Against Baboons In Education

The ToI today carries a debate on education; or, more precisely, a specialized education bureaucracy, an idea mooted by our human resource destruction minister, the lawyer-politician, Kapil Sibal. To do them credit, the editors of the ToI have spoken against the motion. There is a counterpoint, here.

I am, of course, on the side of the ToI editors, against the idea of an Indian Education Service on the lines of the other baboon cadres like the IAS, IPS, IFS, IRS et. al. However, to buttress the arguments of the ToI editors, I would like to talk about the kind of school education Ludwig von Mises received.

I have for quite a long time been noting that there are profound differences in the quality of classical liberal scholarship offered by those schooled in Europe, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Bruno Leoni, as compared to the standard product of Anglo-American education we are so much more familiar with today.

If comparisons are to be made, the Europeans stand hugely superior. They have a grounding in languages, in classical history, and they seem to have studied the originals, not translations. If you read Mises, Hayek or Leoni, you fill find quotes in the original Latin or French, and in the case of Greek, these quotes will use Greek letters, without offering a translation. What kind of schools created such intellects? Some answers emerge from Hülsmann’s biography of Mises, which I am currently enjoying in hardback, which you can find as a free pdf download here.

Hülsmann first tells us a little about the Mises family in Vienna:

The Miseses had become a typical Jewish family for the Vienna of that time, as described by cultural historian William Johnston:

“It was characteristic of them that a businessman father would marry a wife who was more cultivated than he was. Together the couple would settle in Vienna, often in the Leopoldstadt district, where he established a career while she supervised the education of the children. The cultural ambition of the wife was then passed on to the sons, who aspired to excel their fathers by entering one of the liberal professions.”

By all human standards, Adele von Mises did an outstanding job educating her two sons. Each did far more than just surpass his father. They both turned out to be scientific geniuses: Ludwig in the social sciences and Richard in the natural sciences. Ample administrations of motherly love provided the foundation for their astounding achievements. But there was more. Adele taught her sons to care for others. She taught them to be modest and frugal. She taught them to honor truth and virtue more than the encomiums of the world. She taught them the art of writing. And she taught them always to strive for excellence.

Here we see the benefits of “homeschooling,” of vigorous self-help in the field of education, all of it accomplished within the home.

Let us move on to school:

In September 1892, shortly before his eleventh birthday, Mises entered the Akademische Gymnasium where he would be schooled for the next eight years. The gymnasium schools were very particular institutions, more demanding and quite dissimilar from their present-day successors. A product of the nineteenth-century Continental system of education, they can best be described as “a combination of high school and college.” The children of ambitious and well-to-do parents began attending around the age of ten, after four years of elementary training. Three gymnasium models were available: a classical model featuring eight years of Latin and six of Greek; a semi-classical with Latin and one or two modern languages; and a thoroughly modern option with only modern languages. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn states that the classical model had more prestige than the others, but they were all demanding.

“Often these very hard school years hung like a black cloud over families. Failure in just one subject required repetition of a whole year. This was the fate of Nietzsche, of Albert Einstein, and also of Friedrich August von Hayek! Young Mises, of course, got a classical education: the modern languages he learned privately.”

While at the Akademischen Gymnasium, Mises read Caesar, Livy, Ovid, Sallust Jugurtha, Cicero, Virgil, and Tacitus in Latin. In Greek, he studied Xenophon, Homer, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Plato, and Sophocles. One verse from Virgil so deeply impressed him that it became his maxim for a lifetime:

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.

(Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.)

Many years later, he pointed out the crucial role that the immersion in classical literature—and the writings of the ancient Greeks in particular—played for the emergence of liberal social philosophy and thus in his own intellectual development:

“It was the political literature of the ancient Greeks that begot the ideas of the Monarchomachs, the philosophy of the Whigs, the doctrines of Althusius, Grotius and John Locke and the ideology of the fathers of modern constitutions and bills of rights. It was the classical studies, the essential feature of a liberal education, that kept awake the spirit of freedom in the England of the Stuarts, in the France of the Bourbons, and in Italy subject to the despotism of a galaxy of princes. No less a man than Bismarck, among the nineteenth-century statesmen next to Metternich the foremost foe of liberty, bears witness to the fact that, even in the Prussia of Frederick William III, the Gymnasium, the education based on Greek and Roman literature, was a stronghold of republicanism.”

This quote is from Mises’ The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, and it is continued in a footnote:

“The liberty which the Greek statesmen, philosophers and historians glorified as the most precious good of man was a privilege reserved to a minority. In denying it to metics and slaves they virtually advocated the despotic rule of a hereditary caste of oligarchs. Yet it would be a grave error to dismiss their hymns to liberty as mendacious. They were no less sincere in their praise and quest of freedom than were, two thousand years later, the slave-holders among the signers of the American Declaration of Independence.”

My point is: Who knows what is the “best” education system? My answer would be: There is none. There are those with knowledge and there are those without – and the two can only meet in a market. In such a non-system, knowledge will be bought and sold in capsules: you can learn something here, and something else there. Maybe there will then be space for this sort of “classical education” too. But no Indian Education Service can make this happen. They will only rigidify the syllabus into a one-size-fit-all load of nonsense.

I leave you with what Frederic Bastiat, another Continental scholar, said:

“If you want to have theories, systems, methods, principles, textbooks and teachers forced on you by the government, that is up to you; but do not expect me to sign, in your name, such a shameful abdication of your rights.”

He added:

“The monopoly of teaching cannot reasonably be entrusted to any but an authority recognized as infallible. Otherwise, there is an unlimited risk that error be uniformly taught to the people as a whole.”