The Case Against State Education

By Sauvik Chakraverti

(Times of India, April 12, 2000)

The Centre for Civil Society carefully selected 40 of Calcutta's brightest college students for a four-day, all expenses paid, residential seminar on the importance of freedom to society. To begin with, a question was posed to the group: Why is India poor? The answers were polled; 35 said the vicious circle of poverty. What is this theory?

It holds that poor countries are hopelessly so because of a cycle of low productivity, low output and low savings. As Lord Peter Bauer says, if this proposition were true, the world would still be in the Stone Age. Every country that is rich today started off poor and underdeveloped. Hong Kong was just a barren rock some time ago. Singapore was full of coolies when Nehru started planning. I have been broke so many times in my life and come out of it. What is the damage done by teaching such unsubstantiated theories?

Orwellian Drama

A growing civilisation, as Arnold Toynbee kept reminding us, possesses a vital elan. There is josh. Teaching nonsense like this kills the nation's vital elan. Young, curious minds come to college searching for knowledge. Economics is a study of the production of wealth. They do not get to study this economics. They study that poverty is apparently an inescapable condition for this great nation. This is taught to them by purveyors of knowledge who are wholly financed by the taxpayer.

It is time we understood very clearly that the state is not a lamp of learning. Knowledge is produced by the application of mind. The state does not possess this mind. If our public administration is anything to go by, the state is in need of knowledge; it cannot impart it. Knowledge is also continually being produced. Knowledge is not constant; it expands daily.

The state's professors are all educrats: they control budgets. They do not produce knowledge. Their articles are never found in top journals. These educrats control what is taught to our young as civics and Indian economics. They push their biases into every school and college in this land and thereby destroy the national spirit. There is simply no case for the predatory state in education. Its educational bureaus must be closed down. The ministry for human resource development should be viewed as an Orwellian nightmare and abolished.

This is in the interest of liberal democracy, which rests on three pillars: the political freedom of democracy; the economic freedom of the market; and liberal education (which teaches the value of freedom). Our democracy is totally illiberal. The Representation of Peoples Act does not permit liberals to form political parties: every party must swear by socialism. And our education is not liberal either. We are ranked 120 in the World Economic Freedom Index simply because of the content of our education: it does not teach the value of freedom.

Otherwise, there is no reason why, when we have democracy, we should remain in the mostly unfree category of the index, bare notches above the economically repressed.

Brain Revolution

Liberalism need not wait for a liberal political party to be set up. Politics is the public actions of free people. We can all participate in the politics of knowledge as free people.

Students, teachers, principals and parents can hold seminars, discussions and debates which challenge the knowledge that the state is giving them. This knowledge is the weakest point in Indian socialism. It can be destroyed by free civic politics.

Liberalism will then rule the minds of all Indians. When the philosophy of freedom has spread far and wide, the government will not be the great prize that socialism has made it. An intellectual revolution should be the liberal goal, achieved through free knowledge-based politics without a party. If the theory of the vicious circle of poverty is inaccurate, what explains our poverty? Mancur Olson presented a paper in Delhi some years ago in which he proposed that national boundaries are the only reason explaining poverty. Implication: Certain states, where statism rules, cause poverty. Nothing else. See East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Burma and Malaysia and Olson's point becomes clear.

The seminarians in Calcutta are not prescribed Olson in college. Apart from the vicious circle of poverty, they held that our massive population explains poverty. This naturally follows in the minds of those who are not taught that all of us, even little children, are naturally gifted with the ability to trade and that free trade causes national prosperity. They do not see themselves and their compatriots as Homo Economicus: they see a huge problem called poverty that requires strong state action to solve.

Indeed, our population is our greatest resource. Especially the youth, with dreams, hopes, inquiring minds and energy. The country is ruled by aged men who see children as a problem and who systematically destroy the greatest resource we possess: the human mind. This human mind is uniquely gifted with the ability to engage in trade. Our people need complete economic freedom, property rights and sound money. They do not need education. Certainly not from the predatory state.

Gifted People

The truth is that Indians are an economically gifted people. Someone I met in London said that a bania can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scot and still emerge with a profit. We have huge trading communities.

Indians run almost all the corner-shops in London: We are the shopkeepers in a nation of shopkeepers. Our traders are a far greater economic resource than our pampered industrialists.