August 22, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Elitist Education versus Democracy
While Eliot sought education for the
lawmakers and the elected representatives of the people in a democracy this is
contrary and antithetical to its general principle.
Democracy imposes no limitation or any
minimal requirement of any sort for a person to be popularly elected.
After all democracy is “rule of the
majority” or “rule of the people” in contrast to aristocracy.
It is the aristocracy which stands for
“rule of the elite” that sanctions only educated nobility to rule the masses.
Therefore as long as a person is popular
among the masses and the people chose that person to represent them as their
lawmaker he is clear to take off.
Though apparently, intuitively and
theoretically democracy and aristocracy are poles apart (as is brightly
highlighted in the history courses of the famous French and American
Revolutions – both of them occurring near-simultaneously and even causally
interlinked) in practice the distinction between them has always been blurry.
For instance, the classical Greek
city-state such as Athens who probably was the first to codify the system of
democracy excluded slaves and women from political participation which is an
elitist and autocratic attribute.
Even the post revolutionary France and the
United States were not true democracies in the modern sense as the suffrage was
limited and far from universal.
The truth is that in most modern
democracies the governments had restricted the right to vote to only to those
with wealth and property and that meant a restricted group of elite male
population.
Not only did these two large groups
(together they comprise more than half of any general population) lacked the
right to stand for elections of public lawmakers they were not even allowed the
access to the ballot boxes.
On the other hand, in most democracies including
the great United States and Hindustan, it is always the members of the elite
class that have been the rulers.
You can see that from a quick glance at the
list of the Founding Fathers of both the United States and India.
In the United States even after the
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution of 1870 after the
American Civil War and during the Reconstruction Era the African Americans
continued to remain disfranchised in the Southern States.
The Southern officers of the United States
government did not care for this amendment made to their constitution.
This theme has recurred with strikingly
regularity in the modern history of virtually all nation states.
The only outlier in this predictable trend
was perhaps India when in 1951 the nation putting an unprecedented faith on its
361 million odd people with less than 20% being literate ‘with few parallels in
the history of mankind’ chose to adopt universal adult franchise almost
immediately.
As historian Ramachandra Guha puts it in
his essay “Democracy’s Biggest Gamble” – It is hard to overstate the occasion’s
radical novelty.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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