Language, Education & Civilization

Language, Education & Civilization

Previously published in The Island on 7^th Wednesday 2007

To begin at the beginning I think that it is sometimes helpful to occasionally remember our evolutionary animal origin and to contemplate the fact that we can not possibly escape nature however highly advanced or exalted we consider ourselves to be. Watching how other animals learn the behaviours necessary for their survival could perhaps give us certain cues for understanding the complex idea that is embodied in the term ‘education’ in the same way as observing bird flight provided the pioneers of aviation with a useful analogy.

Learning – the process of acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for physical survival, social living, and life-enjoyment – is natural to the young of all higher animals including humans. In most cases the young are put through a course of training by their parents at the end of which they are turned out into the wide world to fend for themselves. The preparation of young animals for their future life as adults is actually an inchoate teaching-learning situation in which the parent animals educate their young offspring.

The formal human teaching-learning activity usually covered by the term ‘education’, though cognate with the natural way other animals learn, far transcends it and comprehends, in addition to the rudimentary purposes of animal learning, the reclamation of the factual knowledge and the practical skills of the previous generations, the creative augmentation and preservation of new knowledge and skills, plus mind training and moral culture for the benefit and happiness of all humankind.

Among animals the teaching-learning process is mainly initiated and sustained by instinct, apparently without any contribution from reasoning, whereas human learning is a result of both instinct and intellect. In both animals and humans play dominates the mode of training initially. This play mode of education involves the repeated practice of adult activities by the young in an atmosphere of fun and freedom safe from the perils and uncertainties that these activities involve in the actual adult world.

We cannot stretch this analogy (i.e. the comparison between human and animal learning) too far. There is a world of difference between animal learning and human education. Animals do not possess anything comparable to human language that helps record and store knowledge for future generations, and that enables the enrichment of inherited knowledge through individual contributions. As for humans, they can recall the knowledge of their forefathers through records or collective memory, and supplement it with new knowledge that they generate by themselves, and transmit it down generations by means of language.

Among animals the training given before the assumption of adult responsibilities is based on instinctive practice that usually takes the form of play. Kittens, for example, engage in mock hunting by stalking and pouncing on each other in play; their mother sometimes brings them a small animal such as a mouse that she has caught without killing and allows the kittens to play with it. The kittens learn to hunt in this way. That is their grooming for life. They reinforce this initial training by gradually tackling real life situations through trial and error under the supervision of their mother.

In the world of humans the education of the young is not merely instinctive, and is not limited to the development of bodily skills alone. It is infinitely more an intellectual activity than the simple acquisition of muscular skills through the instinctive rehearsal of manoeures in the make-believe-world of play.

We cannot sustain the analogy between animal learning and human learning beyond a very basic point in view of the extreme complexity of the latter process. What makes human learning so complex is fundamentally the use of brain power – rational thinking and creative imagination - for processing information. Humans can gather information, share it with their neighbours, store it in memory or records, retrieve it, and relate it to their current circumstances and experiences, and so on. All this is due to the characteristically human faculty of language.

The sophisticated use of language distinguishes human learning from animal learning. It is true that many higher animals other than humans can be said to use ‘language’ in the sense that they too use certain ‘vocal’ sounds to communicate within their species. Like humans they have a limited number of these sounds. But the big difference is that whereas humans can arrange their vocal sounds and other elements in different patterns to make an infinity of sentences to express an infinity of meanings, animals cannot do this; animals have a finite number of calls to communicate an extremely narrow range of vital information relating to such things as food, sex, danger, etc. Human language has structure, but animal language lacks this feature. This fact has profound implications for any comparison between animal and human learning.

Our earliest ape ancestors must have adopted the same mode of ‘vocal’ communication as other higher animals do even today, and also a similar mode of learning. However, as they evolved over millions of years, they gradually grew out of that stage concurrently with the development of their brain power. It was the advent of language that transformed apes into humans. The growth of the language faculty was obviously not a sudden occurrence. It must have been a gradual process too. With the development of language the pace of human civilization (the development of humans as social beings) quickened. The generation and transmission of knowledge went hand in hand with this, both as result and cause, that is advancing knowledge and advancing civilization contributed to each other.

The movement away from animal status meant a departure from the rudimentary type of learning which was adequate for the bare survival of animals as individuals and as members of their societies. Humans moved on in sophistication while animals remained almost static. Humans must have overcome all those creatures which threatened their supremacy and survival in evolutionary history. Their position today would be unassailable in any conflict with their closest relatives in the animal world.

The physical, mental and social development of humans as a unique species required the collection, amelioration , and dissemination of knowledge within the different communities about the world in general, and about the vitally important crafts and skills, and the collective experiences peculiar to those communities. Language contributed to this process in large measure by being the main medium through which forms of abstract knowledge and practical skills were inherited, improved, and passed on from generation to generation.

It is this language-driven cultural process of the acquisition and transmission of human knowledge, and practical skills, which could be called education, that has propelled humanity to the present level of civilization. (I need hardly point out that I am not talking here about the education of single individuals, but of all humanity as a species.) The sustenance and further sophistication of human civilization is not possible without education. And language is vital for that.

To my mind therefore, education is the universal, language-based intellectual process by which humanity retrieves useful past knowledge of facts and skills, and wisdom from records and communal memory, generates new knowledge through discovery, and preserves it for posterity, while honing further their intellectual powers, and perfecting their actions for the survival, contentment, security and happiness of all, and for the constant betterment of the common human lot.