Blog: Diagnosis of a sick Society : Information v/s Intelligence

It is strange that in spite of all the revolutions that the East has waged against misleading philosophies of the West, our society is still a slave of the Western sophistry. Is knowledge the ultimate end of education or intelligence?

Knowledge is acquired and accumulated from sources - parents, teachers, friends and media. These cannot develop intelligence. The aim of education is still the storage of knowledge when man has found a better substitute for himself - the computer. The world over the school is breeding escape, truancy, disaffection, aggressiveness, violence or indifference. In Mauritius we are thinking of coercive methods of making the youth attend school. Classes are no longer capable of fulfilling the need of our youth. It is not knowledge that schools must teach, but intelligence. Intelligence is not the reservoir of anything. It is the capacity of simply looking, listening and inquiring.

Our homes are today talking of children beyond control, because parents and children are talking at cross purposes. The solution does not lie in opening schools for parents, making religious heads dispense lectures. Parents and religious heads can only convey what belongs to the past because knowledge belongs to the past. In our world, to be educated means to acquire more and more knowledge so that the mind is cluttered with information. The world needs to know how to think. Man needs to learn to be keenly aware, to allow himself to flow with the current of life.

Makers of chaos

The moral dereliction in our society is our own making. We have left our children (since their childhood) in the hands of a school that has no morality, no character. Our teachers have been honestly fulfilling a predetermined role of transmitting information. They have used competition not to extract the best out of every child, but to put one child against another in a race with no visible finishing line or one which is constantly moving away, thus making competition become a way of life rather than a means. We have surrounded our youth with the state-of-the-art technology which exposes them to the manipulations of an invisible world. Instead of using technology, our youth are the objects of a worldwide manoeuvre through new platforms that go by the name of social network. We are the idiots of our own past that have been outstripped of our means and our understanding by a new social organisation where you communicate with an unknown, make friends with an unknown, promise eternal partnership to the unknown.

Moral bankruptcy

Every social organisation has its own profiteers. Our youth and our parents are both caught up in an 'ignis fatuus'- will-o'-the-wisp found in marshy areas. One sees a fire burning and thinks there are settlements - and one realises one has been chasing a mirage when one is stuck in marshy land.  The pity of it lies in the fact that we are stuck. When the Minister of Gender, Family and Children's welfare talks of solutions, she does not realise how she landed her society into this marsh. We have not developed an awareness of the cause of our moral bankruptcy. We simply want to avoid the wounds that hurt us. The real disease lies in the absence of religion, absence of parenthood. It is the wrong attitude of religious heads. It is the wrong control of parents who give all without realising children should grow up morally and all the material comfort are no substitute for the leadership they need. Our youth lacks credible leaders.

The Arab spring revolution is a warning. Traditional leaders have been taken by surprise. The Tahrir Square in Egypt is a metaphor of a cry for a new society, a new way of dealing with our youth. By repressing them we are simply postponing the surgical operation. Our adults are victims of their past and such people suffering from guilt are not able to impose their will because all force can only lead the youth to lead a clandestine life of sensual or sexual gratification. The age of obedience without questioning is over. Can we imagine how backward our adults are when they are fighting over keeping historical records secret in order that others may not know what caste they belong to? Riots will erupt not over caste differences. This is the tip of the iceberg which demonstrates how the world of parental control is out of tune with reality. It is empty rhetoric to seek strategies to reform this society. It will be window-dressing to give an impression of curative action. It is not the loss of our values of the past that we should mourn over. It is the simple absence of values, of restraint, of order that we are witnessing.

If the Minister of Gender thinks that she can heal the wounds of her sick society, she is making the mistake of expecting a bottom-up reform. In the ethics of moral behavior, we should always expect examples to come from the top and we know it is the top that knows decay and then spreads it in the body.

School for parents?

Educating parents is a game of wishfulfilment. Punishing parents for their lack of responsibility is possible if criminal offences can be proved. But otherwise punishing parents blindly for the misdemeanor of their children is empty vengeance unworthy in a State. It is the youth at school who has to be fortified while the home, the church, voluntary organisations support the objectives of a new education that helps our youth to think, to be critical, to be creative - to be intelligent, to be imaginative and to be capable of empathy.

What attitude to the rot?

Pessimists will say that we have not yet seen the moral degradation at the level of megacities of Western Europe, America and successful economies in S.E.Asia and the BRICS experience it. Cynics will invoke fatalism. Optimists will draw satisfaction from the comforting prospect that society evolves in a melioristic manner to become better and better. These culture shocks we know today inaugurate a new era, a new world. We shall get used to it soon. In all civilisations women have been the prime movers of radical change. In its best and worst forms women are the spearheads of and bear the brunt of a cultural revolution taking place in our society.

New strategies

The stock-in-trade, hackneyed strategies that we witness in ministries other than Education - those of calling committees, giving newsbreaking interviews on MBC and lulling the population with hope - are part of the fanfare of all politicians. Let us realise that the real targets must be our youth through a new education that shifts the emphasis from information to intelligence. Information is readily available in an Information Age. We must be guided to think of being fully oneself.