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Thoughts on Education

 

Right Sound for the Mind

 

 
The core task of education lies not in simply acquiring knowledge, but in enhancing our awareness.


We often speak of the "expanding universe” when what we actually mean is our expanding awareness.

 

 

Foreword..

  • The essential thing is not information, but understanding, and understanding can be attained only by personal creative application. Information is gained from without to the inside; understanding is a creative process in the opposite direction.
  • All people have certain assets and should be taught how to use them.
  • It is not necessary for every person to become an artist, but it is imperative that each person becomes a creator.

         

Project «Open Intuition»

The proposed project «Open Intuition» aims at solving one of the central problems in today’s world: the problem of unemployment. Unemployment is not merely a problem of insufficient positions, as most people assume. Instead, the main issue – even if this may seem paradoxical – is the problem of providing a meaningful activity for the allotted timeframe.
         

Developed countries have social provisions to ensure the interests of their citizens. These provisions guaranty each individual economic protection and medical insurance in case of job loss or partial or complete disability. In this sense, the current situation is absolutely unique. At the same time, each person under full social protection has also received another large gift from our developed society - a large amount of free time. With the right understanding of the situation and an intelligent solution this national problem could be converted into a great advantage for these nations.


We live in an age of increasing inventiveness in all areas of human trade, which is exactly why the largest challenge we face in the current time is to rethink these obsolete ideas of under-employment and to find a precise formulation for new and positive ideas and measures.


The government attempts to solve such problems in a purely utilitarian, and rather ineffective, method. They redirect the flow of unemployed into numerous training courses in the hope that qualifying them in another professional field will help them find a different position. However, the advantages of such courses are minimal as they fail to fulfill their core purpose: to determine the true interests of the participants.


A minimal percentage of the graduates do find a new position; however, rarely one that they really want and one that they will enjoy and where they can realize their potential. Instead, the positions are merely positions that happen to be available at a given time. The remaining graduates of these numerous courses, who do not find a position, continue down the path of depression and become frequent visitors to medical institutions and doctors’ offices. It is no secret that it takes colossal means to maintain the health of the million contingents of unemployed populations and is, without doubt, one of the largest expenditures in the national budget.


The problem of unemployment could be solved in a short amount of time if society would understand that only a new form of education is the key to the solution. 


A lack of developed institutions and the inability of tradition education to develop create a situation where only a small group of creative thinkers have direct access to knowledge. This situation can be changed through the development of a new type of education, one in which intuition, the higher intuitive aspect of thinking, is developed. Such an approach would help people determine their natural abilities and talents, as well as to understand their strengths and individuality and, in turn, to apply them in their daily life. In contrast to traditional educational methods, so-called “Backward Looking Education”, that focuses and is based on the accomplishments of the past, the new educational form is called “Forward Looking Education” or simply


FORLED


Turning away from the myriad of dogmatic guidelines or commonly accepted standards, we are challenged to free students' aware from unnecessary veils and to provide greater possibilities of determining the stronger, natural properties of human personalities and to uncover the hidden abilities that will help them solve concrete tasks. We must teach students to be active in a future-oriented manner, while drawing their basis from the present. In order to become an independent and strong creator of one's own life one must liberate one's self and must test future freedoms. The purpose behind this educational process is to reach a new level in evolutionary development, from intellect to intuition, thereby turning each person into an independent think and enabling them to form their own private and professional life. We describe this level of mental development as “Universal Thinking”.


Providing greater access to such education is vital. This has become especially clear in today’s business world. Today’s business world relies completely on development and expansion, in other words on the concrete formation of the future as that is the only way to guarantee success. Focusing merely on the knowledge of the past is generally not enough when trying to solve business or economic questions as the past is just not current enough. As can be seen, modern business life and traditional education often block one another and are heading in two different directions.


The formula of success


1.       The most important aspect is not information, but a deep understanding, which can only be achieved through individual and creative efforts. People gather information from external sources: from books, newspapers, human contact, the internet, as well as the radio and television. However, understanding is a creative process that begins internally and works its way outward and which is not possible without the development of intuition.


2.       Second, modern humanities focus on three aspects of mental activity or three fundamentally different types of understanding.
a.       The basic, instinctive understanding or so-called “common sense”, which is necessary for survival. Traditional forms of education and psychology are closely related to this form of understanding.


b.       Individual  understanding, also referred to as intellect. Intellect is the rational, analytical aspect of understanding and thinking. This category includes all individuals who actively attempt to think autonomously and independently.


c.       The third level is the highest level of understanding, which intuition uses as a bridge to connect individuals to the world of ideas. This type of mental activity is mostly seen in exceptional personalities in culture and science, progress-oriented politicians, benefactors to society, as well as the leaders of modern business, economy and the financial world.
Traditional, classic education develops the first two aspects of the human being – instinctive and intellectual thinking. This classic formula can be described as


Instinct + Intellect = Double II


However, our education combines all three aspects: instinct, intellect and intuition, with a focus placed on developing intuition.
Our new formula for "holistic education" in the 21st century can be described as follows:

Instinct + Intellect + Intuition = TRIPLE III


This formula involves a much more thorough integration of personality aspects and internal synthesis, which is mandatory for continued progress.


Moreover, we help students develop a clear understanding that each person who follows their own artistic, scientific or philosophic nature follows the comfortable “way of least resistance", from a psychological point of view. The main goal of an educator becomes to define and encourage these approaches. We are fully convinced that this form of educational system can change all of humankind as a result of a change in the way humankind thinks. Mental speculation and purely intellectual concepts are replaced by a stronger and more creative spirit.


If this new concept were used to solve unemployment, unemployment ratings could be greatly reduced over the next 7 years. Free time would be used in a new, creative way and many, who today are socially-needy, would be able to follow a completely independent path of creative self realization. The natural result in the general, state-run procedures in academic education, as well as higher education, would be the following of a redefined and new direction.


To demonstrate the possibilities of this form of educational method we propose the realization of a one year program involving a socially-dependent population in USA, Canada, Australia and countries of the European Union under the name of “Open Intuition”. The results will be reviewed in depth by experts in the employment market, by sociologists, psychologists, physicians and economics and present to the public in a suitable manner. These results would receive a multi-faceted and wide-ranging response, as well as active support, not just from companies, but from state-run structures as well. Our goal is to successfully realize this a future-oriented educational program as far as possible and to earn its recognition as a primary necessity within the overall development process in the European Union throughout the coming decades.


We have already defined this type of education and have been using it successfully for over 25 years in Germany and USA.


The steps humanity needs to take are significant and essential and only an innovative education system and modernized access to the academic process can realize these steps.

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

The following article is a translation of an article written by Oleg Uriev in the Art Journal  “The Decorative Art of the Soviet Union”, September, 1988.

 


Taste of Improvisation

 


I always wonder,   why  there  are so many more artistically talented children than artistically talented adults.  Without exaggeration one could say that an artistically untalented child as hard to find as a talented adult. Why? What happens with a child at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen years? Why does a girl that created verses full of lively charm while a small child, suddenly start to write clumsy boring stuff?  A  boy  that excited us with the bright decorations and the unconscious meanings of his drawings – why does he stop drawing?  I think about these things.  I am convinced that thinking about the phenomenon of artistic creativity in a child means thinking about the nature of talent in general. What kind of education serves to maintain and develop talent?


I decided to write about the studio of Allen Tager because he has a unique and interesting teaching method and because he has so many very talented children in his studio.


What are the basic elements of his method? Allen says, his work with children always begins with “physical emancipation”. When a child comes into the studio he has allowed to draw in any position, he chooses: standing, lying, sitting on a chair, under the table.  Eventually, he discovers for himself the most natural drawing position of sitting on a chair in front of an easel. Everything begins with freedom. That is  the main point. If you tie the child to the chair, teach him “the right way” of holding a pencil or brush or put some clay in from of him, you can imagine how his art education will continue. In this case nothing is expected from the child until the child  grow older and learn how to be an artist.
Until now people have been dealing with two different approaches toward artistic development. In the first approach, the artist has forged though the walls of the formal traditional school system because of his special qualities of his personality. In the second approach, the artist develops independently outside of the traditional school system as a great self-educator.


In the studio of Tager the children learn something different. Now that they have their body ”emancipated” and have found the most natural position, they are feeling free and comfortable. So, what next? Quite unexpectedly the little children (6-9 years old) get a lecture of philosophy: “Do you know,” – the teacher says – “that the lines on the palm of every man are an absolutely unique drawing nobody is able to reproduce? In the special way you are, you are singular on this earth.  You shouldn’t forget this”.


Of all we have heard so far we must come to a seemingly simple conclusion: All we have talked about you can name with just one word – freedom.


After this preparation the teacher begins to talk about drawings. The main focus is on the mutual relationship between the elements of the picture, which are the life within the picture. Color becomes an expression of the inner self awareness of the object, not only an attempt to reproduce the image. The works of the students are “professional” child paintings and not to be understood as preparations.


Allen Tager is a gifted teacher. He wants to get through to a certain part f the child’s inner world, the spheres of freedom which are nearer to the surface in a child that they are in grown-ups. He uses a method called the “stress technique”. In the explanation of this “stress technique”   Tager refers to Zen and the inducement of stress on the students by the teacher.  When you try to take the security of common associations away from children this is a psychological stress. The world proves to be something new every time, deprived of  it’s  solid  and well known elements. One has to learn about this world anew and thus to concentrate his/her mental power to solve this problem. That’s it. You won’t get ahead with less. This is the source of the energy in the children’s art which is nearly tragic sometimes, the source of the astonishing harmony you can find in the pictures by these children.


To make work with these principles effective one needs to build a special kind of culture, a suitable social law. This law requires that there be no leaders in the collective. Nobody will have the perspective that they are on top of the social ladder, a perspective that is the scourge of all children’s groups and has been the ruin of many talented persons.  Tager is very wise only to accept the leadership of certain works of art but not of their creators. Everybody can be a leader if his/her drawing proves worthy to be exhibited.  In the beginning this means just to hang on the studio wall. Everybody can be the creator  of such a work, some more often, some less, but everybody sometimes. This is why in Tager’s studio there is a deliberate distinction between the creative process and the result.  The disaster of traditional and related methods is their one-sided attention to either process or result.


In the studio of Allen Tager the children do not learn drawing technique, but a technique of improvisation, a technique of communication with the object, people and nature around us. The thought is obviously that a drawing technique will come by itself. In other words, the creation itself is the right drawing technique for everyone who is drawing in a concrete way.

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on Education

 

 

 

 

All people have certain assets and should be taught how to use them. The essential thing is not information, but understanding, and understanding can be attained only by personal creative application. Information is gained from without to the inside; understanding is a creative process in the opposite direction. One may know everything without at the same time understanding anything at all.

The Tibetan

It is not necessary for every person to become an artist, but it is imperative that each person becomes a creator.

Allen Tager

 

 

The History of Education

 

The development of world education has been progressively along three main lines, starting in the East and culminating today in the West. In Asia, we have had the intensive training, down the centuries, of certain carefully chosen individuals and a complete neglect of the masses. In the training of the highly developed individuals, however, the masses throughout Asia have been neglected, and the system, consequently, (from the angle of racial development), leaves much to be desired.

Then in Europe, we have had educational attention concentrated upon a few privileged groups, giving them a carefully planned cultural training but teaching only the necessary rudiments of learning to the masses. This produced periodically such important epochs of cultural expression as the Elizabethan period and Renaissance.

Finally, in the new countries of the world, such as the United States, Australia and Canada, mass education was instituted and was largely copied throughout the entire civilized world. In the West the emphasis is entirely reversed. The product of these premises is the reverse of the Oriental. We have no specific culture of a kind to produce such world figures as Asia has produced, but we have evolved a mass system of education, and we have developed groups of thinkers.

The general level of cultural attainment became much lower; the level of mass information and competency considerably higher. The question now arises: What will be the next evolutionary development in the educational world?

 

Education Today

Education, up to the present time, has been occupied with the art of synthesizing past history, past achievement in all departments of human thought and with the attainments to date of human knowledge. It has dealt with those forms of science which the past has evolved. It is primarily backward-looking and not forward-looking.

Education has concerned itself primarily with the organizing of the lower mind, and a student’s caliber has been largely gauged by its reaction to accumulated information. Education to date has been largely memory training, though there is now emerging the recognition that this attitude must end.

To all of these I would like to add that one of our immediate educational objectives must be elimination of the competitive spirit and the substitution of the cooperative consciousness. Here is the question at once arises: How can one achieve this and at the same time bring about a high level of individual attainment? Is not competition a major spur to all endeavor? This has hitherto been so, but it need not be.

Today the average child is, for the first fife or six years of his life, the victim of his parents ignorance or selfishness or lack of interest. He is frequently kept quiet and out of the way because his parents are too busy with their own affairs to give him the needed time — busy with nonessential matters, compared to the important end essential business of given their child a right start upon the pathway of life. He is left to his own resources or those of some ignorant nursemaid, at a stage when a destructive little animal should be developed into a constructive little citizen. He is some times petted and often scolded. He is dragged hither and hither, according to his parents whims and interest, and he is sent to school with a sense of relief on their part, in order to get him occupied and out of the way. At school, he is frequently under the care of some young, ignorant though well-meaning person whose task it is to teach him the rudiments of civilization — a certain superficial attitude and form of manners which should govern his relations to the world of men, an ability to read and write and figure, and smattering (rudimentary indeed) of history and geography and good form in speech and writing.

By that time however the mischief is done and the form which his later education processes may take, from the age of eleven onward, is of small moment. An orientation has been effected, an attitude (usually defensive, and therefore inhibiting) has been established, a form of behavior has been enforced or imposed which is superficial, and which is not based upon the realities of right relationships. The true person which is found in every child-expansive, out-going and well-meaning as are the bulk of children in infancy-has consequently been driven within, out of sight, and hidden itself behind an outer shell which custom and tuition have enforced. Add to this a multitude of misunderstandings on the part of loving but superficial and well-intentioned parents, a long series of small catastrophes in relation to others, and it is obvious that the majority of children get of to a wrong start and begin life basically handicapped. The damage done to children in the plastic and pliable years is often irremediable and is responsible for much of the pain and suffering in later life. What then can be done? What, apart from the more technical approaches outlined by me today, should be the effort on the part of parents and educators? First, and above everything else, the effort should be made to provide an atmosphere wherein certain qualities can emerge.

1.

An atmosphere of love, wherein fear is cast out and the child realizes he had no cause for timidity, shyness or caution, and one in which he receives courteous treatment at the hands of others, and is expected also to render equally courteous treatment in return. This is rare indeed to find in schoolrooms or in homes for that matter. This atmosphere of love is not an emotional, sentimental form of love but it based upon a realization of the potentialities of the child as an individual, on a sense of true responsibility, freedom from prejudice, racial antagonisms, and above everything else, upon compassionate tenderness.

This compassionate tenderness is founded on the recognition of the difficulty of living, upon sensitivity to the child’s normally affectionate response, and upon a knowledge that love always draws forth what is best in child and man.

2.

Atmosphere of patience, wherein the child can become, normally and naturally, a seeker after the light of knowledge, wherein he or she is sure of always meeting with a quick response to inquire and a careful replay to all question, and wherein there is never the sense of speed or hurry. Most children’s natures are warped by the rush and hurry of those with whom they are perforce associated. There is no time to instruct them and to replay to their small and most necessary inquiries, and the time factor therefore becomes a menace to right development , and leads eventually to a life of evasions and of wrong perspectives. Their standard of values becomes distorted by watching those with whom they live, and much of it is brought to their attention by the impatience which is displayed towards them. This impatience on the part of those upon whom they are so pathetically dependent, sows in them the seeds of irritation, and more lives are ruined by irritation than can counted.

3.

An atmosphere of ordered activity, wherein the child can learn the first rudiments of responsibility. This should be carefully borne in mind, for the shouldering of small duties and the sharing of responsibility (which is always concerned with some form of group relation) is a potent factor in determining a child’s character and future vocation.

4.

And atmosphere of understanding, wherein a child is always sure that the reasons and motives for his actions will be recognized, and that those who are his older associates will always comprehend the nature of his motivating impulses, even though they may not always approved of what he has done or of his activities. Many of the things which the average child does are not in themselves naughty or wicked or intentionally bad. They are frequently prompted by a thwarted inquiring spirit, by the desire to retaliate for some injustice ( based on the adult’s lack of understanding his motivation), by an inability to employ time rightly ( for the directional is often, at this age, entirely quiescent and will not become active until the mind is beginning to function), and by the urge to attract attention — a necessary urge in the development of self-consciousness, but one which needs understanding and most careful guidance.

 

 

The Fundamental Necessity of the Present Time

 

The fundamental necessity which today confronts the educational world is the need to relate the process of unfolding the human mentality to the world of meaning, and not to the world of objective phenomena. Until the aim of education is to orient a man to this inner world of realities, we shall have the misplaced emphasis of the present time.

Above all else, the educators will endeavor to teach man the science of unifying the three aspects of himself which are covered by the general title of mental aspects:

a.

The lower concrete mind or common-sense.

b.

The individualized mind.

c.

The higher, abstract or intuitional mind.

1.

The first effort of education to civilize the child will be to train and rightly direct his instincts.

2.

The second obligation upon the educators will be to bring about his true culture, by training him to use his intellect rightly.

3.

The third duty of education will be to evoke and to develop the intuition.

We must strengthen those aspects which are good and desirable; we must develop the new attitudes and techniques which will fit a child for complete living and so make him truly human a creative, constructive member of the human family. The very best of all that is past must be preserved but should only be regarded as the foundation for a better system and a wiser approach to the goal of world citizenship.

Education is the training, intelligently given, which will enable the youth of the world to contact their environment with intelligence and sanity, and adapt themselves to the existing conditions. This today is of prime importance.

 

Educational Methodology

Knowledge comes from two directions. It is the result of the intelligent use of the five senses and it is also developed from the attempt to seize upon and understand ideas. Both of these are implemented by curiosity and investigation.

Educators will, therefore, lay emphasis in the future upon:

1.

Inherited, factual knowledge upon which it will be possible to superimpose the wisdom of the future.

2.

Capacity wisely to handle relationships and to recognize and assume responsibility.

3.

The power to use the mind in two ways:

a.

As the «commonsense» (using this word in its old connotation), analyzing and synthesizing the information conveyed by the five senses.

b.

As a searchlight, penetrating into the world of ideas.

Education should be of three kinds and all three are necessary to bring humanity to a needed point of development.

It is, first of all, a process of acquiring facts past and present and of then learning to infer and gather from this mass of information, gradually accumulated, that which can be of practical use in any given situation. This process involves the fundamentals of our present educational systems.

It is, secondly, a process of learning wisdom as an outgrowth of knowledge and of grasping understandingly the meaning which lies behind the outer imparted facts. It is the power to apply knowledge in such a manner that sane living and an understanding point of view, plus an intelligent technique of conduct, are the natural results. This also involves training for specialized activities. based upon innate tendencies, talents or genius.

It is, finally, a process whereby unity or a sense of synthesis is cultivated. Young people should be taught to think of themselves in relation to the group, to the family unit and to the nation in which their destiny has put them. They will also be taught to think in terms of world relationship and of their nation in relation to other nations. This covers training for citizenship, for parenthood, and for world understanding; it is basically psychological and should convey an understanding of humanity. When this type of training is given, we shall develop men and women who are both civilized and cultured and who will also possess the capacity to move forward (as life unfolds) into that world of meaning which underlies the world of outer phenomena and who will begin to view human happenings in terms of the deeper universal values. In others words — in the present time we have to turn our culture from intellect to intuition.

Education should be the process whereby youth is taught to reason from cause to effect, to know the reason why certain actions are bound inevitably to produce certain results.

 

Educational Goals

An international system of education, developed in joint conference by broadminded teachers and educational authorities in every country, is today a crying need and would provide a major asset in preserving world peace. Steps towards this are already being taken and today groups of educators are getting together and discussing the formation of a better system which will guarantee that the children of the different nations (beginning with the millions of children now demanding education) will be taught truth, without bias or prejudice. World democracy will take form when men everywhere are regarded in reality as equal; when boys and girls are taught that it does not matter whether a man is an Asiatic, an American, a European, British, a Jew or a Gentile but only that each has an historical background and history which enables him to contribute something to the good of the whole, and that the major requirement is an attitude of goodwill and a constant effort to foster right human relations. World Unity will be a fact when the children of the world are taught that religious differences are largely a matter of birth; that if a man is born in Italy, the probability is that he will be a Roman Catholic; if he is born a Jew, he will follow the Jewish teaching; if born in Asia, he may be a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, or belong to one of the Hindu sects; if born in other countries, he may be a Protestant and so on. He will learn that the religious differences are largely the result of man made quarrels over human interpretations of truth. Thus gradually, our quarrels and differences will be offset and the idea of the One Humanity will take their place.

Much greater care will have to be given in picking and training the teachers of the future. Their mental attainments and their knowledge of their particular subject will be of importance, but more important still will be the need for them to be free from prejudice and to see all men as members of a great family. The educator of the future will need to be more of a trained psychologist than he is today. Besides imparting academic knowledge, he will realize that his major task is to evoke out of his class of students a real sense of responsibility; no matter what he has to teach history, geography, mathematics, languages, science in its various branches or philosophy he will relate it all to the Science of Right Human Relations and try to give a truer perspective than in the past upon social organization.

When the young people of the future under the proposed application of principles are civilized, cultured and responsive to world citizenship, we shall have a world of men awakened, creative and possessing a true sense of values and a sound and constructive outlook on world affairs. It will take a time to bring this about, but it is not impossible as history itself has proved.

Information as to the past history of the race will be given to him from the angle of the racial growth in consciousness and not so much from the angle of the facts of material or aggressive achievement as is now the case.

I am dealing solely with the institutional aspect of the educational systems and with the proven effect upon the young of every nation who have been subjected to these systems. The realized goals which the institutional teacher has set before himself have been narrow, and the consequent effect of his teaching and of his work has been the production of a selfish, materialistically-minded person whose major objective has been self-betterment in a material sense.

The natural idealism of the child (and what child is not an innate idealist?) has been slowly and steadily suffocated by the weight of the world’s educational machine.

The trend of our modern civilization, in spite of all its mistakes and errors, is to produce thinkers. Education, books, travel, in its many and varied forms, enunciations of science and of philosophy, and the driving inner urge which we call religious, but which is, in fact, the drive towards truth and its mental verification all these factors have one objective, and this is to produce thinkers.

Given a real thinker, you have an incipient creator.

The most advanced educators today are occupied in making students knowers.

1.

Teaching them to know themselves.

2.

Setting them free from authority by awakening interest and enquiry in their minds, and then indicating (not more than that) the direction in which the answer should be sought.

3.

Giving them those conditions which will force them to stand on their own feet and rely on their own souls and not on any human being, be he a best friend, teacher, or a group leader.

I seek not to repeat myself. But, our philosophy here is never judge in terms of right or wrong. The crude discrimination between right and wrong which occupies the child soul is succeeded by the finer distinctions of right, or of more right, of high, or higher.

The essential thing is not information, but understanding, and understanding can be attained only by personal creative application. Information is gained from without to the inside; understanding is a creative process in the opposite direction. One may know everything without at the same time understanding anything at all. And that is precisely the pass to which our education, that aims at a hoarding of information, has brought the majority.

Education should not aim at a passive awareness of dead facts but at an activity directed towards the world that our efforts are to create. But we must remember that creation posits an alive and functioning creator, acting with intention and utilizing the creative imagination. Could it be said that this is the effect of our modern educational systems? Is not the mind standardized and held down by our mass system and by the method of cramming the memory with ill digested facts?

We can defines educational task is to reorient the individual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals.

 

The Purpose of Education

“…education is undergoing important transformations. From a relatively external process of pouring in facts, it is increasingly becoming a process of evoking the deeper, generative possibilities that lie within the individual.”

H. A. Overstreet

One of the many factors which have brought humanity to its present point of development has been the growth and perfecting of its educational methods and systems. At first this was in the hands of the organized religions, but now it is practically divorced from the control of the religious bodies, and lies in the hands of the state. In the past, education was largely colored by theology and its methods were dictated by the churchmen and the priests. Now the vast body of teachers are trained by the state; any religious bias is ignored on account of the many differentiated religious bodies, and the trend of the teaching is almost entirely materialistic and scientific. In the past, both in the East and in the West, we have had the education of the more highly evolved members of the human family. Today we have mass education. In approaching any understanding of the future and (we believe) higher education, these two facts must be borne in mind for it will be in a synthesis of these two methods — individual and mass education — religious and scientific — that the way out will be found.

Like everything else in this transitional period, our educational systems are in a state of flux and of change. A general feeling that much has been done to raise the level of the human mind is everywhere to be found, coupled with a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the results. We are questioning whether our educational systems are achieving the widest good. We appreciate the enormous advance that has been made during the past two hundred years, and yet we wonder whether we are, after all, getting as much out of life as should be possible to people with an adequate system of training. We are smugly satisfied with our growth in knowledge, our accumulation of information, and our control of the forces of nature, and yet we hold collegiate debates as to whether we have any true culture. We teach our children to memorize an enormous array of facts, and to assimilate a vast amount of widely diversified detail, and yet we question sometimes whether we are teaching them to live more satisfactorily. We use billions of dollars to build and endow universities and colleges and yet our most far-sighted educators are gravely concerned as to whether this organized education is really meeting the needs of the average citizen. It certainly seems to fail in its mission with the unusual child and with the gifted man or woman. Our mode of training our youth is standing decidedly before the bar of judgment. Only the future can settle whether some way out will not have to be found whereby the culture of the individual can proceed alongside the civilizing, through education, of the masses.

In an age of scientific achievement and of a synthesis of thought in every department of human knowledge, one of our educators, Dr. Rufus  M. Jones says:

“But, alas, none of these achievements makes us better men. There is no equation between bank accounts and goodness of heart. Knowledge is by no means the same thing as wisdom or nobility of spirit…. The world has never seen before such an immense army of educators at work on the youth of the country, nor has there ever been before in the history of the world, such a generous outlay of money for education both lower and higher. The total effect, however, is disappointing, and misses the central point. Our institutions of learning produce some good scholars and give a body of scientific facts to a great number. But there is a pitiable failure in the main business of education which is, or should be, the formation of character, the culture of the spirit, the building of the soul.”

Old Mother Asia and Europe, up to the eighteenth century, trained and cultured the individual. An intensified training was given to the so-called upper classes, and to the man who showed a marked aptitude for spiritual culture. Under the Brahmanical system in the East, and in the monasteries in the West, a specialized culture was imparted to those who could profit by it, and rare individuals were produced, who, to this day, set their mark upon human thought. For this our modern Occidental world has substituted mass education. For the first time, men in their millions are being taught to use their minds; they are beginning to assert their own individualities, and to formulate their own ideas. The freedom of human thought, liberation from the control of theologies (religious or scientific) are the war cries of the present, and much has thereby been gained. The masses are beginning to do their own thinking. But it is largely mass thinking, and haphazard public opinion now moulds thought just as much as theologies formerly did. The pioneering individual has still as much difficulty in making himself felt in the present world of thought and of endeavor, as of old.

Perhaps in the turning of the great wheel of life, we are due again to revert to the ancient method of specialized training for the special individual — a reversion which will not involve a discarding of mass education. In this way, we may ultimately unify the methods of the past and of the East with those of the present and of the West.

Before considering these two methods let us attempt to define education, to express to ourselves its goal and so clarify our ideas as to the objectives ahead of all our endeavor.

This is no easy thing to do. Viewed from its most uninteresting aspect, education can briefly be defined as the imparting of knowledge to a student, and usually to an unwilling student, who receives a mass of information that does not interest him in the least. A note of dryness and of aridity is struck; we feel that this presentation deals primarily with memory training, with the impartation of so-called facts, and with giving the student a little information on a vast number of unrelated subjects. The literal meaning of the word, however, is “to lead out of,” or “to draw out,” and this is most instructive. The thought latent in this idea is that we should draw out the inherent instincts and potentialities of the child in order to lead him out of one state of consciousness into another and wider one. In this way we lead children, for instance, who are simply conscious of being alive, into a state of self-consciousness; they become aware of themselves and of their group relationships; they are taught to develop powers and capacities, especially through vocational training, in order that they may be economically independent, and thus self-supporting members of society. We exploit their instinct of self-preservation in order to lead them on along the path of knowledge. Could it be said that we begin with the utilization of their instinctive apparatus to lead them on to the way of the intellect? Perhaps this may be true, but I question whether, having brought them thus far we carry on the good work and teach them the real meaning of intellection as a training whereby the intuition is released.

If Professor  H. Wildon Carr is right, in his definition of the intuition, then our educational methods do not tend to its development. He defines it as “the apprehension by the mind of reality directly as it is, and not under the form of a perception or a conception, nor as an idea or object of the reason, all of which by contrast are intellectual apprehension.”

We rate the science of the mind or the modifications of the thinking principle as strictly human, relegating man’s instinctual reactions to qualities he shares in common with the animals. May it not be possible that the science of the intuition, the art of clear synthetic vision, may some day stand to the intellect as it, in its turn, stands to the instinctual faculty.

Dr. Dibblee of Oxford makes the following interesting comments upon instinct and intuition. He says:

“…both instinct and intuition begin within the extra-conscious parts of ourselves, to speak in a local figure, and emerge equally unexpectedly into the light of every day consciousness…. The impulses of instinct and the promptings of intuition are engendered in total secrecy. When they do appear, they are necessarily almost complete, and their advent into our consciousness is sudden.”

And he adds in another place that intuition lies on the other side of reason to instinct. We have, therefore, this interesting triplicity — instinct, intellect and intuition — with instinct lying below the threshold of consciousness, so to speak, with the intellect holding the first place in the recognition of man, as human, and with the intuition lying beyond both of them, and only occasionally making its presence felt in the sudden illuminations and apprehensions of truth which are the gift of our greatest thinkers.

Surely there must be something more to the educational process than just fitting a man to cope with external facts and with his arbitrary environment? Humanity must be led out and into a deeper and wider future and realization. It must be equipped to meet and handle whatever may come, so as to get the highest and the best results. Men’s powers should be drawn out to their fullest constructive expression. There must be no standardized limit of achievement, the attainment of which will leave them complacent, self-satisfied and, therefore, static. They must always be led from lower to higher states of realization, and the faculty of awareness must be steadily expanded. Expansion and growth is the law of life and while the mass of men must be lifted by a system of education, fitted to bring the greatest good to the greatest number, the individual must be given his full heritage, and special culture provided which will foster and strengthen the finest and the best amongst us, for in their achievement lies the promise of the New Age. The inferior and the backward must also have special training in order that they may come up to the high standard which the educators set. But it is of even greater importance that no man, with a special aptitude and equipment, should be held down to the dead level of the mass standard of the educated class.

It is right here that the difficulty of defining education becomes apparent, and the questions arise as to the real goal and the true objectives. Dr. Randall realizes this in an article he wrote, in which he says:

“Let each one ask himself what he means by ’education’; and if he ponders the question deeply he will discover that in order to answer it he will have to probe down to the innermost meaning of life itself. Thinking earnestly about the meaning of education compels us to face the fundamental questions of life as we never have before…. Is the goal of education knowledge? Assuredly yes, but knowledge for what? Is its goal power? Again yes, but power to what end? Is its goal social adjustment? The modern age replies emphatically, yes, but what kind of adjustment shall it be, and determined by what ideals? That education aims not at mere knowledge or mere power of any kind, but at knowledge and power put to right uses is clearly recognized by the most progressive educational thought, though not by the popular opinion of the day….

”The new education has for its great end, therefore, the training and development of the individual for social ends, that is, for the largest service to man….

“We commonly classify education under three heads — primary, secondary and higher. To these three I should like to add a fourth, highest. The highest education is wisdom in action.

Both East and West seem to feel that an educational system that does not eventually lead a man out of the world of human affairs into the wider consciousness of spiritual things has failed in its mission and will not measure up to the soaring demand of the human soul. A training that stops short with the intellect, and ignores the faculty to intuit truth which the best minds evidence, lacks much. The door must be opened for those who can go beyond the academic training of the mind with relation to physical plane living.

The success of the future of the race is bound up with the success of those individuals who have the capacity to achieve greater, because more spiritual, things. These units of the human family must be discovered and encouraged to go on and to penetrate into the realm of the intangible. They must be cultured and trained and given an education which will be adapted to the highest and the best that is in them. Such an education requires a proper perception of individual growth and status, and a right understanding of what the next step in any given case should be. It requires insight, sympathy and understanding on the part of the teacher.

There is an increasing realization among educators of this need to lift the more advanced educational processes and so raise those subjected to their influence out of the realm of the purely analytical critical mind into that of pure reason and intuitive perception. Bertrand Russell points out that „Education should not aim at a passive awareness of dead facts but at an activity directed towards the world that our efforts are to create.“ But we must remember that creation posits an alive and functioning creator, acting with intention and utilizing the creative imagination. Could it be said that this is the effect of our modern educational systems?

Is not the mind standardized and held down by our mass system and by the method of cramming the memory with all digested facts?

If Dr. Herbart is right when he says that the „chief business of education is the ethical revelation of the universe“ then perhaps Dr. Moran is also right when he points out that „one of the underlying causes, perhaps the greatest, of our materialistic age is the lack of the spiritual element in our formal education.„

The essential thing of education is not information, but understanding, and understanding can be attained only by personal creative application…. Information is gained from without to the inside; understanding is a creative process in the opposite direction. Under these circumstances, there is no direct way leading from one goal to the other. One may know everything without at the same time understanding anything at all. And that is precisely the pass to which our education, that aims at a hoarding of information, has brought the majority.“

Everett Dean Martin defines education for us as a „spiritual revaluation of human life. Its task is to reorient the individual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals.“ This definition necessarily opens the door to controversy, for we live, each of us, in a different environment; we have each our special problems and characteristics, based upon our heredity, our physical condition and many other factors. The consequent standard of values will have to be modified for each person, for each generation, country and race. That education is intended to prepare us for „complete living“ (as Herbert Spencer says) may be true, but the scope and capacity of each man differs. The lowest and the highest attainable point for men varies infinitely, and a man, moreover, who is equipped to function in one particular sphere might prove ludicrously inadequate in another. Some standard of „complete living“ must therefore be worked out if the definition is to be useful. To do this we shall have to ascertain what is the pure type of the rounded out and perfected man, and what is the sum total of his range of contacts. It does not seem possible that we have exhausted the possibilities of man’s response apparatus, nor of the environment with which it can put him in touch. What are the limits within which man can function? If there are states of awareness, ranging all the way from that of the Hottentot up to that of our intelligentsia and on to the geniuses and leaders in all fields of human expression, what constitutes the difference between them? Why are their fields of perception so widely diverse? Racial development, one will reply; or instability, another will say; the possession, or the lack, of adequate educational advantages, differences in environment and in heritage, other groups of thinkers will decide.

But out of the welter of opinion emerges the basic fact of the wide range of the human states of awareness, and the wonder of the realization that humanity has produced such marvels of comprehensive understanding, of purity of expression and of perfected world-wide influence as we see evidenced by the Christ, the Buddha, Plato and many others, whose thoughts and words have set their mark upon the minds of men for thousands of years. What has made them what they are?

Dr. Overstreet says:

„In the main, we are creatures who see ’things’. We see what we see and usually not beyond what we see. To experience the world as merely a world of things is doubtless to fail of something that is significant. The experience of things, to be sure, is good as far as it goes. It enables us to move about our world and to manipulate the life-factors with some success…. It is possible, however, to get a different ’feel’ of one’s world if one is able to develop another habit of mind. It is, in short, the habit of seeing the invisible in the visible reality; the habit of penetrating surfaces, of seeing through things to their initiating sources.“

These two methods of rounding out the human being and raising him to a mass standard, and of producing the emergence of the new type, the soul, constitute the main distinction between the western and eastern educational methods.

The contrast between the two ways of development is most instructive. In the East we have the careful culture of the individual, with the masses left practically without any education. In the West we have mass education, but the individual is left, speaking generally, without any specific culturing. These two great and divergent systems have each produced a civilization, expressing its peculiar genius and manifestations, but also its marked defects. The premises upon which the systems are based are widely divergent, and it would be worth our while to consider them, for in understanding them and in the eventual union of the two it is possible that the way out may be found for the new race in the New Age.

The result of this intensive and individual training has been spectacular in the extreme. The eastern method is the only one which has produced the Founders of all the world religions, for all are Asiatic in origin. Thus the East has manifested forth, as the result of its particular technique, all the Great Individuals. The result of their lives is to be seen in the great organized religions.

In the training of the highly developed individuals, however, the masses throughout Asia have been neglected, and the system, consequently, (from the angle of racial development), leaves much to be desired. The defects of the system are the development of visionary and impractical tendencies. The mystic is frequently unable to cope with his environment, and where the emphasis is laid entirely upon the subjective side of life, the physical welfare of the individual and the race is neglected and overlooked. The masses are left to struggle in the mire of ignorance, disease and dirt, and, hence, we have the deplorable conditions found throughout the Orient, alongside the highest spiritual illumination of the favored few.

In the West the emphasis is entirely reversed. The subjective is ignored. The premises upon which our culture is based are as follows: First, there is an entity, called the human being, who possesses a mind, a set of emotions and a response apparatus through which he is brought into contact with his environment. Second, according to the caliber of his apparatus and the condition of his mind, plus the nature of his environing circumstances, so will be his character and disposition. The goal of the educational process, applied wholesale and indiscriminately, is to make him physically fit, mentally alert, to provide a trained memory, controlled reactions, and a character which makes him a social asset and a contributing factor in the body economic. His mind is regarded as a storehouse for imparted facts and the training given every child is intended to make him a useful member of society, self-supporting and decent. The product of these premises is the reverse of the Oriental. We have no specific culture of a kind to produce such world figures as Asia has produced, but we have evolved a mass system of education, and we have developed groups of thinkers. Hence, our universities, colleges and public and private schools. These set their mark upon tens of thousands of men, standardizing them and training them so that we turn out a human product, possessing a certain uniform knowledge, a certain stereotyped store of facts and a smattering of information. This means that there is no such deplorable ignorance as we find in the East, but a fairly high level of general knowledge. It has produced what we call civilization, with its wealth of books, and its many sciences. It has produced the scientific investigation of man.

Yet the cause is basically one — a method of education. Both are also fundamentally right, yet both are needed to supplement and complement each other. The education of the masses of the Orient will lead to the rectifying of their physical plane problems which call aloud for solution. A wide general system of education reaching down among the illiterate masses of the people in Asia is the outstanding need. The culturing of the individual in the West, and the grafting upon his body of imposed knowledge, of a technique of Soul Culture, as it has come to us from the Orient, will lift and salvage our civilization which is so fast breaking down. The East needs knowledge and the imparting of information. The West needs wisdom.

This scientific and cultural system, when applied to our highly educated human beings, will produce that bridging body of men, who will unify the achievements of the two hemispheres and link the subjective and objective realms. They will act as the pioneers of the New Age, when men will be practical men of affairs with their feet firmly planted on earth and yet, at the same time, be seers, living also in the world of spirit and carrying inspiration and illumination with them into the life of every day.

Professor Luzzatti says: “It is everywhere noticed that the growth of the empire of man over himself does not keep step with the growth of the empire of man over nature.” It is essential that the western world should perfect its educational systems in such a way as to bring about this conquest of the empire of ourselves.


It requires simply the recognition that all formulations of truth and of beliefs are only partial in time and space, and are temporarily suited to the temperaments and conditions of the age and race.


It will, therefore, be clear to you on careful perusal, that as one knows more, one judges less.


The most advanced educators today do not reward by commendation, by patting on the head, or by expressing their pleasure in words. They are occupied in making knowers and masters out of everyday men and women by:

a.

Teaching them to know themselves.

b.

Setting them free from authority by awakening interest and enquiry in their minds, and then indicating (not more than that) the direction in which the answer should be sought.

c.

Giving them those conditions which will force them to stand on their own feet and rely on their own souls and not on any human being, be he a beloved friend, a teacher, or a Master of the Wisdom.


One interesting fact emerges out of all this comparative work and this mode of analogical teaching, and that is that the word “spiritual” refers neither to religious matters, but to the relationships on every level of the cosmic physical plane, to every level from the lowest to the highest.

The word “spiritual” relates to attitudes, to relationships, to the moving forward from one level of consciousness (no matter how low or gross, from the point of view of a higher level of contact) to the next; it is related to the power to see the vision, even if that vision is materialistic as seen from the angle of a higher registration of possibility; the word “spiritual” refers to every effect of the evolutionary process as it drives man forward from one range of sensitivity and of responsiveness to impression to another; it relates to the expansion of consciousness, so that the enfoldment of the organs of sensory perception in primitive man or in the awakening infant are just as surely spiritual events as participation in an initiatory process; the development of the so-called irreligious man into a sound and effective businessman, with all the necessary perception and equipment for success.

The assumption by orthodox church people that the word “spiritual” connotes profound and effective interest in orthodox religion is not borne out by the facts of the spiritual life. Some day, when the world is increasingly led by its initiates, this erroneous assumption will be discarded, and it will be realized that all activity which drives the human being forward towards some form of development (physical, emotional, intuitional, and so forth) is essentially spiritual in nature and is indicative of the livingness of the inner divine entity.


Creators withdraw within in order to comprehend the life side of the form. The outer manifestation of that life side in the world is through that which we call art. The great painters and the superlative musicians are in many cases reaching their goal that way.


What we produce through wrestling and strenuous endeavor remains forever our own, and vanishes not into forgetfulness as do the thoughts that enter through the eye from the printed page, or through the ear from the lips of any teacher no matter how revered.

Only that which is the result of self-effort, of hard struggle and of bitter experience is of permanent and lasting value.


If then it seems to you that I have but imparted only sufficient to arouse interest, know then that that is my aim. When your interest and the interest of all aspirants is sufficiently aroused naught can then be withheld from you.


We aim at developing thinkers and men of clear vision, capable of logical reasoning. To do this we teach men to develop themselves, to do their own thinking, reason out their own problems, and build their own characters.


Brooding over past deeds, and casting the mind back over old achievement, is in the nature of involution, and the servant seeks to work with the law of evolution. This is an important thing to note.


This awareness can be instinctual, intellectual and therefore human, and also spiritual. But all three are equally divine, which is a point often forgotten.


The instinct which has characterized this passing sixth ray period and which has been noticeably fostered under its influence is that of taste — taste in food, in human intercourse, in color, in form, in art and architecture and in all branches of human knowledge. This discriminating taste has reached a relatively high stage of development during the past two thousand years and “good taste” is a highly cherished mass virtue and objective today. This is a totally new thing and one which has been hitherto the prerogative of the highly cultured few. Ponder on this. It connotes evolutionary achievement. For the disciples of the world, this sense of taste has to be transmuted into its higher correspondence — a discriminating sense of values. Hence the clear emphasis laid in all textbooks on discipleship upon the need to develop discrimination.


The mental equipment of men is increasing out of all proportion to their emotional balance and to their physical equipment. The rapid advance of knowledge, the spreading of the educational system which brings the product of many minds into the environment of the very poor, the ability of all to read and write in such a country as America or among the other Anglo-Saxon races, has been the cause of a very real problem.

Mental development when paralleled by emotional stability and a strong healthy body is the aim for all. But now you have mental development paralleled by an unstable emotional and a weak, badly raised physical. Hence disorder, lack of balance, the clouding of the vision and disproportionate discussion. Lower mind, instead of being a means to an end and a weapon for use, is in fair way of being a ruler and a tyrant, preventing the play of the intuition and shutting out the abstract mind.


Imagination does not relate to the emotions. Imagination is the lowest aspect of the intuition.


The trend of our modern civilization, in spite of all its mistakes and errors, is to produce thinkers. Education, books, travel, in its many and varied forms, enunciations of science and of philosophy, and the driving inner urge which we call religious, but which is, in fact, the drive towards truth and its mental verification-all these factors have one objective, and this is to produce thinkers. Given a real thinker, you have an incipient creator.


Time is literally the length of a thought.


The energy of the intuition, which is the word we use to describe a direct contact with the Mind of The Universe at some relatively high level of experience. The intuition is entirely concerned with group activity; it is never interested in or directed to the revelation of anything concerned with the personality life.


From the traditional angle, evolution means growth and development and is largely applied to the form side of nature, and the term “evolution” might thus be confined entirely to the evolution of the form nature. However, from the spiritual angle, evolution means a steadily increasing sensitivity to light and illumination.


This is an important thing to note. On the mental plane there are three aspects of the mind. These three aspects constitute the most important part of human nature:

a.

The lower concrete mind or “common sense”

b.

The abstract mind, or that aspect of the mind which is related to the world of ideas.

c.

The intuition or pure reason which is for man the highest aspect of the mentality.


Through analysis, correlation and synthesis, the thought power of man is developed and the abstract mind can be unified with the concrete. Therefore that interesting sensitivity of man, with its three outstanding characteristics of instinct, intellect and intuition is brought to a condition of intelligent coordination. Instinct relates man to the animal world, intellect unites him to his fellow men, whilst the intuition reveals to him the life of divinity.


The religion implication of meditation are needless. Meditation is the process whereby the objective tendencies and outgoing impulses of the mind are thwarted, and it begins to be subjective, to focus and to intuit. This can be taught through the medium of deep thinking on any subject — mathematics, business, biology, history, music, art and so forth.


The voice of conscience — is the whisper of the soul.


The two most modern groups are the psychologists who work under the Delphic injunction “Man, know thyself”, and the financiers who are the custodians of the means whereby man can live upon the physical plane. These two groups necessarily, and in spite of apparent divergences and differences are more synthetic in their foundational aspects, than any of the others. One group concerns itself with mankind, with the varying types of humanity the mechanism employed, and man’s urges, characteristics, and with the purpose-apparent or hidden-of his being. The other group controls and orders the means whereby he exists, controlling all that can be converted into energy and constituting a dictatorship over all modes of intercourse, commerce and exchange. They control the multiplicity of form-objects which modern man regards as essential to his mode of life. Money is only crystallized energy or vitality. It is a concretization of etheric force. It is therefore vital energy externalized, and this form of energy is under the direction of the financial group. They are the latest group in point of date, and their work (it should be borne in mind) is most definitely planned by the Universe. They are bringing about effects upon the earth which are most far reaching.


Love is in reality, understanding wisdom in active expression. Love, actually, is - wisdom in action.


The most advanced educators always teaching the art of living in order to produce a synthesis of beauty. There is no beauty without unity.


The sense of synthesis is our major goal and will be the goal of all educational movements.


The sense of identity persists only during the creative process.


Liberty, in the minds of many, is freedom from the imposition of any man's rule, freedom to do as one wishes, to think as one determines and to live as one chooses. This is as it should be, provided that one's wishes, choices, thoughts and desires are free from selfishness and are dedicated to the good of the whole. This is, as yet, very seldom so.


We help our student enters the world of meaning and so can interpret events.


Only today is man at the point in the evolution of his consciousness where he can begin to realize the power of the subjective worlds, and the new and vast science of psychology is his response to this growing interest. It is in this connection that it becomes obvious that the work of the teacher and of the psychologist must eventually go hand in hand.


Students lose much by refusing to let go of that which the lower mind cherishes. When they do succeed in being entirely open minded and are ready to accept the new theories and hypotheses, they discover that the old and dearly held truth is not really lost, but only relegated to its rightful place in a larger scheme.


One danger against which the student must guard himself is becoming obsessed by his own embodied ideas, be they temporarily right or basically strong. Forget not that all right ideas are temporary in nature and must eventually take their place as partial rights and give place to the greater truth. The fact of the day is seen later as part of a greater fact. A man can have grasped some of the lesser principles of the Universal Wisdom so clearly and be so convinced of their correctness that the bigger whole is forgotten and he builds a thought-form about the partial truth which he has seen which can prove a limitation and keep him a prisoner and hold him back from progress. He is so sure of his possession of truth that he can see the truth of no one else. He can be so convinced of the reality of His own embodied concept of what the truth may be that he forgets his own brain limitations and that the truth has come to him via his own soul and is consequently being subsequently built into form by his personal reparative mind. He lives but for that little truth; he can see no other; he forces his thought-form on other people; he becomes the obsessed fanatic and so mentally unbalanced, even if the world regards him as sane.


The object for which life takes form and the purpose of manifested being is the enfoldment of consciousness, or the revelation of the soul. This might be called the Theory of the Evolution of Light. When it is realized that light and matter are synonymous terms, it becomes apparent that through the interplay of the poles light flashes forth. The goal of evolution is found to be a gradual series of light demonstrations. Veiled and hidden by every form lies light. As evolution proceeds, matter becomes increasingly a better conductor of the light.


Knowledge might be divided into three categories:— First, there is theoretical knowledge. This includes all knowledge of which man is aware but which is accepted by him on the statements of other people, and by the specialists in the various branches of knowledge. It is founded on authoritative statements and has in it the element of trust in the writers and speakers, and in the trained intelligences of the workers in any of the many and varied fields of thought. The truths accepted as such have not been formulated or verified by the one who accepts them, lacking as he does the necessary training and equipment. The dicta of science, the theologies of religion, and the findings of the philosophers and thinkers everywhere color the point of view and meet with a ready acquiescence from the untrained mind, and that is the average mind. Then, secondly, we have discriminative knowledge, which has in it a selective quality and which posits the intelligent appreciation and practical application of the more specifically scientific method, and the utilization of test, the elimination of that which cannot be proved, and the isolation of those factors which will bear investigation and are in conformity with what is understood as law. The rational, argumentative, scholastic, and concretizing mind is brought into play with the result that much that is childish, impossible and unverifiable is rejected and a consequent clarifying of the fields of thought results.

 

This discriminating and scientific process has enabled man to arrive at much truth in relation to the world. The scientific method is, in relation to the mind of humanity, playing the same function as the method of meditation (in its first two stages of concentration and prolonged concentration ) plays in relation to the individual. Through it right processes of thought are engendered, non-essentials and incorrect formulations of truth are ultimately eliminated or corrected, and the steady focusing of the attention either upon a seed thought, a scientific problem, a philosophy or a world situation results in an ultimate clarifying and the steady seeping in of right ideas and sound conclusions. The foremost thinkers in any of the great schools of thought are simply exponents scientific method of meditation (through the medium of deep thinking) and the brilliant discoveries of science, the correct interpretations of nature's laws, and the formulations of correct conclusions whether in the fields of science, of economics, of philosophy, psychology or elsewhere is but the registering by the mind (and subsequently by the brain) of the eternal verities, and the indication that the race is beginning also to bridge the gap between the objective and the subjective, between the world of form and the world of ideas.

 

This leads inevitably to the emergence of the third branch of knowledge, the intuitive. The intuition is in reality only the appreciation by the mind of some factor in creation, some law of manifestation and some aspect of truth, emanating from the world of ideas, and being of the nature of those energies which produce all that is known and seen. These truths are always present, and these laws are ever active, but only as the mind is trained and developed, focused, and open-minded can they be recognized, later understood, and finally adjusted to the needs and demands of the cycle and time. Those who have thus trained the mind in the art of clear thinking, the focusing of the attention, and consequent receptivity to truth have always been with us, but hitherto have been few and far between. They are the outstanding minds of the ages. But now they are many and increasingly found. The minds of the race are in process of training and many are hovering on the borders of a new knowledge. The intuition which guides all advanced thinkers into the newer fields of learning is but the forerunner of that omniscience which characterizes the soul. The truth about all things exists, and we call it the "correct knowledge". When man grasps a fragment of it and absorbs it into the racial consciousness we call it the formulation of a law, a discovery of one or other of nature's processes.


There is no question but that a man is faced, in his progress, with increasingly subtle distinctions. The crude discrimination between right and wrong which occupies the child soul is succeeded by the finer distinctions of right, or of more right, of high, or higher.


The intuition ever concerns itself with group activity and not with petty personal affairs. The intuition reveals not the way ambition can be fed, nor the manner in which desire for selfish advancement can be gratified.


The lower concrete mind alone is ever egoistic, self-seeking, and expresses that personal ambition which carries within it the germ of its own destruction.


Instinct, governing the vegetable and animal kingdoms, develops into intellect in the human family. Later intellect merges into intuition and intuition into illumination. When the superhuman consciousness is evoked these two — intuition and illumination — take the place of instinct and of intelligence.


We speak at times of an expanding universe; what we really mean is an expanding consciousness.


Let us be willing to recognize that those countries in which the old mode of education is still peacefully practiced may be not only dangerous to themselves because they are perpetuating the bad old ways, but that they also constitute a menace to those countries which are in the happy position of being able to change their educational institutions and thus inaugurate a better way of preparing their youth for total living. Education is a deeply spiritual enterprise. It concerns the whole man.


In the teaching of history, for instance, we are still teaching the old ways wherein each nation glorifies itself at the expense frequently of other nations, in which facts are systematically garbled, in which the pivotal points in history are the various wars down the ages—a history, therefore, of aggression, of the rise of a material and selfish civilization and one which has fed the nationalistic and, therefore, reparative spirit, which has fostered racial hatreds and stimulated national prides? The first historical date usually remembered by the average British child is "William, the Conqueror, 1066". The American child remembers the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers and the gradual taking of the country from its rightful inhabitants and perhaps the Boston Tea Party. The heroes of history are all warriors — Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, Richard Coeur de Lion, Napoleon, George Washington and many others. Geography is largely history in another form but presented in a similar manner—a history of discovery, investigation and seizure, followed frequently by wicked and cruel treatment of the inhabitants of the discovered lands. Greed, ambition, cruelty and pride are the keynotes of our teaching of history and geography. The wars, aggressions and thefts which have distinguished every great nation without exception are facts and cannot be denied. Surely, however, the lessons of the evils which they wrought can be pointed out and the ancient causes of present day prejudices and dislikes can be shown and their futility emphasized.

Is it not possible to build our theory of history upon the great and good ideas which have conditioned the nations and made them what they are? To emphasize the creativity which has distinguished all of them? Can we not present more effectively the great cultural epochs which—suddenly appearing in some one nation—enriched the entire world and gave to humanity its literature, its art and its vision? This necessitates a drastic change in our methods of presenting history and geography. Science has always been universal. Great art and literature have always belonged to the world. It is upon these facts that the education to be given to the children of the world must be built—upon our similarities, our creative achievements, our spiritual idealisms, and our points of contact. Unless this is done, the wounds of the nations will never be healed and the barriers which have existed for centuries will never be removed.

The educators who face the present world opportunity should see to it that a sound foundation is laid for the coming civilization; they should undertake that it is general and universal in its scope, truthful in its presentation and constructive in its approach. What initial steps the educators of the different countries take will inevitably determine the nature of the coming civilization. They should prepare for a renaissance of all the arts and for a new and free flow of the creative spirit in man. They should lay an emphatic importance upon those great moments in human history wherein man's divinity flamed forth and indicated new ways of thinking, new modes of human planning and thus changed for all time the trend of human affairs. Two major ideas should immediately be taught to the children of every country. They are: the value of the individual and the fact of the one humanity. The value of the individual and the existence of that whole which we call Humanity are most closely related. This needs emphasizing. These two principles, when properly taught and understood, will lead to the intensive culture of the individual and then to his recognition of his responsibility as an integral part of the whole body of humanity. It, therefore, becomes increasingly apparent that the coming education could be defined in a new and broader sense as the Science of Right Human Relations and of Social Organization. This gives a comparatively new purpose to any curriculum imparted and yet indicates that nothing hitherto included need be excluded, only a better motivation will be obvious and a nationalistic, selfish presentation avoided. If history is, for instance, presented on the basis of the conditioning ideas which have led humanity onward and not on the basis of aggressive wars and international or national thievery, then education will concern itself with the right perception and use of ideas, of their transformation into working ideals.

It is perhaps a platitude to say that education should occupy itself necessarily with the development of the reasoning powers of the child and not primarily—as is now usually the case—with the training of the memory and the parrot-like recording of facts and dates and uncorrelated and ill-digested items of information. The history of the growth of man's perceptive faculties under differing national and racial conditions is of profound interest. The outstanding figures of history, literature and art and of religion will surely be studied from the angle of their effect and their influence for good or evil upon their period; the quality and purpose of their leadership will be considered. Thus the child will absorb a vast amount of historical information, of creative activity and of idealism and philosophy not only with the maximum of ease but with permanent effect upon his character. The continuity of effort, the effects upon civilization of ancient tradition, good and evil happenings and the interplay of varying cultural aspects of civilization will be brought to his attention and the dry-as-dust information, dates and names will fall into the discard. All branches of human knowledge could, in this way, come alive and reach a new level of constructive usefulness.

There is already a definite tendency in this direction and it is good and sound. The past of Humanity as the foundation for present happenings, and the present as the determining factor for the future will increasingly be recognized and thus great and needed changes will be brought about in human psychology as a whole. The creative aptitude of the human being should also, under the new era, receive fuller attention; the child will be spurred on to individual effort suited to his temperament and capacity. Thus he will be induced to contribute what he can of beauty to the world and of right thought to the sum total of human thinking; he will be encouraged to investigate and the world of science will open up before him. Behind all these applied incentives, the motives of goodwill and right human relations will be found. Finally, education should surely present the hypothesis of the soul in man as the interior factor which produces the good, the true and the beautiful. Creative expression and humanitarian effort will, therefore, receive a logical basis. This will not be done through a theological or doctrinal presentation, as is today the case, but as presenting a problem for investigation and as an effort to answer the question: What is man? What is his intrinsic purpose in the scheme of things? The livingness of the influence and the proclaimed purpose behind the constant appearance of spiritual, cultural and artistic world leaders down the ages will be studied and their lives subjected to research, both historical and psychological. This will open up before the youth of the world the entire problem of leadership and of motive.

Education will, therefore, be given in the form of human interest, human achievement and human possibility. This will be done in such a manner that the content of the student's mind will not only be enriched with historical and literary facts but his imagination will be open and his aspiration evoked along true and right lines; the world of past human effort will be presented to him in a truer perspective and the future thrown open to him also in an appeal for his individual effort and personal contribution. Every race and all nations have always produced those who have expressed the highest possible point of attainment for their day and generation—men who have united within themselves that basic triplicity: instinct, intellect and intuition. Their numbers were relatively few in the early stages of man's enfoldment but today those numbers are rapidly increasing. It will be only commonsense, however, to realize that this integration is not possible for every student passing through the hands of our teachers. Students will have to be gauged from the three angles which form the background of this chapter:

1.

Those capable of being civilized. This refers to the mass of men.

2.

Those capable of being carried forward into the world of culture. This includes a very large number.

The keynote of the new education is essentially right interpretation of life, past and present, and its relation to the future of mankind. The keynote of the new science of politics and of government will be right human relations and for both of these education must prepare the child.


The highest unity will be cognized only when this dual relation is perfected. The theory of the One Life may be held, but I deal not basically with theory but with that which may be known, provided there is growth and intelligent application of truth. I deal with possibility and with that which is capable of achievement. Many these days like to talk and think in terms of that One Life, but it remains but speech and thought, whilst the true awareness of that essential Unity remains a dream and an imagining.


It is awareness of identity in relation to other identities. It is a sense of identity, however, which persists only during the creative process.


The major science today is Psychology. The reason for its greatness and usefulness lies in the fact that it lays the emphasis upon the relation of the unit to the whole.


Psychology is only just come into its own, and only now is its function beginning to be understood; in one hundred years time, however, it will be the dominating science; and the newer educational systems, based on scientific psychology, will have completely superseded our modern methods.


Love of the form is good but only as the form is known for what it is. Love of the form must never hide the Life which has its place behind.


Art is Isolated Unity. Isolated Unity is that stage of consciousness which sees the whole as one and regards itself, not theoretically but as a realized fact, as identified with that whole. It is a whole which is "isolated" in the consciousness of the man, and not the man himself who regards himself as isolated.


When educators cease to train the brain cells or to deal with the evocation of memory, and when they cease to regard the brain and the mind as one, but learn to differentiate between the two, then great strides forward will be made.


Every child should be studied in three directions. First, to ascertain the natural trend of his impulses: Are they towards physical expression, towards manual labor, in which one would include such a wide range of opportunity as that of the mechanical factory worker and the trained skill of the electrician? Is there a latent capacity for one or other of the arts, a reaction to color and form, or a response to music and rhythm? Is the intellectual caliber one that should warrant a definitely mental training in analysis, deduction, mathematics or logic? Then perhaps as life goes on our young people will be graded into two groups: * the “SRI” group, under which heading one would group those with religious, artistic and the more impractical tendencies; and ** the “SRP“ group, which would include the intellectual, scientific and mental types. By the time a child is seventeen the training given should have enabled him to strike his note clearly, and should have indicated the pattern into which his life impulses will most probably run. In the first fourteen years, opportunity should be given to experiment in many fields of opportunity. Pure vocational training should not be emphasized until the later years of the educational process. * "SRI" - Seven Ray Impractical, ** "SRP" - Seven Ray Practical


The time is coming when all children will be studied in the following directions:

1.

Astrologically, to determine the life tendencies and the peculiar problem of the soul.

2.

Psychologically, supplementing the best of modern psychology.

3.

Medically, with special attention to the endocrine system.

4.

Vocationally, so as to place them later in life where their gifts and capacities may find fullest expression and enable them thus to fulfill their group obligations.

5.

Spiritually. By this I mean that the apparent age of the soul under consideration will be studied, and the place on the ladder of evolution will be approximately noted; all natural gifts and tendencies will be considered and their apparent lack noted.


Those upon the teaching ray will learn to teach by teaching. There is no surer method, provided it is accompanied by a deep love, personal yet at the same time impersonal, for those who are to be taught. Above everything else, I would enjoin upon you the inculcation of the group spirit, for that is the first expression of true love.


Reading has to do with the clothing of ideas with form and is related to the first step in the creative process. Writing symbolizes the method whereby the process is carried on, but it is of course far more personal in its implications. Reading is concerned essentially with the realization of a clothed idea of some kind, whereas writing is, curiously enough, concerned with the individual's conscious self-relation to ideas, and his use of words in writing is the measure of the grasp he may have of these universal ideas. Mathematics (and the power to add, to subtract, and to multiply) is related also to the creative process and concerns the production of those forms upon the physical plane which will adequately produce the idea and bring it to manifestation.


The fundamental necessity which today confronts the educational world is the need to relate the process of unfolding the human mentality to the world of meaning, and not to the world of objective phenomena. Until the aim of education is to orient a man to this inner world of realities, we shall have the misplaced emphasis of the present time. Until we can arrive in our educational objectives a bridging which must take place upon the mental levels of consciousness, we shall make but little progress in right directions and all interim activity will be inadequate to the modern need. Until the fact of the higher mind is recognized, and the place which the lower concrete mind should fill as the servant of the higher is likewise recognized, we shall have the over development of the concrete materializing faculty—with its aptitude to memorize, to correlate facts and to produce that which will meet man's lower desire—but we shall not have a humanity which can truly think.


Educators are therefore faced with the opportunity of dealing intelligently with the innate idealism to be found in any child, and with the interesting task of leading the youth of the world on from one realized goal to another. But this they must do in the future from the angle of the ultimate soul objective and not, as in the past, from the angle of a particular standard of national education. This is an important point, for it will mark the shift of attention from the nonessential to the essential.


Modern education has been primarily competitive, nationalistic and, therefore, separative. It has trained the child to regard the material values as of major importance, to believe that his particular nation is also of major importance and that every other nation is secondary; it has fed pride and fostered the belief that he, his group and his nation are infinitely superior to other people and peoples. He is taught consequently to be a one-sided person with his world values wrongly adjusted and his attitudes to life distinguished by bias and prejudice. The rudiments of the arts are taught him in order to enable him to function with the needed efficiency in a competitive setting and in his particular vocational environment. To read, to write and to be able to add and do elementary arithmetic are regarded as the minimum requirement; to know something of past events—historical, geographical, literary, philosophical and scientific—are likewise added in many countries and for certain classes of people. Some of the literature of the world is also brought to his attention. The general level of world information is high but usually biased, influenced either by national or religious prejudices, serving thus to make a man a citizen of his own country but not a human being with world relations. World citizenship is not emphasized.


I would like here to enlarge somewhat upon the interpretation of the much used words culture and civilization. For it is the production of some form of culture—material or spiritual, or material and spiritual—which is the objective of all education. Education is the major agent in the world.


In the field of education united action is essential. Surely a basic unity of objectives should govern the educational systems of the nations, even though uniformity of method and of techniques may not be possible. Differences of language, of background and of culture will and should always exist; they constitute the beautiful tapestry of human living down the ages. But much that has hitherto militated against right human relations must and should be eliminated.


Much greater care will have to be given in picking and training the teachers of the future. Their mental attainments and their knowledge of their particular subject will be of importance, but more important still will be the need for them to be free from prejudice and to see all men as members of a great family. The educator of the future will need to be more of a trained psychologist than he is today. Besides imparting academic knowledge, he will realize that his major task is to evoke out of his class of students a real sense of responsibility; no matter what he has to teach—history, geography, mathematics, languages, science in its various branches or philosophy—he will relate it all to the Science of Right Human Relations and try to give a truer perspective than in the past upon social organization.


It is difficult for modern man to conceive of a time when there will be no racial, national or reparative religious consciousness present in human thinking. It was equally difficult for prehistoric man to conceive of a time when there would be national thinking and this is a good thing for us to bear in mind. The time when humanity will be able to think in universal terms still lies far ahead but the fact that we can speak of it, desire it and plan for it is surely the guarantee that it is not impossible.


The family group (like all else in human affairs) has shared in the general separativeness, selfishness and individual, isolated exclusiveness, based on class distinctions, inherited tradition, racial attitudes and national custom. Families (under any category and bracket) present a united front to the world; parents defend their own children and position and situation, right or wrong; family pride, tradition, pedigree are overemphasized, leading to the different barriers which today separate man from man, family from family and group from group. The grip of the past upon families is a factor which is largely responsible for the revolt of modern youth against parental control.


Simplicity should be our keyword for it is simplicity which will kill our old materialistic way of living.


The most spiritual use now to be found in the world is the application of money to the purposes of education. When it is turned away from the construction of the form side and the bringing about solely of material well-being of humanity and deflected from its present channels into truly spiritual foundations much good will be done and a step forward will be made. The spiritualizing of money and its massing in quantities for the work of the progressive movements in education can change our world in a very short time.


 

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Acknowledgement

Many of the educational ideas expressed in this article are in alignment with those of The Tibetan, as reflected in the writings of Alice Bailey. More than twenty years after I began implementing this philosophy in my teachings, I was delighted to find a volume of his work, and my own work has been enriched over the years as a result.

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