Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man more clever devil

The Clever Devil and the Missing Chest

After the Second World War, a school principal who had survived a Nazi concentration camp wrote a letter to every new teacher at the school. The psychologist Haim Ginott later made it famous. The writer had seen gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians and infants killed by trained nurses. "So I am suspicious of education," the letter says, and its request is simple: help your students become human. That letter is the most chilling commentary on the statement before us. It concedes, as the topic itself does, that education is useful; the engineers were competent and the physicians skilled. But knowledge only multiplies the force of the person who holds it, and without values to direct that force, education does not make a better human being, only a more capable one, for good or for evil.

The statement rests on a careful distinction. Education, in the narrow sense, transmits information and skill: how to calculate, design, argue and persuade. Values decide the ends to which these powers are put: honesty, compassion, justice, restraint. The phrase "as useful as it is" is an honest concession, since no society can do without trained minds. Yet cleverness is instrumental; it can be put to any purpose, just as a sharper knife cuts bread and throats with equal ease. The writer C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man (1943), warned that modern schooling was producing "men without chests": people with trained intellects and strong appetites but no cultivated sentiments in between to hold the two in check. A clever devil is precisely such a man.

History offers its sharpest illustrations in the lives of brilliant people. Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for synthesising ammonia, a process whose fertilisers still feed a large share of humanity. The same mind directed the first large-scale chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915. His education was identical in both cases; only the purpose differed. Moreover, the officials who met at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 to coordinate the extermination of European Jews were no illiterate mob: more than half of them held doctorates, many in law. Their training made the machinery of murder efficient, punctual and legally tidy. Education did not prevent the horror; it administered it.

The corporate world tells the same story in a quieter register. The sociologist Edwin Sutherland coined the term white-collar crime in 1939 to describe offences committed by respectable, educated people in the course of their work. Enron, which collapsed in 2001, was run by graduates of the finest business schools who used sophisticated accounting to hide losses. The global financial crisis of 2008 was built on mathematical models and complex derivatives that their own creators barely understood but happily sold. In India, Ramalinga Raju's confession in 2009 that Satyam's accounts had been inflated for years shocked a country that had held up its software firms as models of a new, educated, merit-based capitalism. In each case, expertise was the instrument of deception rather than the guard against it.

Building upon this, the digital age has made the clever devil more powerful than ever. Cyber fraudsters who empty the bank accounts of pensioners are often technically skilled young people. The Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 showed how data scientists could harvest the personal data of millions and use it to manipulate voters. Deepfakes now let a person with a laptop put false words in the mouth of any public figure. The Vyapam scandal in Madhya Pradesh revealed how examinations meant to select doctors and officials could themselves be gamed by educated middlemen. Technology without ethics magnifies harm at a scale no earlier villain could imagine, which is why the question of values in education is not old-fashioned but urgent.

Indian thought has long anticipated this warning. The Vishnu Purana declares sa vidya ya vimuktaye: that alone is knowledge which liberates. The Mundaka Upanishad distinguishes para vidya, the higher knowledge that leads to wisdom, from apara vidya, the lower learning of disciplines and skills. Gandhi listed "knowledge without character" and "science without humanity" among his Seven Social Sins in Young India in 1925. Across the world, a young Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1947 that the most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but with no morals, and that the goal of true education is intelligence plus character. The traditions converge on one point: the purpose of learning is to make a person better, not merely more effective.

Yet the antithesis deserves a fair hearing. Values without education can be equally dangerous. Superstition, caste prejudice and so-called honour killings are all defended in the name of values; fanaticism is often deeply sincere. The question also arises: whose values? A state that preaches its preferred morality in classrooms can slide into indoctrination, as every totalitarian regime has shown. Education, by teaching people to reason, compare and doubt, is itself a protection against bad values. The answer, therefore, is not to place values above knowledge but to marry them, and to root the values in something shared: the constitutional morality that Ambedkar spoke of, with its commitment to liberty, equality, fraternity and dignity.

How, then, can values be taught without sermonising? The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg showed that moral reasoning develops in stages and grows through grappling with real dilemmas, not through memorising rules. Children learn honesty from teachers who are honest, fairness from classrooms that are fair, and compassion from community service. India's education commissions understood this: the University Education Commission under Dr. S. Radhakrishnan (1948-49) and the Kothari Commission both urged moral and spiritual education. The Delhi government's Happiness Curriculum, introduced in 2018, set aside daily time for mindfulness and reflection, and the National Education Policy 2020 names ethical reasoning and constitutional values among the core outcomes of schooling. Sport, the arts and service learning teach teamwork and empathy far better than a moral science textbook.

Professions, too, must keep reinforcing what schools begin. The Hippocratic tradition binds doctors to do no harm; the Nolan Committee's seven principles of public life (1995) set standards for those who hold public office; and UPSC added a paper on Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude to the civil services examination in 2013, a recognition that a clever administrator without integrity is a danger to the very citizens he serves. Codes alone do not create character, but they remind the educated that their skill is held in trust.

The principal who survived the camps did not ask teachers to stop teaching mathematics or science. The plea was that "reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human." That is the real meaning of the statement. Education will always make people more capable; whether it makes them better depends on the values woven into it, by the home, the classroom, the profession and the state together. A nation that educates only the mind will produce clever devils in abundance; a nation that educates the mind and the heart together will produce citizens worthy of their knowledge. The choice between the two is made every day, in every classroom, and its consequences outlast us all.