The torch relay in Hong Kong represented the beginning of a three-month journey for the Olympic torch across China and into Beijing for the opening ceremony, scheduled for the auspicious date of 08-08-08.  Hopefully the date will be more auspicious than Friday’s wet weather.

But back to the Olympic torch relay – the overwhelming sense of patriotism here made protests of the kind seen in other countries highly unlikely.  I read in the news that there were a few protesters, mainly campaigning against China’s policies in Tibet, but as one Hong Kong person said as he yelled at them “Do you think this is Paris?” while another shouted “What kind of Chinese are you?”.

Paris’ revolutionary credentials were enhanced in 1848 with a social uprising, followed by worker upheaval in 1871, and student revolt exactly 40 years ago this week in 1968.  In 2005, many parts of Paris were set on fire once again by social activists proclaiming:  “These aren’t ‘riots’.  This is social rebellion, directed at decades of French imperial rule, and ultra-capitalist and racist policymaking at home”.

Revolutionary figures such as Che Guevara, Washington, Gandhi, Mao and Lenin have always captured the imagination.  However, history shows us that most revolutions turn sour, and they are seldom as ‘popular’ as their initiators’ propaganda claims.

As many students at LPCUWC are aware, I have often said that in an ideal world there would be no need and no place for rules.  However, we do not live in an ideal world with perfect, altruistic human beings, and thus most people prefer to live under the rules of law (harmony) than the rules of war (anarchy).

Aristotle also highlighted the tension between liberty and equality, saying that the use of reason should provide the best way to structure society, but because different people have different capacities of reasoning, a society based on negotiation alone would be far from egalitarian.  That is why he believed rules and laws were necessary – in today’s parlance, we would say it is “to stop the squeaky wheels always getting the most oil”.

“ ... democratic countries have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret.  But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible; they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.  They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.”

In my experience, most people have never understood this fundamental tension between liberty and equality.  They are not opposites, but they tend to be incompatible in practice if either is pushed towards an extreme.  It makes something of a mockery of the famous slogan of the French Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” – or maybe that slogan was just philosophically naïve.  After all, revolutionary rallying calls are seldom designed to work well as coherent policy!

I think it is an open question as to whether de Tocqueville was correct.  The ‘revolt of the masses’ mirrors the classic problem of rule addressed in ‘Plato’s Republic’, written in 360 BC, in which he answers the question “Who should rule?” by claiming that just rule is the rule of wisdom, even though the wise do not often wish to rule and the masses do not wish them to rule either.

The tension between liberty and equality is a significant one that is often overlooked at our peril, as we experienced last week at our College.  United World Colleges are often described as offering a ‘liberal’ education, and the words ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ are also often used – even though none of these three words actually appears in the UWC Mission Statement, Core Values or official description of the UWC Movement (see HERE).  I suspect that many of those who use the words have never really thought about what they mean, or the tensions that arise in practice when we try to possess them all simultaneously, as José Ortega y Gasset correctly pointed out.

The argument that there should be (almost) no rules forms the foundation of Liberalism.  Liberalism is the philosophy underpinning the concept of Liberty as meaning ‘free of restraint’.  During its 16-year history, LPCUWC has been engaged in a worthwhile (if at times frustrating) ongoing discussion on whether there are too many or too few rules (the rules are all contained on one A4 page), and the degree of flexibility with which they should be applied.  Interestingly, I have never had a parent or a National Committee suggesting that there are too many rules; the proposition seems to come mainly from some students, but only after they have been through all the processes of selection and acceptance.

Any on-campus discussion about rules is, I believe, a very valuable process, not only as a means of refining the rules for the good of the whole community, but because the process of negotiating itself develops important skills in our students.  The philosophy of liberalism has been the unspoken, unidentified assumption for many students during these discussions, especially those who have come from countries where liberalism is a strong tradition.

Mill argued that each person should be self-made, free to develop his talents to the fullest extent possible.  Mill had quite a constrained childhood, and to some extent his philosophy of liberalism arose as a reaction against his childhood constraints.  His priority was what he termed ‘individual flourishing’ – the conviction that everyone should develop his (or her, but he only referred to ‘his’) talents and abilities to the fullest extent possible, and to have whatever freedom (or lack of constraints) was necessary to do this.

‘On Liberty’ described in detail the nature of a liberal culture under which human flourishing could occur.  An important question for me is ‘how closely Mill’s description should match the environment of a United World College’?  And how closely SHOULD it match the culture of a United World College?

In Mill’s thinking, there is a need for rules, the most notable single rule being the ‘harm principle’.  He argued that all things being equal, as long as you are not harming someone else, you should be free to do whatever you want, even if it is stupid or self-destructive.  This includes the freedom to fail, the freedom to indulge in activities that others might see as immoral or reprehensible, or just plain silly.  The ‘harm principle’ is based on extreme tolerance and a deep belief that all people can become better versions of themselves.  According to Mill, there is only one legitimate reason to impose rules or power over individuals: “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

Interestingly, the founder of the United World Colleges, Kurt Hahn, disagreed very strongly with this postulation.  Hahn’s view was especially evident in his strong anti-smoking stance, in which he claimed any student should lose his (and it was just ‘his’ in those days) scholarship if he smoked because he had a duty to those who sponsored his scholarship to remain fit and healthy so he could give a long and fruitful return on the sponsor’s investment.  Duty and liberalism do not sit comfortably together!

To relate this to a school context, Mill’s argument was perhaps one of the earliest arguments against peer pressure.  It was very important to Mill that we should follow our own path and avoid doing what we now call ‘the done thing’.  Mill was explicit that ‘On Liberty’ was about intellectual freedom, not political freedom.  Since he wrote ‘On Liberty’, the book has often been wrongly to push political agendas, but that is the antithesis of Mill’s clearly stated intention.

One area where liberty does cross into the political arena is ‘free speech’.  Mill argued that all things being equal, we should be free to say whatever we want because that is the best way at arriving at the truth, which he saw as a ‘consensus’ rather than any sense of ‘absolute truth’. Mill did not just argue for the absence of any restraints on free speech, but he actually advocated argument, dissent and disagreement as positive things.  He said at one point that if there isn’t an opposing view, then we should create one, noting that even the Catholic Church appoints a Devil’s Advocate to argue against the canonisation of a proposed saint.

Mill claimed that there is nothing more dangerous than the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’, and he would be deeply dissatisfied with any society that had all the protections of free speech but where everyone went about agreeing with one another.  He positively wanted argument, and he believed it was necessary, because it was only in the collision of our half-truths, which constitute most people’s opinions, that the real truth would emerge.

Mill once claimed in Parliament that each of us knows that some of our opinions are wrong, but none of us knows which ones are the ones that are wrong, because if we did they would no longer be our opinions.  He hated politicians who said they would never change their minds of shift opinions – and yet, he was passionate about his own convictions, including his belief that everyone has some opinions that are wrong!!!!!

Mill claimed that if we ever give up the possibility that what we believe is right is actually wrong, then we are in real strife.  That is why he felt so strongly that debate and argument are important.

Of course, there is a danger in setting up Mill as an authority, or expert, on liberalism, because that would be against the tenets of liberalism.  One of the tensions in Mill’s work was the question of how to handle authority – needless to say, he saw the tension between liberty and equality quite differently from José Ortega y Gasset.  Mill wanted a more learned, well-educated, cleverer group of people to be more influential than the less educated mass of the population.  These days, we would call his view elitist.  Nonetheless, in the tension between liberty and equality, Mill would choose liberty every time.  To make the point unambiguously, Mill was even hesitant about introducing universal suffrage (voting) until the level of education had risen.

Despite its rhetoric, liberalism is elitist in that it specifically empowers those who are better educated.  It does so on the grounds that those with less education are less likely to be fully informed to make appropriate decisions, and they are even less likely to have the skills of eloquent oratory necessary to engage in robust argument, as Mill felt was so important.

As one example to illustrate this, UCLA researchers have compared the MRI scans of young adults with those of adolescents.  The researchers looked for signs of myelin, the electrically-insulating dielectric phospholipid layer that surrounds the axons of many neurons, and which is required for more mature, efficient connections within grey matter. As expected, it was the areas of the frontal lobe that showed the largest differences between young adults and teens.  The increased myelination in adults’ frontal lobes is believed to relate to the maturation of cognitive processing and other functions that involve soundness of judgement and impulse control.

None of this suggests for a moment that adolescents are incapable of making sound decisions.  That would not only be counter-intuitive but absurd in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.  I am often in awe at the wisdom shown by students at LPCUWC in making insightful judgments.

Nonetheless, we cannot simply choose to ignore the overwhelming evidence that significant high-order abilities required for liberalism to function (such as discerning a full range of possible consequences) do not form physically in the human brain until adulthood.  Unless one is prepared to function on the edge of constant chaos, this makes liberalism effectively unworkable in its purest form – by which I mean allowing every individual to have the liberty to make decisions that are constrained solely by the ‘harm principle’ –in any primary or secondary school environment.  This probably explains why schools based explicitly on liberalism such as Summerhill (links HERE and HERE) have not spread more widely or become more influential, despite the appealing rhetoric of their advocates.

Asian (and most African for that matter) societies are based on community concerns rather than the individual priorities that underpin Mill’s liberalism.  On that basis, Howland argues that mistrust of individual liberty in Asia continues to highlight the cultural narrowness of Mill’s work and its inapplicability to societies where emphasis is placed on the collective good rather than individual welfare.

Mill’s concept of liberty was (and is) extremely individualistic to the point of self-centredness, as might be expected when egalitarianism and the rights of others cease to be factors that are deemed to be worthy of consideration.  To Mill, the extent to which someone’s life is good is measured by the extent to which the individual has made his own choices, the extent to which the individual is charting his own direction, and the extent to which the individual is deciding what constitutes a flourishing life for himself.

Of course, there are many appealing aspects of liberalism, and it offers some extremely worthwhile insights for all of us who are part of a UWC community.  And yet, any enthusiasm for liberalism needs to be balanced with an honest assessment and acknowledgement of its limitations and shortcomings, and safeguards must be provided as protection from the excesses of unfettered liberalism.  As in all things, balance is needed.

I spent much of last weekend answering tens of supportive and encouraging e-mails (thank you!), and talking with groups of students in the living area of my home.  Several of these conversations explored the extent to which schools (and ours in particular) need rules, and IF we need them, whether or not they need to be enforced.   I have been thinking deeply about those conversations, and like most of my blogs, this is my attempt to work through many of the issues that arose.

As the most recent photo of John Stuart Mill (shown left) suggests, liberalism has been around for a long time - about 150 years in fact.  Nonetheless, as the actions of many Hollywood actors testify, it is still a fashionable and trendy philosophy to promote, with just a hint of ‘cool’ subversiveness.  And yet, if pure liberalism is to work in practice in a school environment, the evidence suggests that we have to have a largely monocultural community where every individual is self-centred and has a fully-developed, well-educated, adult, genetically-European brain, and where there are no imbalances in power relationships and no peer pressures (‘the tyranny of the majority’)!  And we would have to accept that liberty is a more important priority than equality, which would be a tough call I think.  Those assumptions collectively seem like quite significant limitations to have to address.

In practice, I think liberalism provides some extremely useful insights but its limitations are highly significant in the context of an international school, and cannot be ignored.  And I hope that José Ortega y Gasset, Kurt Hahn, Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, Alexis de Tocqueville, the UCLA brain researchers and Zhou Enlai would all agree with me – not that their agreement would make me right; I learned that from John Stuart Mill ;-)

For the full text of ‘On Liberty’ Click HERE.