentioned, every audience is unique and its characteristics need to be considered carefully before an interaction.

In some cases this is very easy to grasp especially when the audience is self-selected. Thus the audience that goes to a show by a stand-up comic wants to be amused. On the other end of the spectrum, the audience that attends a majlis during Muharram wishes to be made to weep. It would be a disaster to mix up the needs of these two very different audiences.

Political audiences are more difficult to read because they are more of a mixed bag. Here we make some very broad and summary generalizations for the sake of discussion.

American political audiences who have never seen adversity or been at the wrong end of history want to be roused. Different segments of the audience prefer different ways of being roused. There are audiences for the Bush style of macho cowboy aggression, for Kennedy style idealism, for the Martin Luther King style message of hope, and for the Obama style that is an intelligent mix of all the other three.

American audiences respond to the personal anecdote, the hard-luck story, the heroic overcoming of odds, and the reiteration of the American dream like few other audiences in the world. Even Europeans view the American audience and what appeals to it as something quite different from their own traditions.

Non-Western audiences, especially those that nurture deep hurts and grievances, a sense of injustice and humiliation, have different needs. If there was a constraint to use a one-word description, it might be said that they do not want to be roused – they have been roused and let down too often. They wish to be respected.

This was the difference between Bush and Obama. Bush did not give them respect and Obama did. But Obama’s respect scratched the surface. It used the right salutations, the appropriate language, and acknowledged the heritage of his listeners. It aimed to mollify their sensitivities and flatter their egos.

But did Obama respect the intelligence of his audience? Here the verdict seems more mixed. As we mentioned in the earlier post, just because this was an address to a Muslim audience did not imply that the audience wished to listen to selective quotations from the scriptures and be told of what God wanted.

This audience might have responded better to a more forthright discussion of the critical issues. Even a frank portrayal of the difficulties in pursuing certain courses of action could have elicited a genuine appreciation of the obstacles in the way of getting to where Obama wants to lead the world.

The question we want to discuss in this forum is whether Obama read his audience right?

Knowing one’s audience is an issue that has significance beyond the Cairo speech and beyond politics – it is at the heart of all communications, all attempts at persuasion, and all efforts at marketing.

Some socioeconomic situations make it easier to realize the nature of this phenomenon. Take a country like Pakistan with a colonial history where there are two broad groups in society – the English-educated, English-speaking elite and the others who communicate in languages other than English. The ways of persuading these two groups to a point of view require very different approaches. Again, if the constraint was to generalize with a one-word characterization, it could be argued that the first group is swayed more by deduction, the second more by precedent.

This might be difficult to accept as a first reaction. Try an experiment. Take an English language op-ed that you find particularly convincing. Translate it into a local language and give it to a local language speaker not familiar with English. Ask him or her the degree to which the message was found to be convincing. It is not that the local language speaker cannot be convinced or is impervious to logic; it is just that he or she has to be convinced in a different way.

This would be a great experiment for a journalism class.

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Them Versus Us

The first part of this thought experiment was intended to test if my perception of the ‘Other’ was a reflection of nothing more than my own prejudices. It had me revisit repeatedly the same set of objects arranged in different ways to see how my reactions varied in response to the arrangements.

In the second part of the experiment I want to see the picture from the other end. This time I imagine myself to be a member of the set of objects and try to sense how I would feel in the various scenarios.

The setting is still the same – a classroom of children being visited by an outsider. As before, imagine that in the initial arrangement of the class all students, wearing the school uniform and no other marks of identification, are seated in random order.

The subsequent arrangements are as follows:

1. The boys and girls are seated separately.
2. The fair skinned and the dark skinned students are seated separately.
3. The school uniforms are gone and students in western dress are seated separately from those wearing native dress.
4. The urban and rural students are seated separately.
5. The non-handicapped and the handicapped are seated separately.
6. The students are wearing marks of religious identification and seated apart from each other.

In this experiment, the identity of the visitor varies in each scenario. The visitor can be male or female, dark or light skinned, in western or local dress, from an urban or rural background, and belong to the majority or minority religion.

How would we expect the children belonging to the various subsets to respond to a particular incarnation of the visitor? Under what conditions would the responses of the different subsets be the same? Under what conditions would they be markedly different?

There is a larger public policy issue embedded in this experiment. We know, for example, that public housing projects built exclusively for low-income groups ended up stigmatizing the poor. Racially imbalanced neighborhoods (black inner cities, white suburbs) heightened the resentments against segregation. Confining religious minorities to ghettoes fueled social tensions.

In an earlier post we have referred to the difference between ‘bridging’ capital (ties between groups) and ‘bonding’ capital (ties within groups) and pointed to research that shows that the former is much more crucial for social harmony. This would suggest that any arrangement other than a random mixing of the children in the classroom could give rise to fears and apprehensions whether they are justified or not.

We can now extrapolate from the classroom to society. In a region like South Asia where the social order is fractured in so many diverse ways and history carries such a burden of oppressions, we need to make a conscious effort to eliminate the sense of distinctions to the extent possible. We need to strive to see everyone as a citizen or transform everyone into a citizen, equal in every respect, and do away with outmoded notions of majorities and minorities.

We know that human beings are not born with prejudices. Children when allowed to play together are not conscious of differences; it is the early socialization that gives rise to the sense of difference followed by the perception of superiority or inferiority. This is what we need to minimize, if not altogether eliminate.

Is that possible?

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Us Versus Them

I am perplexed by the Us versus Them phenomenon. Try as I might, I have not been able to explain why it has such a powerful hold on so many of us.

Let me try and work through it once again using a thought experiment. I would like you to stay with me as I do and to give me your feedback at the end.

I imagine that I am invited to speak to a class of high school students in a city that I have never visited before.

I arrive at the school and walk through a corridor into the class. In front to me I find 60 students of both genders wearing the school uniform and no other marks of identification seated in random order.

Before I begin speaking to the students, this movie in my head goes into rewind mode. I am marched backwards out through the corridor. There is a pause and then I march back into the class. This process is repeated many times. Each time I re-enter the class, I find a different arrangement of the same students. Let us say, I am confronted with the following arrangements, in turn:

1. The boys and girls are seated separately.
2. The fair skinned and the dark skinned students are seated separately.
3. The school uniforms are gone and students in western dress are seated separately from those wearing native dress.
4. The urban and rural students are seated separately.
5. The non-handicapped and the handicapped are seated separately.
6. The students are wearing marks of religious identification and seated apart from each other.

I try and imagine if my emotions and mental responses would be the same in these subsequent encounters as they would have been in the first one.

Would that depend on whether I was sexist or a feminist, a racist or a sectarian, an Anglophile or an Anglophobe, on whether I had disdain for the handicapped or contempt for the unsophisticated?

Would I sense that the rural students smelled differently? Would I want the religious minority to apologize for something? Would I wish the girls to be more modestly dressed?

Remember that it is the same set of students; only the outward appearances and/or the seating arrangements differ in each scenario. Should my emotional response vary? And if it does, would it be fair to conclude that what I have to examine is myself and not the class?

Would it suggest that there are certain prejudices that I carry with me that make me react in a particular way to a particular arrangement of the same individuals?

I still won’t be sure where I picked up the prejudices – at my mother’s knee, in early socialization, in school, at my place of worship – but would I begin to look at myself more critically?

How would you react if you were the subject of the experiment?

Is it really Us versus Them or is it Us versus Us? Do we have to stop looking for someone to vilify, hate or pity and instead reach within ourselves to slay the demons that make us see the same reality in so many jaundiced ways? 

Can we do it?

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The Peculiarities of Imran Khan

Two things struck me as being odd in Imran Khan’s article that I had discussed earlier: how he found wisdom and the use he put the wisdom to.

Imran describes his narrow escape: “it was a miracle I did not become an atheist. The only reason why I did not was the powerful religious influence my mother wielded on me since my childhood. It was not so much out of conviction but love for her that I stayed a Muslim.”

I have just recently read Latika Gupta’s account of what some mothers are doing to their children and so reading Imran’s sentence made me shiver. Imran just turned out be very lucky in having a pious and sensible mother but is it a good idea in general to be shaped by the powerful religious influences of mothers and to believe in something out of love rather than conviction?

Could it not be the case that mothers would pass on all their prejudices to their children and the children would subscribe to them out of love? Let us stay within Islam for the moment and imagine a Muslim mother saying that Islam is superior to all other religions. Quite possible. But the same Sunni Muslim mother at the same time might say that Shias are not really Muslims and need to be taught a lesson (or vice versa). Equally possible. Where does that leave us?

To range a little further, is it difficult to imagine a White mother saying that Blacks were not quite humans or an affluent mother saying that the lower orders need to be kept in their places?

The bottom line is that much as we love our mothers we cannot be fully objective about them and nor can we expect them to be fully objective about the societies they live in. When all is said and done, mothers are more likely to pass on the same bundle of prejudices that they picked up from their own mothers especially if they have never been exposed to any other viewpoints – half the mothers have never been to school in some countries of South Asia.

This is where the contribution of the public school system becomes absolutely critical. It is the function of the schools to ensure that the prejudices imbibed at the mother’s knee are neutralized before they have a chance to harden into lifelong attitudes. This is all the more crucial in societies like ours that are riven by innumerable fault lines along which mothers might have taught children to hate each other.

To get back to Imran Khan. What I found hard to understand was why, once he had found wisdom and become a good and tolerant human being, he had to go off on this crusade to prove that the East was superior to the West. I am sure he himself is responsible for this attitude and that it could not have been his mother who passed it on to him.

I keep puzzling over this great need to prove that one’s ways or inheritance are superior to someone else’s. It must be a powerful urge because one runs into it all the time. Have you heard people argue that Indian classical music is better that Western classical music? They are different, no doubt. But both have lasted over a thousand years and so both must be beautiful in their own ways. Would it not make more sense to enjoy the music than to try and prove the superiority of one over the other?

This is one human need that I have not been able to explain satisfactorily to myself. Is there a reader that can shed some light on the subject?

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What Makes Men Stupid?

Universal Patterns within Cultural Diversity: Patriarchy Makes Men Crazy and Stupid

By Robert Jensen

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2008 he taught a three-week course to a co-ed class at the International Islamic University in Islamabad.

Islamabad, Pakistan — Some lessons learned while spending time in a different culture come from paying attention to the wide diversity in how we humans arrange ourselves socially.  Equally crucial lessons come from seeing patterns in how people behave similarly in similar situations, even in very different cultural contexts.

This week in Pakistan, as I have been learning more about a very different culture than my own, I was reminded of one of those patterns: Patriarchy makes men crazy.

The setting for this lesson is the International Islamic University in Islamabad, where I am teaching a three-week course on media law and ethics as a visiting fellow of the university’s Iqbal International Institute for Research and Dialogue.  Institute Director Mumtaz Ahmad brought in me and my Canadian colleague Justin Podur, who is teaching a course on critical thinking, to bring new perspectives to the students at what is a fairly orthodox university, and the dialogue has indeed been rewarding.

As is the case in my courses at the University of Texas at Austin, no matter what the specific subject of the course — freedom of expression, democracy, and mass media, in this case — I often raise questions about how our identities — race, gender, class, nation — structure our position in a society and understanding of the world.  Given the gender segregation at IIU — I have male and female students in my class, but they are housed on different campuses and much of the regular instruction is in single-sex settings — it’s difficult not to circle back frequently to gender.

One day while I was talking about race, I pointed out that while white people in a white-supremacist society have distinct advantages, there is one downside: It makes white people crazy.  The students’ expressions suggested they weren’t sure how to take that, so I explained: White supremacy leads white people to believe they are superior based on their skin color.  That idea is . . . crazy.  Therefore, lots of white people — those who explicitly support white supremacy or unconsciously accept such a notion — are crazy.

My students are mostly Pakistani, with a few from other Islamic countries in Asia and Africa; all are brown or black.  They tried to be polite but couldn’t help laughing at the obvious truth in the statement, as well as the odd fact that a white guy was saying it.

I then moved to an obvious comparison: We men know about this problem, I said, because of the same problem in patriarchy.  In male-supremacist societies, men have distinct advantages, but we often believe that we are superior based on our sex.  That idea is . . . .

This time the women laughed, but the men were silent.  They weren’t so sure they agreed with the analysis in this case.

The next week a power outage at the university helped me drive home my point.

When we arrived that morning and found our classroom dark, we looked for a space with natural light that could accommodate the entire class.  The most easily accessible place was the carpeted prayer area off the building lobby, and one of the female faculty members helping me with the class led us there.  I sat down with the women, and one of the most inquisitive students raised a critical question about one of my assertions from our previous class.  We launched into a lively discussion for several minutes, until we were informed that the male students had a problem with the class meeting there.  I looked around and, sure enough, the men had yet to join us.  They were standing off to the side, refusing to come into the prayer space, which they thought should not be used for a classroom with men and women.

Our host Junaid Ahmad, who puts his considerable organizing skills to good use in the United States and Pakistan, was starting to sort out the issue when the power came back on, and we all headed back to our regular classroom.  I put my scheduled lecture on hold to allow for discussion about what had just happened.  Could a prayer space be used for other purposes, such as a class?  If so, given such that space is used exclusively by men here, is it appropriate to use it for a coeducational classroom?

It’s hardly surprising that students held a variety of opinions about how to resolve those questions consistent with their interpretation of Islamic principles, and a gendered pattern emerged immediately.  The women overwhelmingly asserted that there was nothing wrong with us all being in the prayer space, and the men overwhelmingly rejected that conclusion.  I made it clear that as an outsider I wasn’t going to weigh in on the theological question, but that I wanted to use our experience to examine how a society could create a system of freedom of expression to explore such issues democratically.

The lesson for me came in how the discussion went forward.  The women were not shy in expressing themselves, eager to engage in debate with the men, who were considerably more reserved.  After a contentious half hour of discussion, we moved forward to my lecture.  During the break, the men huddled to discuss the question of the prayer space.  When we reconvened, one of them asked if a representative of the men could speak again on issue.  He began by saying that he had hesitated to speak in the previous discussion because he felt it was obvious that the women were wrong and he had not wanted to hurt their feelings or impede their willingness to speak up by pointing out their error immediately.

I suggested we resolve that question first.  I turned to the women and asked, “Will your feelings be hurt or will you be you afraid to speak if he is critical of your arguments?”  Their response was a resounding no.

I turned back to the man and made the obvious point: We now have clear evidence that that your assumption was wrong.  The women are telling you directly that they are not shy about debating, and so you can make your points.  When he did — and when the women disagreed — they let him know without hesitation.  From what I could tell, his argument did not persuade many, if any, of the women that their judgments had been wrong.

What struck me about the exchange was how ill-prepared the men were to defend their position in the face of a challenge from the women.  It was clear that the men were not used to facing such challenges, and as they scrambled to formulate rebuttals they did little more than restate claims with which they were comfortable and familiar.  That strategy (or lack of a strategy) is hardly unique to Pakistani men.

To modify my previous statement about the negative effects of privilege on the privileged: Patriarchy makes us men not just crazy but stupid.  The more our intellectual activity takes place in male-dominant spaces, and the more intensely male-dominant those spaces are, the less likely we are to develop our ability to think critically about gender and power.  Sometimes when faced with an incisive challenge, men become aggressive, even violent; sometimes men retreat with an illusory sense of victory; sometimes men sulk until women give up the debate.  Individual men will react differently in different times and places; it’s the patterns that are important.

Cultural diversity exists alongside universal patterns.  The United States and Pakistan are very different societies, but they are both patriarchal.  Patriarchy takes different forms in each society, and the harms to women can be quite different, but my observation holds in both.  It doesn’t mean patriarchy doesn’t sometimes also constrain women’s thinking, nor does it mean women are always right in debates with men.  To identify patterns is not to make ridiculous totalizing claims.

There’s one more valuable lesson I took away from this episode: I have to be vigilant in challenging my stereotypes about women in Islamic societies.  I can be quick to assume that Islamic women always capitulate to the patriarchal ideas and norms that dominate their societies.  While I can’t know what each woman in the room was thinking, there was a consensus that they would not accept the conclusion of the men without challenge.  In front of me were women with their heads covered (the hijab) and some with the full face veil (the niqab).  Others had scarves draped around their shoulders, their heads uncovered.  One of the two most forceful women in the debate wore the hijab and the other was uncovered; I couldn’t predict the content or tone of a woman’s response from her dress. No matter how much I know that intellectually, I still catch myself making assumptions about these women based on their choice of head covering.  The class discussion reminds me to remember to challenge my own assumptions.

These conclusions are hardly original or revolutionary, but they bear regular restatement:

It is crucial that we remember the reality of cultural diversity and encourage respect of that diversity, while not shying away from critical engagement.  That’s especially important for those of us from privileged classes in affluent imperial nations, who often are quick to assume we are superior.

It’s just as crucial to look for patterns across cultures, to help us understand how systems of power shape us in ways that are remarkably consistent and to help us develop better strategies to resist illegitimate authority and transform our diverse societies.  That is important for us all who care about justice.

This article is reproduced here from MRzine with permission of the author.

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Education and the Rights of Children

In earlier posts we have highlighted what we feel many schools in South Asia are doing (inculcating hatred) that is harmful to the social psyche of children. We have also discussed what we feel enough schools are not doing (proactively teaching tolerance) that would be beneficial for the social health of South Asian countries.

In this post we look at education from a different perspective and raise two questions that ought to occupy centre-stage in the debate over the public school curriculum: What are the rights of a child? And, how are these rights to be ensured?

There is much room for disagreement on the first, which should lead to a vigorous debate. This would be interesting, given that ‘rights’ cover the entire spectrum from the simple to the complex and from the obvious to the controversial.

Within the realm of education, one can identify a number of rights worthy of discussion. Do children have the right to an education? If yes, of what kind, and up to what level? Do children have the right to be spared physical punishment? Do children have the right to refuse indoctrination of any type? Can a child claim protection against attempts to mould him or her into a particular type of individual?

These are all very important questions, and the absence of a debate on them reflects poorly on civil society. It suggests indifference to the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes numerous clauses that some people in South Asia seem to disagree with.

For example, Article 13(1) states, in general, that: “The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” 



Article 17(e) says that States should “Encourage the development of appropriate guidelines for the protection of the child from information and material injurious to his or her well-being.” An informed debate is needed on whether these rights are being honored or violated in the case of the public school curricula in the different countries of South Asian.

The lack of discussion on controversial issues obscures the more critical issue of ensuring the rights of children even when they are not controversial. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, like most conventions, is non-binding, which is precisely the reason it can be ignored. Here we come face to face with the reality that, unlike most other interest groups, children are not in a position to lobby politically for their rights. All other groups (women, laborers, farmers, manufacturers, retirees, lawyers, etc.) can do so, if they want to. But children cannot; someone else has to speak on their behalf.

And this, in turn, leads to a further complication because adults cannot seem to avoid using children as pawns in their political contests. The real rights of children are ignored in the struggle to score political points or ensure outcomes favorable to particular groups. And children can do nothing to put a stop to this exploitation. Animals and poor children get treated equally poorly in developing countries, but even in many richer ones the lobby to protect animals is often stronger than the one protecting children.

The problem of indifference is starkly obvious in the case of the rights of the unborn. An ethical perspective demands that we, as trustees, consider the rights of future generations in our use of the natural resources of the earth. However, existing generations and their political representatives pay very little heed to this obligation. This indifference might change radically if the unborn were somehow able to vote. But they cannot, and hence their rights are consistently ignored and jeopardized.

The situation is not very different for children. Take the public school curriculum, for example. Long ago, Socrates described education as the kindling of a flame, not the filling of an empty vessel. We fill our children’s heads with whatever content is deemed ‘right’ at a particular time to serve the ends of adults. In the process, how many rights of children, who cannot protest this treatment, are trampled?

Because it is not possible to ask a child about these things, there seems no way out of this conundrum. It might be worthwhile, though, to ask the adults of today their views on education and how they would have liked to be have been educated as children.

Perhaps a good research design might be able to yield usable and unbiased answers. They could be disaggregated by age, gender, domicile and income to find out who it is that would like to do unto others what they would not have liked done unto themselves.

In South Asia today children are being used as frontline soldiers in the battles for God or revolution or liberation. These are very important questions to raise and discuss on their behalf at such a time.

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Similar and Different: Bengal Revisited

What have we learnt from this extended discourse on similarities and differences? It is time for a recap and a summary.

We started with Vir Sanghvi’s angry pronouncement that Pakistanis and Indians were no longer similar; they may have been 60 years ago but by now ‘they’ were fundamentalist and ‘we’ were secular.

There were immediate rejoinders to this burst of annoyance with hurt pronouncements of sharing the same music and the same sports.

It became immediately obvious that there were two flaws with the framing of this discussion. First, human beings were not one thing or another; rather, they were better characterized as bundles of attributes. And it was quite possible for individuals to share some attributes and differ along others. To take a very simple example, Punjabis could share a language but differ in religion.

Second, and because of that perspective, it became clear that one could not generalize so broadly as to contrast all Indians and Pakistanis. Within each country, individuals could well have quite different attributes. Again, to take a simple example, fundamentalists and secularists could be found in both countries.

The insight that emerged from this richer framework was that comparisons across individuals are not neutral; indeed they are very context dependent. Thus, the specific attributes that get highlighted in emphasizing similarities or differences are very much dependent on what is at issue at that time.

And the follow-up to that insight was that this highlighting is rarely left to the individuals themselves. More often than not there are external agents who manipulate these attributes for other ends that only indirectly involve the individuals whose attributes are being highlighted.

We can now see that all these factors came into play during the partition of the subcontinent. But we can illustrate the point even more dramatically by thinking about the relationship between the people of West and East Pakistan.

During the run up to the Partition, the only attribute that was given prominence was that of a shared religion. It was taken for granted that Bengali and Punjabi Muslims shared a common destiny and were meant to share a common homeland.

But within a few years other attributes were raised to the fore: their language was different; their staple food was different; even their culture was different because Bengalis sang and danced; and so on. And the highlighting of these differences for political ends led to another unforgivable human tragedy of massive scale ending with Punjabis being described as the ‘butchers’ of Bengal.

The lesson from this discussion is that political differences (which will always exist in society) have to be resolved in political ways. They should never be reduced to the level of individuals and attributed to their individual differences. Whenever we find ourselves thinking in terms of blue-eyed people being devils, or dark-skinned people being dangerous, we should become wary. We can be sure that we are being manipulated for ulterior ends, that we are being used as pawns in somebody else’s game.

And thus we reach our conclusion: it is really quite irrelevant whether we are similar or different. The important thing to realize is that all citizens of a country need to co-exist as equals within their respective countries. And citizens of different countries in the same neighborhood (as in South Asia) need to exist in cooperation with each other.

All of us have to work together and strengthen those who believe in these aims and resist those who hope to discriminate or disturb the neighborhood. Vir Sanghvi is perfectly justified in being annoyed but his analysis is wrong and his prescription will create problems than it would resolve.

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