Education in the New Age

Education has become of major importance today in all parts of the world. The requirements of education under modem conditions of international relationships and in the light of an emerging new civilisation, are occupying the attention not only of those countries now providing education for the masses of their peoples for the first time in history, but also of countries where a form of compulsory education has been in existence for some time. What should be the principles and purposes underlying new educational techniques? What should these techniques be?

In this pamphlet certain ideas and concepts fundamental to education in all its aspects, and in the many different circumstances of the modern world, are presented.

Education in the New Age

Education Past and Present

Education, up to the present time, has been largely occupied with the art of synthesising past history and past achievement in all departments of human thought and with the attainments to date of human knowledge. It has been primarily backward-looking and not forward-looking.

The values of modern education are still largely competitive, nationalistic and, therefore, separative. The child comes 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. This has fed his pride and fostered the belief that he, his group, his religion and his nation are superior to other people and peoples. He becomes consequently a one-sided person with his world values wrongly adjusted and his attitudes to life distinguished by bias and prejudice.

Education has also concerned itself with the organising of the lower mind, (the purely rational as distinct from creative and intuitive faculties). To read, to write and to be able to do elementary arithmetic are regarded as the minimum requirements. The rudiments of the arts are taught to children in order to enable them to function with the needed efficiency in a competitive setting and in their particular environment.

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 materialism of the world's educational machine.

Little by little this disastrous state of affairs has been changing, so that today in many countries the welfare of the state itself, the need of the nation, is held before the child from its earliest years an the highest possible ideal. This is a definite step forward in the expansion of consciousness which the human race must achieve, for expansion of consciousness and the production of increased sensitivity and perceptive awareness to the larger whole are the goals of all evolutionary endeavour. A further step is to be seen in the fact that everywhere and in every country men are taught to be exponents of certain group ideologies. These ideologies are, in the last analysis, materialising dreams, visions, or ideas.

Leading educational thinkers and organisations today, including UNESCO at the world level, are increasingly emphasising the moral, ethical and spiritual objectives and needs of the educational process. It is, therefore, apparent that behind all the surface turmoil and chaos present today in the consciousness of humanity human beings are beginning to blend in themselves three states of consciousness: that of the individual, of the citizen, and of the idealist. Humanity's sense of world awareness is definitely growing.

The question now arises: what will be the next evolutionary development in the educational world?

 

The Task and Objectives of the New Education

 

Education has three major objectives, from the angle of human development.

First, it must make a man an intelligent citizen, a wise parent, and a controlled personality, able to play his part harmoniously and constructively in the work of the world.

Second, the gap between the lower mind and the soul has to be bridged. The true work of education is to train the man in right discrimination and accurate sensitivity to moral and spiritual ideas and ideals, so that he can build true to the purpose of his soul and produce upon the earth that which will be his contribution to the whole. Curiously enough humanity has always recognised this and has talked therefore in terms of "achieving unity" or "attaining alignment". These are all attempts to express this intuitively realised truth.

Third, it must enable him to bridge the gap between the various aspects of his own mental nature.
This includes bridging between the lower mind and the soul. These aspects are:

1. The Lower concrete mind, the reasoning principle, the receptive mind, as dealt with by the psychologists. It is with this aspect of the man that our present educational processes profess to deal.
2. The "son of mind", the individualised mind, which we may call the ego or SOUL. This is the intelligence principle, known under such names as the Solar Angel, the Christ principle. With this, religion in the past has professed to deal.
3. The higher abstract mind, the illuminating mind, the custodian of ideas. This mind is the conveyor of illumination to the lower mind, once that lower mind is in rapport with the soul. With this world of ideas philosophy has professed to deal.

The true education is consequently the science of linking up the integral parts of man: also of linking him up in turn with his immediate environment, and then with the greater whole in which he has to play his part. This involves the process of acquiring facts, and then learning to infer and gather from this information what can be of practical use in any given situation. It involves the process of learning wisdom, as an outgrowth of knowledge. This 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. It is finally a process whereby unity or a sense of synthesis is cultivated.

The coming education, therefore, should cover training for citizenship, for parenthood, and for world understanding and could be defined in a new and broader sense as the science of right human relations and of social organisation.

The general trend of the new education should, therefore, be more psychological than in the past and educators should in the future lay emphasis upon:

1. A developing mental control of the emotional nature.
2. Vision or the capacity to see beyond what is, to what might be.
3. Inherited, factual knowledge upon which it will be possible to superimpose the wisdom of the future.
4. Capacity wisely to handle relationships and to recognise and assume responsibility.

5. The power to use the mind in two ways:

   a) As the "common sense", analysing and synthesising the information conveyed by the five senses.

   b) As a searchlight, penetrating into the world of Ideas and abstract truth.

Finally, education should present the hypothesis of the soul in man as the interior factor which produces the good, the true and the beautiful.
This interior factor, or soul, expresses itself in every human being as a peculiar quality to which one might give the name of "mystical perception". This quality of mystical perception is inclusive of:

1. The mystical vision of the soul, of God and the universe.
2. The power to contact and appreciate the world of meaning.
3. The power to love and to go out to that which is other than the self.
4. The capacity to grasp and intuit ideas.
5. The ability to sense the unknown, the desirable and the desired the consequent determination and persistence which enables man to seek, to search for and demand that unknown reality. It is the mystical tendency which has produced the great mystics of world renown, the large number of explorers, discoverers and inventors.
6. The power to sense, register and record the good, the beautiful and the true. It is this that has produced the writer, the poet, the musician, the artist and the architect.
7. The urge to discover and to penetrate to the secrets of God and of nature. It is this which produced the scientist and the religious man.

"Mystical perception" therefore is no more and no less than the power, innate in man, to reach out and to grasp that which is greater and better than himself. It is the power to appreciate and to strive after the apparently unattainable good.

The objective of education should, therefore, be the training of the personality mechanism to respond to the life of the soul. Creative expression and humanitarian effort will then be spiritually based and there will be a more realistic answer to the question, what is
man? This will open up before the youth of the world the entire problem of leadership and of motive. The content of the student's mind will not only be enriched with historical and literary facts but his imagination will be fired, and his ambition and aspiration evoked along

true and right lines.

 

Unfoldment and Study of the Child

 

There is an urgent need for the development of more adequate means of understanding and studying children and young people if the objectives of the new education are to be achieved. The future education can only be built on a comprehensive appreciation of man's nature and constitution, and the process of his unfoldment.

The sequence of the child's growth, based upon the process of unfoldment in a human being, can be briefly tabulated an follows:

1. Response to impact, the infant's senses awakened. He begins to hear and see.
2. Response to possession and to acquisitiveness. The child begins to appropriate, becomes self-conscious and grasps for the personal self.
3. Response to the instinct governing the animal and desire nature, and to human tendencies.
4. Response to the group. The child becomes aware of his environment and that he is an integral part of a whole.
5. Response to knowledge. Beginning with the impartation of informative facts, leading to interest, correlation, synthesis and application to life.
6. Response to the innate need to search. This leads to experiment on the physical plane, to introspection on the emotional plane, and to intellectual study and a condition of mental activity.
7. Response to economic and sex pressure and to the law of survival. This forces him to use his equipment and knowledge, to take his place as a factor in group life and to promote group welfare by some aspect of active work.
8. Response to pure intellectual awareness. This leads to a conscious free use of the mind, to individual thinking, to the creation of thought forms, and eventually to the steady orientation of the mind to wider and wider fields of realisation and awareness.
9. Response to the thinker or the soul. With the registration of this response the man enters into his kingdom. The objective and the subjective worlds are unified. Towards this consummation all education should tend.

Every child should be studied first, to ascertain the natural trend of his impulses. Are they towards physical expression? Is there a latent capacity for one or other of the arts? Is the intellectual calibre 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 mystical, under which one would group those with religious, cultural and artistic tendencies; and the occult, which would include the intellectual, scientific and mental types.

By the time the child is seventeen the training given should have enabled him to strike his note clearly, and should have indicated the pattern to which his life impulses will most probably run. In the the first fourteen years opportunity should be given to experiment in many fields of experience. Pure vocational training should not be emphasised until the later years of the educational process.

The time is coming when children will be studied far more comprehensively than is at present the case. In particular this will be made possible through:

1. The growth, development and widespread use of the science of psychology. This is the science of the essential man. The various schools of psychology will each contribute its particular truth and thus the real science of the soul will emerge from this synthesis.
2. The growth and development of the science of the seven basic types of individual on which much Eastern psychological thought is based.
3. The acceptance of the teaching on the constitution of man, with particular reference to the nature, purpose and quality of the three vehicles or bodies of expression, mental, emotional and etheric-physical, and their relation to the soul.

In order to bring this about the best that the East has to offer and the knowledge of the West should be made available. In addition to the methods of studying the child outlined above, all children should be studied medically, with special attention to the endocrine system and the development of the response apparatus, and vocationally, so that later in life their gifts and capacities may find fullest expression. In time scientific astrology will be developed as a means of determining the life tendencies and the peculiar problem of the soul.

All children will also be studied spiritually--the apparent age of the soul and the place on the ladder of evolution will be approximately noted; mystical and introspective tendencies will be considered and their apparent lack noted. Coordination of all aspects of the individual will be carefully investigated so as to bring the entire equipment of the child into a functioning and united whole.

The word "spiritual" does not refer to religious matters, so-called. All activity which drives the human being forward towards some form of development--physical, emotional, mental, intuitional, social--if it is in advance of his present state is essentially spiritual in nature and is indicative of the livingness of the inner divine entity. The spirit of man is undying; it forever endures, progressing from point to point and stage to stage upon the path of evolution, unfolding steadily and sequentially the divine attributes and aspects.

If a true understanding of the seven basic ray types, of the constitution of man and of astrology, plus a right application of synthetic psychology is of any use at all, it must demonstrate itself in the production of a correctly coordinated, wisely developed, highly intelligent and mentally directed human being.

Education and the Seven Rays

There are seven "rays" or qualities of energy influencing humanity and producing seven basic types of human being. It is with these qualities and characteristics and with their related traits and instincts that the future educational systems should work:

1. Will or Purpose, developed to the point where the manifested life is governed by conscious spiritual purpose. The right direction of the will should be one of the major concerns of all true educators.
2. Love-Wisdom. This is essentially the unfolding of the consciousness of the whole, including group consciousness.
3. Active Intelligence. This concerns the unfolding of the creative nature, of the conscious, spiritual man. The right direction of this already developed tendency is the aim of all true education.
4. Harmony, produced through conflict. This leads to balance, to release and to the eventual power to create. This is one of the attributes which education should deal with from the angle of the intuition.
5. Concrete knowledge, whereby man is enabled to concretise his concepts. The true work of education is to train the lower man in right discrimination and true sensitivity to the vision, so that he can build true to the purpose of his soul and produce upon the earth that which will be his contribution to the whole.
6. Devotion. Devotion grows out of and is the fruit of dissatisfaction, plus the use of the faculty of choice based on clearly held ideals. Through devotion and idealism man finally unifies himself with the ideal which is the highest possible to him. 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 realised goal to another.
7. Order, and the imposition of an established rhythm through development of the innate faculty to function under directed purpose and ritual. Educators will have to work with this principle of innate attribute and this instinct to ordered rhythm, making it more creatively constructive, and so providing, through it, a field for the unfoldment of soul powers.

    

The New Education

It is the production of some form of culture--material or spiritual, or material and spiritual--which is the objective of all education.

Civilisation is the reaction of humanity to the purpose of any particular world period. In each age, some idea must be expressed in the current racial idealism.

Culture is the approximation of two ways--feeling and mind; of two worlds--sensitivity and thought; and of the attitudes, relational in nature, which will enable a man to live as an intelligent, subjective being in a tangible physical world. The man of culture relates the world of meaning to the world of appearances and regards them as constituting one world with two aspects.

In the last analysis, civilisation concerns the masses and the racial consciousness, while culture concerns the individual and the creative, spiritual man.

Schools and Colleges

In the schools of today, primary schools, secondary schools, and colleges and universities, there can be seen an imperfect and symbolic picture of the triple objectives of the new education: civilisation, culture, unification.

Elementary or Primary Schools might be regarded as the custodians of civilisation; they should fit the child for citizenship, teach him his place as a social unit, and emphasise his group relations.
Reading, writing and arithmetic, elementary history (with the emphasis upon world history), geography and poetry will be taught, together with certain basic and important facts of living, foundational truths, coordination and control.

High Schools or Secondary Schools should regard themselves as the custodians of culture; they should emphasise the larger values of history and literature and give some understanding of art. They should begin to train the boy and girl for that future profession or mode of life which it is obvious will condition them. Citizenship will be taught in larger terms, the world of true values be pointed out and idealism consciously and definitely cultivated. The youth of the world should begin to relate the worlds of objective outer living and of inner subjective existence.

Colleges and Universities should provide a higher extension of all that has already been done.
They should beautify and complete the structure already erected and should deal more directly with the world of meaning. International problems--economic, social, political and religious--should be considered and the man or woman related still more definitely to the world as a whole. They should be the custodians of those methods, techniques and systems of thought and of life which will relate a human being to the world of souls, to the Kingdom of God.

Fitting a man for citizenship in the Kingdom of God is not essentially a religious activity. It should be the task of the higher education, giving purpose and significance to all that has been done.
The unfoldment of the intuition, the importance of ideals and ideas and the development of abstract thinking and perception will be fostered.

Instinct--intellect--intuition--provide the keynotes for the three scholastic institutions through which every young person will pass. The first effort of education to civilise the child will be to train and rightly direct his instincts. The second obligation upon the educators will be to bring about his true culture, by training him to use his intellect rightly. The third duty of education will be to evoke and develop the intuition.

Energy Relationships

Education should be basically concerned with relations and interrelations, with the bridging or the healing of cleavages, and thus with the restoration of unity or synthesis.

There is a thread of energy, which we call the life or spirit aspect, anchored in the heart. It uses the blood stream as its distributing agency.

There is another thread of energy, which we call the consciousness aspect or the faculty of soul knowledge, anchored in the centre of the head. It controls the brain and directs activity by means of the nervous system.

These two energy factors, which are recognised by human beings as life and knowledge, or as living energy and intelligence, are the two poles of a child's being. The task ahead of him is to develop consciously the middle or balancing aspect, which is love or group relationships. A true balance will be brought about by the recognition that the way of service is a scientific technique for achieving this balance.

Educators, therefore, have three things to bear in mind during the present period of transition:

1. To reorient the knowledge, the consciousness aspect or the sense of awareness in the child in such a manner that he realises from infancy that all he has been taught is with the view to the good of others more than of himself.
2. To teach him that the life which he feels pulsing through his veins is only one small part of the total life pulsing throughout all forms, all kingdoms in nature, all planets and the solar system, and that, therefore, a true "blood brotherhood" is everywhere to be found. Consequently, from the very start of his life he can be taught relationship. When these two realisations--responsibility and relationship--are inculcated in the child from infancy, then the third objective of the new education will come with greater ease.
3. The unification in consciousness of the life impulse and the urge to knowledge will lead eventually to a planned activity, which will constitute service, and do three things for the child:

a. Serve as a directional agency, finally indicating vocation and avocation.
b. Draw out the best in the child and make him a magnetic radiating centre in the place where he is.
c. Make him definitely creative and enable him to spin that thread of energy which will link head, heart and creative action into one unified and functioning agency.

The meeting of these three requirements will be the primary step (made on a racial scale) to the building of the "antahkarana",* or the bridge in consciousness, between:

1. Various aspects of the form nature.
2. The personality and the soul.
3. The man and other human beings.
4. The man as a member of the human family, and his environing world.

It should be noted here that the bridging has to be done in the consciousness aspect, and concerns the continuity of man's awareness of life in all his various aspects.

*Antahkarana (Sanskrit): The word is derived from antah meaning inner, and karana meaning instrument.

Three New Age Sciences

Three major sciences should influence the field of education in the new age.

1. The science of the antahkarana (see above definition).

   This is the new and true science of the mind, which will utilise mental substance for the building of the bridge between personality and soul, and then between soul and spirit. It concerns the substance of the three higher levels of the mental plane.

2. The science of meditation

   This science can be applied to every possible life process. It is a subsidiary science preparatory to the science of the antahkarana.

   This is the means of building between the personality and the soul. It is the true science of bridging in consciousness. It relates the individual mind eventually to the higher mind and later to the Universal Mind. It will eventually dominate the new educational methods in schools and colleges.

3. The science of service grows normally and naturally out of the successful application of the other two sciences. Service is the true science of creation and is a scientific method of establishing continuity.

These three sciences may be regarded eventually as the three major concerns of the educational process and emphasis will be increasingly placed upon them.

The tendency of the newer education should be to make the subject of the educational experiment the conscious possessor of his equipment; it should leave him standing clear-eyed before life, with open doors ahead of him into the world of objective phenomena and relationships; it should have brought him to the knowledge of a door leading into the world of soul reality through which he may pass at will, and there assume and work out his relation to other souls.

Education and World Unity

An international system of education, developed in joint conference by broad-minded teachers and educational authorities in every country, is today a crying need and would provide a major asset in preserving world peace. The initial outlines of a world educational systern are emerging today particularly as a result of the pioneering work of UNESCO.

World democracy will take form when men everywhere are regarded in reality as equal. World unity will be a fact when the children of the world are taught that religious differences are largely a matter of birth. Right human relations will be established when the children of every country are taught two major ideas. 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 we call humanity are most closely related. These two principles 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. Thus gradually our quarrels and differences will be offset and the idea of the one humanity will take their place.

It is bridging work that has now to be done. If, in the immediate future, we develop this technique of bridging the many cleavages found in the human family and in offsetting the racial hatred. and the separative attitudes of nations and people, we shall have succeeded in creating a world in which war will be impossible.

Is it not possible to build our teaching of history upon the great and good ideas which have conditioned the nations and made them what they are, and emphasise 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?

We should place emphasis on those great moments in human history wherein man's divinity flamed forth. These moments produced the Magna Carta; they gave emphasis through the French Revolution to the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity; they formulated the American Bill of Rights and the Four Freedoms; and they have culminated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the great concepts which must govern the new age with its nascent civilisation and its future culture.

A growing idealism is fighting its way into the forefront of the human consciousness in spite of all separative enmities. It is largely responsible for the present chaos, and for the establishment and growth of the United Nations and its specialised agencies. It has produced the conflicting ideologies which are seeking world expression. These conflicting idealisms are a wholesome sign, whether we agree with them or not. Out of it should emerge a tolerant and inclusive attitude of mind and a tendency to synthesis. This the soul of man nurtures and expresses.

The sense of responsibility is one of the first indications that the soul of the individual is awakened. The soul of humanity is also at this time awakening en masse, and hence the following indications:

1. The growth of societies, organisations and mass movements for the betterment of humanity everywhere.
2. The growing interest of the mass of the people in the common welfare.
3. Humanitarian and philanthropic effort is at its height, alongside the cruelties, hatreds, abnormalities and separativeness in the life of all nations.
4. Education is rapidly becoming a mass effort.
5. The growing recognition by those in authority that the man in the street is becoming a factor in world affairs.

It is difficult for modern man to conceive of a time when there will be no racial, national or separative religious consciousness present in human thinking. It will be obvious that very many decades must elapse before such a state of affairs will be actively present. But it could be decades and not centuries.

Much greater care will have to be given in selecting and training the teachers of the future.
Mental attainment and knowledge of their particular subject will be of importance, but more important still will be the need for them to be free of prejudice. The educator of the future will need to be more of a trained psychologist than he is today. He will realise 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, he will relate it all to the science of right human relations.

Cooperative goodwill is surely the first idea to be presented to the masses and taught in our schools.

Loving understanding, intelligently applied, should be the hallmark of the cultured and wiser groups.

World citizenship, as an expression of both goodwill and understanding, should be the goal of the enlightened everywhere and the hallmark of the spiritual man, and in these you have right relations established between education, religion and politics.

Enlightenment is the major goal of education. It is in this statement and region of thought that the distinction is to be found between the work of the Buddha and the Christ. The Buddha achieved "enlightenment", and was the first of our humanity to do so. Christ, because of the attainment of the Buddha and because of His own point in evolution, inaugurated the "age of love", and gave to the people an expression of a new divine aspect, that of love.

The Buddha culminated the "age of knowledge". The Christ began the "age of love". Both ages embody and express two major divine principles. Thus the new education has been made possible by the work of the Buddha. The new religion has been made possible by the work and the life of the Christ.

In the future, illumination will be viewed primarily from the intellectual angle and the whole subject will be approached mentally, and not so definitely (as is the case today) from the angle of religion. Illumination, mysticism and religion have gone hand in hand. One of the major contributions of the present age to the unfoldment of the race has been the growing recognition that spirituality is not to be confined only to the acceptance and the following of the precepts contained in the world scriptures.

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 religion must and should be right approach to God, transcendent in nature and immanent in man, whilst the keynote of the new science of politics and government will be right human relations. For both of these education must prepare the child.

Those working in these three groups must eventually proceed in the closest cooperation, and it is for this planned understanding and this intelligent activity of mankind that the new education must prepare.

Conclusion

1. The new education will primarily be concerned with the scientific and conscious bridging between the various aspects of the human being, thus producing an increased expansion of consciousness.
2. The task of the new education is, therefore, the coordination of the personality, eventually bringing about its at-one-ment with the soul.

3. The new education will deal with, analyse and interpret the laws of thought.

   These laws are the means whereby:

   a. Ideas are intuited.

   b. Ideals are promulgated.

   c. Mental concepts or thoughtforms are constructed, which in due time will make their impact telepathically upon the minds of men.

4. The new education will organise and develop the lower concrete mind.
5. It will teach the human being to think from universals to particulars, as well as to undertake the analysis of particulars.
6. The new education will make a man a good citizen by developing the rational aspects of his consciousness and life, teaching him to use his inherited, acquired and endowed equipment for the evidencing of the social consciousness and attitudes.

7. Above all else, the educators in the new age will endeavour to teach man the science of unifying the three aspects of himself:

   a. The lower concrete mind--the receptive mind or common sense.

   b. The son of mind, the soul, the self--the individualised mind.

   c. The higher, abstract or intuitional mind--the illuminating mind.

8. The educators in the new age will deal with the processes or methods to be employed in bridging the gaps in consciousness between the different aspects.
9. The extension of this concept of bridging will be developed to include not only the internal history of man, but also the bridging between him and his fellowmen on all levels.
10. It will include also the training of the human mechanism to respond to life impacts and to the soul. The soul is essentially intelligence, vitally used on each plane (used on mental, emotional and physical levels). This intelligent activity is always used from the wisdom angle.