Knowledge: why less is more

Guest Columns by Sauvik Chakraverti,

The Newindpress on Sunday, 2007-2008

Knowledge: why less is more

Before paying the education cess willingly, we Indians need to see how wealth is created in the market economy and how knowledge is used and developed therein. If we do so, we will discover that state education of this kind will actually harm the poor. They will waste our money, many years of their own lives, yet emerge with no useful knowledge. Instead of optimism, enthusiasm and economic independence, they will be left hopeless, ignorant and dependant.

Wealth is created in the market economy through specialisation. When there are tailors, carpenters, farmers, fishermen and so on, each produces a ‘marketable surplus’ for the consumption of others. These surpluses make society rich. A journalist like me, who only produces words, has a car, television, food, drink and clothes – my ‘wealth’ – because these are the surpluses of other specialised people.

What is often missed is that this process of specialisation, which political economist Adam Smith called the ‘division of labour’, is accompanied by a simultaneous ‘division of knowledge’. Each specialised economic actor, be he a dentist, journalist or restaurant chef, operates with his own specialised knowledge. This has important implications.

If we look at an isolated Robinson Crusoe, his need for knowledge is enormous. If he wants to eat fish, he must know how to catch it, gut it and cook it. He must know how to fell a tree, make planks, and build his house. He must look after his cow, feed it and milk it. He must know how to grow his own food. And so on. Thus, the more isolated one is, as with a villager, the greater the amount of knowledge each individual requires in order to survive.

The obverse also follows: the more specialised and integrated the exchange economy, the less the knowledge required of any individual. He just needs to know his own field of specialisation well. For everything else, he can happily rely on the knowledge of others. For example: a musician. If he is adept at his instrument, he has no need to learn anything else. If he wants a car, engineers build it for him, a chauffeur drives him around, and mechanics keep it in good repair. If he wants a grand house, architects design it for him, masons build it, and interior designers furnish it aesthetically. As far as he is concerned, he knows how to play one musical instrument well. About everything else, he is ‘rationally ignorant’. He needs to learn nothing else.

The most obvious implication of this ‘division of knowledge’ in the exchange economy of the free market is that the hugely diversified ‘generalised’ (and politicised) curriculum of Indian schools is actually harmful for the prospects of the young, and especially so if they are poor. Even the 3 R’s of reading, writing and arithmetic can be brought down to 2 R’s today, thanks to cheap electronic calculators. Thus, a kid who has no interest or talent in math need not study it at all – and yet survive pretty well.

Instead of general schooling from the state (with a free lunch thrown in with a biased history book: feeding bellies, poisoning minds), children need to learn specialised skills of their own choosing, with which they can flourish in the market. The government can never even know this vast array of possible skills, forget teaching them. The task can only be done by the market: indeed, this is how our software techies learnt their stuff. In the market, either through paid tuition or apprenticeship, a poor kid can learn anything he sets his heart upon. Rather than wasting 10-12 years on an ‘education’ of zero market relevance, children trained thus will be able to stand on their own feet at a very young age. This is crucial in a poor country, where life expectancy is low. As economist Sudha Shenoy says: ‘‘Where life ends early, it must begin early.’’

Second, free trade is an essential means to knowledge. If there had been free trade since 1947, our mechanics would have learnt much more about cars and motorcycles. Without free trade, but with state-sponsored IITs and IIMs, we Indians did not gain an iota of real, usable knowledge in our socialist heydays. For example: all the IITs and IIMs could not produce a good car. Thus, state education in a closed economy is a recipe for total disaster.

Third, a free market must be ‘free’ if all of societal knowledge is to be used. Poor people already possess lots of knowledge today that is denied entry into the market – from Mumbai’s dancing ladies to all the toddy tappers on our coasts. Poor people know exotic recipes that can help them flourish only if street-food explosions occur in our cities.

Children, especially those of the poor, need to be told that they do not need long, arduous and boring years in school. Rather, that they should select avenues in which they want to specialise and seek the knowledge relevant to those fields from the market. This will give them enthusiasm and optimism. The search for knowledge will not seem an enormously uphill task, driving many today to suicide. Further, they must be informed that specialisation is maximised in cities and towns, where the high population makes for a big market: you cannot be a taxi driver, plumber, Thai chef or musician in a sleepy village. They should see India’s future as urban: that Gandhi’s rural utopia of self-sufficient villages is actually economic suicide.

The state will never teach them these things: even in 12 years of school. State education will make them ignorant and dependant. They will never achieve their full human potential. Thus, as with everything else, so too for knowledge, we must turn to the benevolent market. The education cess must be strongly opposed.

(Sauvik Chakraverti is the author of Antidote: Essays Against the Socialist Indian State, and its sequel, Antidote 2: For Liberal Governance. He can be contacted at sauvik@epmltd.com)