Last week found us all caught up, once again, in the tyranny of fear and the outrage of injustice. I, too, was glued to my television, watching events unfold on the streets of Paris. I was, of course, thinking, like everyone, about freedom, what it means, who has it and who doesn’t, who really has it and who really doesn’t. And although many of our freedoms have been threatened once again, I have found myself thinking specifically about freedom of speech.
It is fundamental to a way of life founded on the bedrock of personal freedom that citizens are allowed to say what is on their minds without fear of political or physical retribution. To me, that freedom must also extend to what one writes. My experience teaching in Cambodia, a country with only a cursory nod towards freedom of speech, has led me to speak out on this issue before, notably here. After discovering that I was censoring myself on my blog and potentially in my novels, I became more focussed on my own personal experience of ‘freedom of speech’ and with it, ‘freedom from censorship.’ As a result I became involved in the UK movement towards libel reform.
Yes, freedom of speech leads to the importance of freedom from censorship. But there is an even more basic freedom that is directly affected by these concepts, namely, freedom of thought. We who have been lucky enough to have been educated in systems where individual thinking is valued, may well believe that freedom of speech is all about having the right to express our thoughts publicly. But the continued lack of this freedom becomes even more insidious, as I have seen first hand in the classrooms of Cambodia. People who are not encouraged or allowed to express their thoughts publicly, either by speech or writing, become people who stop thinking their own thoughts. A society without freedom of speech is not a society full of people living their lives, thinking their own thoughts, but frustrated by not being able to express them. A society without freedom of speech becomes a society full of people who do not think at all, and as the generations go by, it becomes a society full of people who do not even know how to think.
When I speak about teaching thinking skills with people who come from countries that promote freedom, the conversation becomes one about the importance of teaching critical thinking. But my experience in the classrooms of Cambodia has shown me that the ability to think critically is a luxury. What must come first is the ability to think conceptually. A child must learn that not only can he/she ask the question why, but that such a question exists in the first place. How can one find different ideas? How can one then take different ideas, look at them together and develop new ones? What does why mean? How can I answer that question? How can I believe that my own answer has value?
I have learned that piece of bad news — conceptual thought is not a given. It doesn’t happen automatically. Like everything else, it must be taught. And it can only be taught if, first and foremost, it is allowed. I now see that freedom of speech is much more important than I originally believed. It is the most basic of our freedoms. Without it we lose the ability to think itself and,of course, what really sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is that one ability.
Freedom of speech means freedom to think. Freedom to think means freedom to be human. That is why it is so important.
Recent Comments