Learning to be free - Part II

Freedom as Motivation for Learning

In the following paragraphs, I outline my understanding of positive liberty as the primary leitmotiv for education. I illustrate the essence of freedom as fundamental motivation for education by exploring the meaning of Epimeleia Heautou, the Greek practice of taking care of oneself, and swaraj, the Indian concept of finding inner and external liberation.

While I do not believe that the proposed motivations need to be made explicit in all 42 learning projects and practices, we should promote their essence in everything we do.

Swaraj — To liberate the Power of Self

In the early hours of dawn, a man enters a room and, looking in a dark corner, believes he sees a long snake. He escapes from the room in a panic. Later, when the sun has lightened the room, he finds that his not-seeing caused him to mistake a coil of rope for a snake.

This old Indian parable illustrates beautifully how knowledge (understanding of the true Being) makes us see better and thereby liberates us from fear.

So it is the unknown, the dark, the void of understanding that causes us to be afraid and either attempt to stop the fear by ending its cause or surrender our so-called faith to someone else who we believe knows better. One is in fear of the unknown — or better that which is not understood — because we cannot prepare for the impact of whatever event it will trigger. However, once we understood its Being we can influence and adopt our behavior.

This freedom of inner clarity and autonomous judgment has been named Swaraj in the Indian tradition. Swaraj is the force Mahatma Gandhi (1934) conceptualized as the spiritual energy source behind the Indian peoples struggle for independence. It is the realization of the importance of knowledge for self-esteem and self-realization that causes the entrepreneurial spirit to attain knowledge opportunities and to develop sagacity.

Epimeleia Heautou — To take care of oneself

Foucault (1983) introduces one of his lectures in Berkeley by recounting a story of the Greek scholar Hermotimus, who has been taught for the last ten years by a great philosopher. The scholar is desperate, because the studies have consumed all his wealth and he still has not learned what he aspires to. What he strives for is to learn to take care of himself (in Greek: Epimeleia Heautou).

Foucault elaborates that one takes care of oneself spiritually and physically, first as an autonomous individual and second as a participant within the division of labor and societal relations of civilization. Two general motivations are analyzed to be fundamental: learning about oneself and the world, as an end in itself. And learning to be able to do something.

What the Greeks called episteme — learning about life and the understanding (making sense) of one’s reality as such — is a recursive perpetual motivation for learning (as self-development). It is this knowledge, described by Lombardo as “understanding the big picture” and “deep learning”, that empowers critical thinking and reflexive capacity, or as Giddens states, in allowing learners to (trans)form themselves into mature interdependent individuals (Harvey & Knight, 1996) and engage in cultural and political discourses as cultural citizens (Delanty, 2001).

The second motivation is aimed at concrete abilities and knowing methods to do something. This knowledge was named techne (as in technique) in ancient Greece. The resulting actions and benefits of techne knowledge is what allows you to physically survive (by generating economic value).

Thoreau (1910) gives us a good impression of how one can provide a (in his eyes) splendid life in almost complete isolation, free from civilization. His account Walden is a great example for a way of life where one is content alone, thereby depicting the self-recognition and self-esteem aspect of taking care of oneself. However, Thoreau depicts a very eremitic perspective and most men will want to learn how to take care of themselves within society; therefore, this is what we spend the following paragraph on.

Three pillars of taking care of oneself within society can be depicted. The first objective is inner freedom, or liberation of the self-applied chains, while the second and third learning motivations aim at external freedom or freedom to master challenges outside one’s self. Three categories of knowledge can be deduced:

(1) personal development — empowering self-realization through loss of fear and development of an inner locus of control;

(2) social and cultural citizenship (Delanty, 2001) — this knowledge allows one to understand and master the complexities of public and private political struggle,

(3) and the last and possibly least important technological citizenship (Delanty, 2001) — the ability to add economic value to society.

Part III of Learning to be Free discusses the fundamentally dual nature of all these knowledge motivations, described above as practice and understanding.

Are you curious to read the article in full? You can read the entire article and find a list of references on Medium here.