Education Without Values, as Useful as It Is, Seems Rather to Make a Man More Clever Devil

On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior officials of the Nazi government met at a villa in Wannsee near Berlin to coordinate what they called the final solution of the Jewish question, the murder of millions of Europe's Jews. Of the fifteen, eight held doctorates. The country they served had some of the finest universities in the world. Later, at the Nuremberg trial of doctors in 1946 and 1947, physicians stood accused of cruel experiments on prisoners. A saying, widely attributed to C. S. Lewis, warns that education without values, useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil. History gives the warning a grim force.

Education here means the formal acquisition of knowledge and skill. Values are the beliefs about right and wrong, kindness and cruelty, truth and falsehood, which guide action. The topic admits that education is useful, and does not reject it. Its claim is that education alone is a tool, and a tool serves its user. A sharper mind in a person without conscience simply finds cleverer ways of doing harm.

Gandhi made the same point more than once. In Young India in 1925 he listed seven social sins, which included knowledge without character, commerce without morality, and science without humanity. He wrote in Hind Swaraj that mere literacy is not education, and that real education should draw out the best in body, mind and spirit. Rabindranath Tagore founded Santiniketan to educate children in nature and in the arts so that they would grow as whole human beings. The Radhakrishnan Commission on university education in 1948 spoke of the need for spiritual and moral training. The theme runs through Indian thought, from the Upanishads, which teach that knowledge must lead to wisdom, to the modern commissions.

The modern world supplies many examples of cleverness without conscience. The cult Aum Shinrikyo, led by a former yoga teacher, recruited graduates in science and medicine, who produced the sarin gas used in the Tokyo subway attack of March 1995 that killed thirteen people. The rogue trading that brought down Barings Bank in 1995 was done by an able young man in a system that failed to check him. The financial crisis of 2008 involved graduates of the best business schools designing instruments whose risk they hid. In India, the Satyam fraud of 2009 and the scams of white collar criminals are done by educated people. Examination cheating, paper leaks and the sale of degrees show that corruption has entered education itself.

A sharper mind in a person without conscience simply finds cleverer ways of doing harm.

Hannah Arendt, who reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, was struck by how ordinary he seemed. She spoke of the banality of evil, which arises not from monstrous hatred but from thoughtlessness, the failure to think from the viewpoint of another. This diagnosis suggests that what education should cultivate is not only knowledge but the capacity to judge, to imagine the suffering of others and to refuse to take part in wrongdoing when ordered. A narrow training in technique, which asks only how to do a thing and never whether it should be done, leaves this capacity unformed.

Yet the topic should not be read as an attack on knowledge. Ignorance is hardly the source of virtue. Education has given humanity the medicines, the understanding and the institutions that protect life, and the educated have also been among history's reformers, from Ambedkar to Marie Curie. Literacy correlates with democracy, health and lower violence. The point is not that education makes people bad, but that it makes them powerful, and power needs direction. The alternative to clever devils is not uneducated saints, as the saying might seem to suggest, but educated persons with conscience.

How can values be taught? Sermons alone rarely work. A student who hears of honesty but sees teachers who cheat will learn the cheating. Values are absorbed through the example of teachers and the culture of the school, through habit and through experience. Practices that help include service learning, in which students work with communities, the discussion of ethical dilemmas in literature, history and science, and games and arts that teach cooperation. The National Curriculum Framework of 2005 sought to reduce rote learning and to build a sense of citizenship. In the professions, codes of ethics, such as those of doctors and engineers, mean little if they are only recited.

There is also the question of whose values. A plural society like India holds many traditions and may disagree on what to teach. The constitutional values of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice, along with the fundamental duties listed in Article 51A, provide a common ground that does not depend on any one faith. Teaching them honestly includes teaching why they matter and what happens when they are neglected.

Teachers carry the greatest responsibility. A child learns respect for truth from a teacher who admits a mistake, and learns contempt for it from one who humiliates a pupil for asking an awkward question. India's tradition of the guru, who teaches by living, recognises this. Teacher training that treats teachers merely as deliverers of the syllabus, and an examination system that rewards marks over understanding, undermine it. If a society wants its graduates to have values, it must first value the people who teach them, and give them the freedom to teach more than the textbook.

Technology has made the matter more urgent. Tools that can search, calculate and generate content are now in the hands of students, and the same tools can be used to deceive on a large scale. Skill with them is spreading faster than any common sense of limits. In a world where capability is growing quickly, the gap between what a person can do and what he ought to do widens unless education closes it. This is where the old warning has acquired new meaning.

A clever devil is a person who has acquired every power but the power to ask what the power is for. The question has no examination, and so no syllabus has ever put it first. Whether a school can teach someone to ask it, and to answer it truthfully when it costs something, is perhaps the only test of its work that is never set.