The Role and Purpose of Education in the New Age
"As a man thinketh, so is he." This is a truism and a platitude of occultism. Therefore, what is true of the individual is also true of the group, and as a group thinks, so does it eventually react. As the group thought-waves penetrate into the mental atmosphere of humanity, men become impressed, and the inaugurating of the new ways of living and of developing proceeds with increased facility".
The Changing Face of Education
"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".
[The Piscean Era of Education] - The Old Way
"Education, up to the present time, has been occupied with the art of synthesising 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. I would remind you that I am here generalising, and that there are many and notable small exceptions to this attitude.
Education has concerned itself primarily with the organising of the lower mind, and a child's calibre has been largely gauged by its reaction to accumulated information (where education is concerned), collated and collected data, sequentially handed out, digested and arranged so as to equip the child to compete with the information which other people possess.
Education to date has been largely memory training, though there is now emerging the recognition that this attitude must end. The child has to assimilate the facts that the race believes to be true, has tested in the past and found adequate. But each age has a differing standard of adequacy. The Piscean Age dealt with the detail of the endeavour to measure up to a sensed ideal. Hence we have a history which covers the method whereby tribes acquired national status through aggression, war and conquest. That has been indicative of racial achievement.
Geography has been based on a similar reaction to an idea of expansion, and through it the child learns how men, driven by economic and other necessities, have conquered territory and absorbed lands. This too has been regarded, and rightly so, as a racial achievement. The various branches of science are also regarded as constituting the conquest of areas of territory, and this again is acclaimed as racial achievement. The conquests of science, the conquests of nations, and the conquests of territory are all indicative of the Piscean method, with its idealism, its militancy, and its separativeness in all fields—religious, political and economic.
But the age of synthesis, of inclusiveness and of understanding is upon us, and the new education of the Aquarian Age must begin very gently to penetrate the human aura.
[The Aquarian Era of Education] The New Way
Education is more than memory training and more than informing a child or student as to the past and its achievements.
Those factors have their place, and the past must be understood and studied, for out of it must grow that which is new, its flower and its fruit.
Education involves more than the investigation of a subject and the forming of subsequent conclusions leading to hypotheses which, in their own turn, lead to still more investigation and conclusions.
Education is more than a sincere effort to fit a child or adult to be a good citizen, an intelligent parent and no charge upon the state. It has a far wider application than producing a human being who will be a commercial asset and not a commercial liability.
Education has other objectives than rendering life enjoyable and so enabling men and women to achieve a culture which will permit them to participate with interest in all that transpires in the three worlds of human affairs. It is all the above, but should also be much more.
3 Major Objectives
Education has three major objectives from the angle of human development:
1. Make man an intelligent person
First, as has been grasped by many, it must make a man an intelligent citizen, a wise parent, and a controlled personality; it must enable him to play his part in the work of the world and fit him for living peaceably and helpfully and in harmony with his neighbours.
2. Bridge the 3 aspects of mind
Second, it must enable him to bridge the gap between the various aspects of his own mental nature... on the mental plane there are three aspects of the mind, or of that mental creature we call a man. These three aspects constitute the most important part of his nature:
- His lower concrete mind, the reasoning principle. It is with this aspect of the man that our educational processes profess to deal.
- That Son of Mind, which we call the Ego or Soul. This is the intelligence principle, and is called by many names in the esoteric literature, such as the Solar Angel, the Agnishvattas, the Christ principle, etc. With this, religion in the past has professed to deal.
- The higher abstract mind, the custodian of ideas, and that which is the conveyor of illumination to the lower mind, once that lower mind is en rapport with the soul. With this world of ideas philosophy has professed to deal.
We might call these three aspects:
- The receptive mind, the mind as dealt with by the psychologists.
- The individualised mind, the Son of Mind.
- The illuminating mind, the higher mind.
3. Bridge the lower mind and Soul
Third, the gap between the lower mind and the soul has to be bridged, and curiously enough humanity has always realised this and has talked therefore in terms of "achieving unity" or "making the at-one-ment" or "attaining alignment." These are all attempts to express this intuitively realised truth.
Education also should concern itself during the new age with the bridging of this gap between the three aspects of the mind nature: between the soul and the lower mind, thus producing at-one-ment between soul and personality; between the lower mind, the soul and the higher mind. For this the race is now ready, and for the first time in the career of humanity the bridging work can go forward on a relatively large scale...
VII. Education is therefore the Science of the Antahkarana. This science and this term is the esoteric way of expressing the truth of this bridging necessity.
The antahkarana is the bridge the man builds—through meditation, understanding and the magical creative work of the soul—between the three aspects of his mind nature.
Therefore the primary objectives of the coming education will be:
- To produce alignment between mind and brain through a correct understanding of the inner constitution of man, particularly of the etheric body and the force centres.
- To build or construct a bridge between the brain-mind-soul, thus producing an integrated personality which is a steady developing expression of the in-dwelling soul.
- To build the bridge between the lower mind, soul, higher mind, so that the illumination of the personality becomes possible.
VIII. The true education is consequently the science of linking up the integral parts of man, and 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.
Each aspect, regarded as a lower aspect, can ever be simply the expression of the next higher. In this phrase I have expressed a fundamental truth which embodies not only the objective, but also indicates the problem before all interested in education. This problem is to gauge rightly the centre or the focus of a man's attention and to note where the consciousness is primarily centered. Then he must be trained in such a way that a shift of that focus into a higher vehicle becomes possible.
We can also express this idea in an equally true manner by saying that the vehicle which seems of paramount importance can become and should become of secondary importance as it becomes simply the instrument of that which is higher than itself.
If the astral (emotional) body is the centre of the personality life, then the objective of the educational process imposed upon the subject will be to make the mind nature the dominating factor, and the astral body then becomes that which is impressed by, and is sensitive to, environing conditions, but is under the control of the mind.
If the mind is the centre of personality attention, then the soul activity must be brought into fuller expression; and so on and on the work proceeds, progress being made from point to point until the top of the ladder has been reached.
It might be noted here that this entire exegesis of the mind and of the needed bridge building is but the practical demonstration of the truth of the occult aphorism that "before a man can tread the Path he must become that Path itself."
The antahkarana is the Path symbolically.
This is one of the paradoxes of the esoteric science. Step by step and stage by stage, we construct that Path just as the spider spins its thread. It is that "way back" which we evolve out of ourselves; it is that Way which we also find and tread.
Extracts from 'Education in the New Age' pp 3-7
