We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar


11. Education for Rebirth


A philosophical and social belief in the fundamental value of individualism in all human affairs, and therefore of individualistic democracy and economic laissez-faire, is at the root of what is generally meant by "progressive education." This movement could be said to have begun in the 18th century with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then in the early part of the 18th century with the educational activities of the Swiss, Johan H. Pestalozzi, and the German, Frederick Froebel, who founded the first kindergarten. But the new approach to education took a more definite form in the closing years of last century particularly with the Pragmatic philosophy and educational activities of John Dewey, and early in our century with the work of Maria Montessori.

The Progressive Education movement influenced greatly the development of a generation of children between the two World Wars. Children were encouraged freely to develop their uniquely creative potentialities in a more or less permissive atmosphere, following the belief that, as such children grew up, they would have the incentive to build a freer, more democratic society. Some educators felt that they could indeed help directly in the building of a new social order.

What occurred in the modern world after 1936 and especially after the Fifties led to a reaction against much that the idealists of the first and second decades of this century had fervently envisioned; and Dewey himself acknowledged the "desperateness" of the situation in his book Problems of Men (1946), thirty years after his major work Democracy and Education. In spite of this situation, and because of it, new educational initiatives have still been taking place which have dramatized the problem of freedom and individualism in education — the most publicized and spectacular one being the successful Summerhill experiment in England ("A radical approach to child rearing") started by A. S. Neill and being now imitated in several places in in America. Though the school was started in 1921 it was only in 1960 that the book Summerhill appeared in America.

More recently the much publicized book Education and Ecstasy by George B. Leonard opened up even more general and radical vistas concerning a total revaluation and transformation of education. Leonard's ideas repeat and greatly enlarge upon some of the concepts of Dr. M. W. Sullivan and are closely related to the general Movement which began in the Thirties with the group-therapy of Dr. Jacob Moreno, originator also of the psychodrama and sociodrama techniques and indeed even a great pioneer in modern psychology. These techniques were simplified by Fritz Perls and Gestalt therapists, and group psychology developed in a multitude of forms since the formation of the Encounter group and Sensitivity Training programs which have radiated from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur to an increasing number of cities. One moves by insensible steps from the level of strict therapy to that of the re-education of supposedly normal human beings; for it soon appears that "normality" in our hectic society, racked which conflicts and plagued with stereotypes, ghosts of Puritanism and of the inability to react spontaneously and creatively to change, is simply a subdued form of neurosis. It has also become only too obvious that adults need as much re-education as their children require education. But to say this begs the question: what is education and, therefore also, re-education?

John Dewey, the most articulate exponent of the philosophy behind the progressive education movement, was essentially a humanist and a pragmatist. He believed intensely in the creativity of the individual person, in the value of freedom, in the power of the American ideal of democracy to bring about, through freedom and individually oriented activity, the full development of human creativity. Dewey believed also in the value of modern science and of the empirical approach to what man experiences through his senses and sense-organs. He stressed the value of experience. As Charles Morris stated in his recent book The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (John Dewey as Educator, Page 162).

Dewey recognizes that schools differ with societies. So the question is to find the kind of educational system appropriate to a democratic society. The direction of his answer follows from his basic presuppositions. If a democratic society is one in which all persons, to the extent of their abilities, participate in the decisions and the development of the society, and if the method of scientific inquiry is the most effective form of intelligence which man has found for the solution of his problems, then the task of the democratic school is to produce persons with an experimental habit of mind and with the moral character which can cooperate with other persons in associated action consonant with the democratic ideal. In producing such persons the school becomes the main agency for continually transforming an existing state of democracy in the direction of the ideal democracy. Education so conceived is "a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims" (p. 115). Its task is "to keep alive a creative and constructive. attitude" (p. 231), to liberate "human intelligence and human sympathy" (p. 269).(1)

If I speak of Dewey's ideas it is because he realizes perhaps more than most educators of this century the fundamental relationship between the ideals of education and the ideals of a society. If one fails fully to recognize such a relationship, whatever one says about education, and the re-education of adults, lacks any solid foundation. It can only be a perhaps beautiful dream — as is the vision presented by Leonard. The social, economic and political realities of not only the country where the dream is trying to actualize itself, but today of the whole human world, are the determining factors. If education is to be changed, these socio-cultural realities must be altered at least in local group-situations which do not appear to pose too great a threat to the existing order — to the Establishment.

The situation reminds one of the hen and egg dilemma: what came first? We have to face the problem of "re-educating" people who can change the social order which has educated them and does not want to be changed. It may seem that the best way to proceed is to give to the coming generation a type of education which will enable them to be transforming agents, if not activists and revolutionists. Will they be permitted to do so? Indeed, would such a totally new type of education be possible under the mental and psychic pressures which go with an established social order, especially if this social order still appeals to the vast masses as synonymous with personal and financial security, or law-and-order? And who would be adequate educators?

Educational Utopias in Today's Society

The problem is very complex today for we live in an ambiguous and indeed schizophrenic type of social situation. Tremendous changes are going on inevitably as the result of our galloping technology, which in turn demands for its utilization technocratic controls which, at least in the present world-situation, run counter to the ideal of democracy and individualistic freedom or self-determination. On the other hand, in the United States, democratic concepts and a number of individual "rights," though now diminishing, are still officially in existence. At least they can be enjoyed by a class of individuals who have a certain amount of financial independence or wealth, and who do not too obviously appear to be a danger to the general concept of law-and-order and to the police charged to enforce its application.

At the beginning of this century, when Dewey's ideas on education were spreading, they no doubt offended the traditionalists and formalists in education — men and women who had been conditioned by European concepts whose origin goes as far back as ancient Rome. These formalists represented thus the old European, and especially Anglo-Saxon and Puritan-Christian, tradition; while the progressive education advocates spoke for the still un-applied ideals of 18th century American democracy. Dewey fought against European obscurantism and Medieval-classical traditions, just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had done, and Maria Montessori was doing in Europe, and Dewey had behind him at least the theoretical ideal of American democracy. He also had on his side the growing power of empirical science and the native pragmatism and action-oriented spirit of America, still imbued with the rugged individualism of Frontier days.

The two World Wars changed whatever the aftermath of the Civil War — the years when America perhaps died as a great dream — had not yet changed. The trend toward technocracy (envisioned by Howard Scott and his Technocracy movement) and militarism (with its "magical" symbol, the Pentagon) have consistently and perhaps irrevocably sapped the very foundations of American democracy, as termites do with the beams that support so many of our suburban homes. Thus, quite logically and unavoidably the progressive education movement died of a slow but quite effective death, in spirit at least and notwithstanding the few remnants of the practices it tried to develop.

As we just stated, there are now attempts to envision a new type of school, but there is something very ambiguous about these efforts.

Any perspicacious reader of Leonard's Education and Ecstasy should realize that, if the entire school system in the U.S. accepted the ideals exemplified in his Kennedy School of the year 2001, the very fabric of the American society would become altogether transformed in two generations. The ambiguity resides in the fact that the development of the technology such a type of school seems to presuppose can only occur, as I see it, if our society becomes increasingly technocratized, and therefore in principle opposed to the very ideal of education which such a school would embody.

What I mean by "technocratized" is controlled in all its functions and its thought-processes by an elite of technicians just as amoral and ruthless as the American Howard Scott would have been if he had had power, or the German, Albert Speer, who engineered the remarkable survival and development of German industry during World War II and whose most revealing autobiography has recently been published. In the global society which in preceding chapters I have sought to evoke in most general outlines there could be high technological development, but this development and the power it would confer to groups of individuals would be checked by the basic independence — and especially the functional rootedness in quite autonomous Earth-regions and ethnic characteristics — of the majority of human beings. Technology would be at the service of human beings who would operate in solidly constituted groups. It would be limited in its operations to the need there would be to effect a wholesome circulation of basic energy, of material goods, and of ideas and men whose task would be to harmonize and integrate the many economic and cultural regions. Men, women and children in all these regions would be imbued with the ideal of all-human unity within the global organism of the Earth as well as with the sense of individual worth and spiritual independence. Technology would thus be a means operating within limits defined by only the essential needs of a global society.

The type of education which would naturally be derived from such an ideal of worldwide all-human organization would not extoll a visionary and ecstatic type of individualism with its almost inevitably unstructured overtones. It would rather tend toward the fostering of "rituals" — that is, of structured group-activities. But these would be rituals in which the performers would be conscious self-actualized persons who would consider themselves, at the same time, autonomous individuals and "servants" of humanity.

Let me stress again that the basic issue mankind faces is the transformation of the concept of individual. Unless the 18th century abstract ideal of individualism and equality is transformed, so that individualism and functionalism, the individual and the Whole, freedom and allegiance, spontaneity and ritual, and so on are harmonized within a new way of understanding, and of living in terms of the "worth and dignity of the human person," we shall never escape from a tragic see-sawing between anarchy and totalitarianism; or, as Dewey said, from "that futile and destructive oscillation between authoritative power and unregulated individual freedom to which we may justly attribute most of the sorrows and defeats of the past. . . . The very desperateness of the situation is . . . but a spur to sustained, courageous effort.(2)

The group is the key to the type of education which could help the child to integrate the basic opposition between freedom and subservience to pre-determined collective structures. The group is indeed the field of human integration. In it only can individual differences acquire their true meaning — a functional meaning. In it, individual differences can be used, not worshiped as badges of excellence. They should be used for the sake of the whole.

The ideal "greater Whole" is, at our stage of evolution, humanity — and for some, the Earth-as-a-whole. But in terms of practical realities, the whole is defined by an individual's capacity for relationship. The whole for a baby may be the nursery, the immediate family, the home. It is because man's capacity for relationship is now being extended, and indeed must be extended in order to cope with the enormously increased scope of interpersonal and social contacts and involvements, that the group or the commune should take the place of the narrow, tense, and today highly unstable family. The human boundaries of the group, especially in the case of a commune, should be wide enough to allow a great deal of latitude to the development of individuality — a development no longer hemmed in and dominated by what two parents, so often frustrated in their life-dreams, force upon the child, in order that he may fulfill their expectations. Yet the group should be sufficiently integrated by a pervasive feeling of communion and multivalent love that, to the child's consciousness, it may act truly as a whole.

Such an integration to be truly effective requires more than love and a community of actions; it needs also a common purpose, or at least some basic ideals and dreams shared by all its members. It needs also symbols which concretize the ideal and make it transferable to others, especially to the children in the group. In the seed-group this common purpose should act even more as a vivid "presence"; and today the one essential purpose of any seed-group should be the transformation of our society and its cultural-social patterns — the rebirth of man. Education in such a group is therefore education for rebirth.

Because of the characteristic of the present world-situation, such an education is, I believe, only possible in a group, neither too large nor too small, nor too conspicuous — so as not to attract too much attention, and opposition — yet capable of radiating its influence along selected channels of information. In present-day United States, the possibility for groups — or even for schools and centers for experimental education and/or re-education — to operate with a minimum of legal restraints and neighborhood antagonism fortunately still exists. This evidently is not the case in totalitarian countries, whether Communist or de facto Fascist. It is prudent, nevertheless, to take into consideration the possibility that the strenuous reaction of the average middle class American against drop-outs and dissident youth might increase rather than subside. And this violent antagonism is directed as well, and perhaps more, against professors and intellectuals in general who are now in a position to influence the students and to start new centers for education.

In a country like India it is conceivable, and indeed much to be hoped, that such a large scale experiment like the Auroville project, which began with Sri Aurobindo ashram, can succeed in realizing the totally revolutionary and most beautiful ideals of its initiators. When the Mother of the ashram writes: "No social constraints, nor moral constraints, no intellectual constraints, no principles, only a light which is there" — such an ideal is certainly not one that could be applied in a world-wide sense, unless some absolutely tremendous change occurs in the state of consciousness and in the very organic nature of human beings.

Auroville is said "not to be a society organized by powers external to itself, whether a money economy, administrative regulations or a constitution. It will be based on a power inherent in each human being but one rarely activated: the power to fulfill oneself within a society, not against others, but with others. . . . The education received in Auroville will not be the kind that we received in the past — a passing on of information — but above all it will be a learnng in the act of living, of living together in an evolutionary, planetary, truly human society. This society Sri Aurobindo has called 'humanity,' but one may also call it a planetary or laser society. One thing is certain: it represents a state of consciousness which cannot be attained by external rules or even by a single great inner leap. It will be the result of a common, conscious and voluntary experience, a total education which will be synonymous with evolution itself. The community gathered up into Auroville will generate the education of change, that way of learning which is conscious transformation."(3)

Auroville is planned to have no more than 50,000 inhabitants, and the project was initiated on February 28, 1968. Its initiator, Mother Mira, wrote that "Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be willing to serve the perfect consciousness." It was also stated that "the foundations of this universe city are neither realistic nor idealistic: they are spiritual. . . . Auroville will be an open city as well as an open school. No examinations or qualifications for residence are required other than the sincere desire to learn and the aspiration to progress.”

Auroville may be ideally an "open city"; yet the requirement that "one must be willing to serve the perfect consciousness" in itself is a deeply conditioning factor. Who will decide that this willingness exists in the applicant for residence? At present the decision appears to rest entirely with the 95-year old woman who inspired the great dream. The realization of that dream as a stable lasting reality presupposes a great many things. Can our present world-situation alter itself suddenly so that it may allow, even in India, the reality to unfold? The even temporary success of such an ambitious project could be contagious. On a much smaller scale and with most limited facilities even the formation of Esalen in Big Sur, California, led to a mushrooming of "growth centers." If a school such as Leonard describes futuristically in his already-mentioned book could operate successfully, it could also be multiplied. But some basic questions are left unanswered by these utopian developments — simply because they come at a time when the trend in national and international affairs is against their survival.

This is what I mean when I said, and repeated, that we are in an era in which "seeds" are falling in the midst of the disintegration of the vegetation of the closing yearly cycle. These utopias can be, and indeed are, seeds. The question is: how will they be able to survive if the expectable storms and wintry darkness materialize? Will they not have to go "underground" — or must we place all our faith in the miraculous and sudden advent of "spring"? Are not survival mechanisms required and the capacity to adjust to what may be inevitable, under one form or another?

Some of the plans for education in Auroville are very similar to, and were perhaps in part inspired by the concepts outlined in Leonard's Education and Ecstasy. They depend heavily on the further development of technology. What is seemingly taken for granted is that a technologized society can accept the ideal of unrestricted freedom of individuals and all that goes with it, i.e. "no social constraints, no moral constraints, no intellectual constraints, no principles." Could it realize and place its absolute faith in "a light which is there" (above-quoted words of the Mother)?

The main flaw in these ideals of utterly transformed, and indeed transfigured, education is that the persons formulating them seem unaware that any system of education reflects the basic concepts of a society. If we want to radically change our approach to education we have also to change our approach to social organization. Certain local movements may for a while develop outwardly in an alien and antagonistic social environment; but if they depend on the facilities provided by this environment in order to fulfill their goal the situation is bound to be very awkward, to say the least — like that of some hippies who depend on social security benefits or welfare benefits order to live a life which is totally opposed to the social patterns of life which in the first place produced social security. The seed does not depend on the decaying vegetation for its survival!

After the collapse of the Roman society, Benedictine monasteries became centers of learning and culture. The monks taught the displaced and lost people of destroyed cities, or what remained of the slave-owning class, how to cultivate the land, to build wells and irrigation canals, etc., after the proud Roman technology which had built the destroyed aqueducts was either mostly forgotten or without trained engineers and slaves. But there could have been no Benedictine monasteries in a strongly and proudly operating Roman Empire. The monks were Christians, and Rome persecuted her Christian communities. Yet these somehow survived; and they were ready to build the Benedictine monasteries as the time came when these were needed.

The time has not come as yet to build the new "Benedictine monasteries" as centers of education . . . a new education. But it is the time to form seed-groups to pass on the vision of a new harmonic global society — the vision of unpossessive love and creative communal activity in tune with the great rhythms of the cosmos — to pass it on to one generation after another, until the time is ready. In order to pass it on, it has to be in a transferable state; and this means in the form of symbols, words, images, rituals, seed ideas for tomorrow's culture. This must be done in inner and, as far as possible, outer freedom from involvement in a disintegrating society.

It does not mean that the great discoveries of modern science and the technology which derived from them are to be scorned and forgotten. As I previously stated, a global society needs a certain kind of advanced technology; but it may not be the kind we now have and worship. Indeed it cannot be that kind, for our present technology casts a formidable shadow over the entire planet in terms of wholesale poisoning and destruction of all that serves life's functions. Jet planes are not functional if they involve the pollution of the atmosphere. Atomic plants are not functional if their wastes poison rivers and seas. The light of modern technology is fallacious because it is utterly bound to a devastating shadow. Somehow a new technology sooner or later has to develop on the basis of entirely new, or forgotten, concepts. The way followed by science since the Renaissance may have been necessary in order to develop certain mental faculties which will eventually make possible a new and harmonic type of technology; similarly the rugged aggressive individualism of Western man presumably was a necessary phase in the development of a harmonic and holarchic individualism fulfilling its creative potentialities in group interplay and cooperation in love and service to the whole. But to say these things does not mean that we should be "collaborators" with the technocratic enemy. An outer acceptance and use of the only means now available in our society is inescapable; but there should be no inner compromises, no divided spiritual-mental allegiance. As Jesus once said, one can be in this world, but one must not be of the world. "Caesar" is powerful and exacts his dues. Pay him his dues, but remain free.

This applies as well to the education of children, for these children are in this world of which we made them citizens. They will live in it; they will be to a great extent subjected to its laws and regulations. They, no more than education itself, can be isolated from the present-day national and international scene. For better or for worse we are all here, now. Even if we have had moments of "ecstasy" in the beautiful, open, free atmosphere of Esalen on the magnificent coast of the Big Sur region, we must return to the city and our occupations within some aspect of "the System" — even if our particular aspect involves planning utterly to transform this System. What is basic, in any case, is our relationship to this society, here and now. Likewise what is basic in any attempt to transform our present hopeless and sclerotic educational system is how this attempt is related to the need and the possibilities of the present social — and not merely scholastic and academic — situation; also, how it is related to what the average American child has to deal with in his family and school environment.

Education as Inoculation Against Mass Pressures

We live today in a sick society — with great material achievements, no doubt, but just the same, very sick. Education within seed groups or communes that are pervaded with and dynamized by the realization that our Western society is gradually degenerating in a poisoned Earth-environment can be considered, first of all, as a kind of emotional-mental and spiritual inoculation. The child should be inoculated against multiform microbes proliferating around him during his first years of formation, and through his whole schooling — a schooling which, let us not forget, is legally obligatory. You cannot very easily take the child away from TV, playmates, often conjugal discord, and some sort of school or street environment. You may manage to protect him from the worst features of the environment, send him to a "good" school and check on his moves away from home, but you cannot stop him from breathing in the all-pervasive mental-emotional atmosphere of our civilization as well as our ever-spreading smog, or eating of our denatured food. Over-protectiveness leads, at best, to ambivalent and doubtful results, and at worst to violent rebellion or dangerous escapes into drugs or schizophrenia.

What, then, is to be done? Inoculation and the strengthening of the natural defenses of the total organism of personality; then, by the sheer power of -example and of the contagiousness of the group's dedication to a positive purpose, a mobilization of the imagination and the will of the child — perhaps since he is about seven — so that he will be willing and ready to enter into the seed-group as a conscious and self-determined participant. This "entry into" the active sphere of the group-reality is, indeed, what has always been called an "initiation." Every tribal society has initiated its youngsters around the age of puberty, giving them — after tests of character, endurance, and psychic openness to the group-consciousness — a sacred name and some symbol of acceptance (for instance, a sacred thread representing his having become a participant in the web of psycho-spiritual energies constituting the essential being of the tribe or clan).

It may be that the modern child's process of growth has become greatly accelerated, and Leonard and the directors of the Auroville experiment have stressed and perhaps overstressed this fact. Whether this early maturing of the child's mind can be matched by an equal emotional development is not at all certain. And this constitutes a very serious problem. Is an over-stimulated childhood and speed in learning mathematical operations in their most abstract form a guarantee of wholesome maturity in the child's twenties? Child prodigies are often very disappointing in mature life. Perhaps what is at stake in such cases of extreme precocity is some psychic phenomenon which modern psychology with its neuro-biological bias would refuse even to consider. Perhaps sooner or later it will be impossible to deny that an organized mind, which had reached its level of organization in a previously living human organism, can operate through another human organism, either intermittently, or permanently in special cases of reincarnation or overshadowing.(4)

Even without referring to such occult concepts — which nevertheless are for a number of individuals experiential realities — the fact remains that the collective mentality of a society does act upon the mind of the young child, not only in terms of the increased sensory stimulation due to a multiplicity of contacts, images and conflicts, but directly. The collective mind acts upon the individual mind through a process of harmonic resonances; and some day I feel sure that the resonance of mind to mind, and especially of the developing young mind to a dynamic and intensely aggressive group-mind, will be accepted as a fact. It seems indeed absurd to believe that there is no such process of mental resonance. To bring in the very vague concept of telepathy as a substitute is simply the result of an obstinate belief in a separative individualism.

We are ready to accept that an individual may send telepathic messages to another individual; yet most people refuse to entertain the idea that the individual mind is at all times in a potentially resonant relationship with the collective mind of humanity, because it somehow upsets the intangibilty, the exclusive character and the inalienability of the individual person. Yet, this individual person is only a focal point for the activity of Man — and religious people would probably want to say: of God or Ishvara. But Man here means — at any time of history, prehistory or post-history — a particular phase of the evolution of humanity as a whole. The collective mentality of an epoch expresses this particular phase; and the children born at that time reflect or resonate to the changing rhythm of the group-mind, or racial-cultural mind. What if this collective mind has become inordinately and unhealthily feverish and disequilibrated?

This condition may be only temporary; it may be caused by a too rapid shift in the level of consciousness. Yet all biological mutations are not necessarily constructive. Why should one believe that the sudden development of the analytical intellect and of unbalanced individualism during the last 400 years is necessarily constructive? The great reptiles which, millions of years ago, grew to enormous sizes, perhaps felt — even with their small brains — that they had achieved greatness, that they were on the crest of the wave of a glorious "progress." Perhaps the minds of many of our technologists, with their intense specialization and lack of concern for the vital-emotional as well as spiritual results of their discoveries in atomic physics, chemistry and biology, are as proudly dinosaurish, and totally misleading in their futuristic extrapolations and predictions. The ecological issue — not to mention the international and economic situation and the inevitable conflict between the Have's and the Have-not's — seems to justify such an evaluation.

All these things have to be considered if one tries to devise on a generalized and nation-wide or world-wide scale new and idealistic educational processes largely dependent upon our Western technology and its future applications. Even if the general ideal is wonderful and prophetic — that is, workable in the "day after tomorrow" — then the actual applications and the means to actualize the ideal are unrealistic, and therefore may perhaps take our minds away from what now are the most basic problems. To present ideas and symbols which herald a still distant future is the task of seed men; but to believe that instant germination is "around the comer", and to try to actualize the future ideal in terms of the means available to the denatured and feverish social system of our tragic epoch, this will presumably lead mostly to confusion. A premature revolution in the political sphere can be indeed both futile and tragic; and the change of consciousness which is so imperative today should be sought in the relatively small field of communes and especially seed-groups. It is also there, I believe, that new values in education may gradually — not spectacularly — take form.

These new values have first to be geared to the present. What the present needs is not ecstasy as much as an understanding of what has happened to mankind to so unbalance its bio-psychic and spiritual-mental equilibrium. Breaking out of the rigid ego-pattern and sociocultural dogmas that enshell the official modern mind is obviously necessary — and this is, in a sense, what "ecstasy" literally means. One may also think of a break-through or transcendence — reaching beyond the taken-for-granted and the stereo-type. But where and when can this be done safely? Only within the small group or commune, where love and compassion, understanding and total sharing can prevail — if all goes well — but not in a more or less public venture, inevitably under the disforming and perverting pressures of a social system to which the large majority of human beings still clings and which they emotionally support. They may support it to the point of a violent Fascistic repression which would most likely make use of the new discoveries of biological technology, much as police today use chemical gases.

Education, Instruction, Initiation

The word education can be given many meanings, some very narrow and referring to the schooling of young human beings and the learning of specific skills, others very broad and applicable to the human process of human existence. Two basic concepts are implied in what today is generally and broadly understood by education: the concept of learning and that of actualization of what is potential in the newborn child. The two concepts are closely related, but unfortunately the word, learning, can refer to at least two quite different processes. One can learn from doing something which leads to results which are then related to previous experiences — a kind of feedback process. One also can learn facts and data from a teacher, a book, a TV program.

Leonard states: "To learn is to change. Education is a process that changes the learner" — and a little later, "Learning involves interaction between the learner and his environment, and its effectiveness relates to the frequency, variety and intensity of the interaction," then adds, "Education at best, is ecstatic." He seems to be concerned only or mainly with the kind of learning which results from an actual relationship being established between a human being and some factor that is being experienced. Learning is thus based upon experience. But there is a kind of learning, as from reading a book full of data or new ideas, which does not really involve "interaction" with the environment or with any particular person.

It seems unfortunate that in America the learning process is usually made to refer implicitly to a series of actions and reactions; i.e., to what I would call training. You learn how to tie your shoe strings, to drive a car, or to program a computer, and the learning involves the ability to use muscles and to react to a series of experienced events in a particular way. There may be only one satisfactory way, especially if one deals with machines. But, as I wrote in my book The Planetarization of Consciousness (The Ethics of Wholeness, page 292) training, as it were, freezes the capacity to adjust to situations — a capacity which I call intelligence — because a perfectly trained technician is no longer able to imagine acting and reacting in any way different from the way he has learned through a perhaps lengthy training. The perfectly trained person cannot make mistakes, unless he breaks down physiologically or emotionally. Every animal is trained before he is born to perform in the "right" way a number of instinctive acts — like building a nest, or paralyzing the nervous ganglion of another animal so that his young will feed on it.

To say that to learn is to change simply identifies learning with living, and the purpose of such a statement is, in a sense, a negative one; that is, it aims at stressing that what should be understood by education is not what our traditional Western system meant by the word. Education through stirring experiences is a process of living. On the other hand when one reads a book and thus acquires either factual information, or new ideas that stimulate thinking, one is preparing oneself to live more richly because one has made oneself responsive to the collective experience of other men, or to the thoughts of some other person with whom one may never interact.

An inclusive definition of the word, education, will identify three phases in the broadly conceived process of education. We will then speak of education proper, of instruction and of initiation.

Education, etymologically speaking, means a "leading out." It is therefore rather similar in meaning with actualization of potential. Through education the as-yet-unexternalized becomes an actual element of personal experience. Thus education begins with the act of impregnation of the ovum by the spermatozoon. The vast unmanifest potentiality of human existence — the as yet unactualized aspects of what I called Man — becomes an actual organismic fact within definite genetic limits. Education essentially is always an arousal of dynamism. The true educator arouses in the child — or the grown-up person — new processes of actualization of as yet latent potential.

It is fashionable now, since Maslow coined the term, to speak of self-actualization. It is questionable however, that actualization ever occurs except as the result of some relationship; but it need not be an interpersonal relationship. It can be a relationship with some nonhuman factor in the environment. Thus Leonard is right in speaking of education — in this precise sense — as a process of interaction. Basically it is one of fecundation. Some existential factor (or event) fecundates — that is, arouses into motion — the person being "e-ducated" or activated. The true activist is an educator, in as much as he seeks to compel reactions and changes. The great virtuoso or star is one who arouses emotion. He or she "moves" you. What Leonard calls ecstasy is actually a certain kind of emotion; some kind of response is brought out of a latent potential of living and experiencing.

Then there is the phrase of "instruction." While e-ducation is centrifugal motion, in-struction is a centripetal process of absorption and assimilation. All eating processes constitute a process of instruction. The embryo is "instructed" by the mother; and so is the baby feeding at her breast. Processes of psychic instruction and mental instruction are going on all the time after birth and indeed through the whole life of a man; mental food is being ingested. The crucial question is: will the mental food be "assimilated?" Unassimilated food easily becomes toxic material. Therefore an "educating" process — in the strict sense of the term — may be necessary to arouse in the mental eater the capacity to assimilate; and this means, first of all, really to understand the mental foodstuff. We shall see presently how important such a form of education is today.

Lastly, the process of "initiation," that is to say the "entering into" a wider sphere of relationships, should be given its full value and social as well as personal significance. The fact that it was regarded as so basic a process in ancient societies is indeed worth pondering upon. However, what makes the concept of initiation difficult for most people to comprehend — even those who talk about it in "occult" terms — is that the ancient distinction between children before initiation and young persons after initiation no longer means anything of deep value. The profound implications of the ancient rites of passage have been buried under the deceitful weight of a totally inconsistent individualistic equalitarianism. We take emotionally for granted that every human being is an individual and equal. Parents and young children are "chums," and this in the name of "love" — a possessive and often blighting love masking the incapacity to give functional and organic (neuro-glandular) differences their essential value. Because everybody feels "equal" in the narrow family circle, the result is that each supposed individual rushes ahead doing his "own thing" in competition and conflict with everybody else, young or old.

Indeed education in the strict sense of the term is impossible in a society such as ours has become during at least the last hundred years, because the concept of an undifferentiated mass education for children and teenagers is simply not workable. All that can be given is mass-instruction, which but too often means the gobbling up of mental foodstuff which most minds are not able to, or even do not particularly care to, digest. It is instruction without education. The incentive-for this compulsory and didactic learning of quantities of usually unrelated data is merely the possible reward of a job which pays better than jobs for "uneducated" people — i.e., people not certified as learners. Today, this is not enough.

True education, in its above described three-fold nature, is only possible in relatively small groups or communities where the bond of love and sharing is a real fact of experience, yet where love does not detract from the realization and correct evaluation of, then the effective response to, functional differences. When the relationship between the adults and the very young members of the community is concerned, these functional differences refer to a difference of levels of consciousness and activity — a very obvious one.

The process of initiation, in the real sense of the term, implies a change of level of functioning. If the word does not refer to such a basic change of rhythm, of quality of being and, to some extent at least, of sphere of activity, it simply has no valid meaning. If a person is initiated into a real Brotherhood, it should signify that from then on he will operate — at a new level of understanding and with an expanded consciousness — in terms of a function he thereby assumes in a new circle of interpersonal relationships.

In order for the candidate to initiation to be able to assume this new function, he should have to receive a relevant kind of instruction preparing him for his entry into this vaster circle of relationships. It is because puberty marks the entrance of the child into a world of interpersonal relationships which are becoming transformed by the rise of sexual energies, that ancient societies thought it necessary to impress upon the young adolescent's consciousness the importance of such a transformation by the performance of rites of passage. The marriage ceremony, at a later period, should be considered also a rite of passage, for it "sanctified" the passage of the older adolescent from the level of learner or apprentice to that of full-fledged member of the social community. This membership implied new responsibilities, in terms of family and social-economic-political activities.

In both these instances the boy and the girl in olden days were instructed in preparation for the tests and the ceremonies; but the type of instruction which can adequately prepare the young person for a conscious and understanding approach to the change in interpersonal relationship, with or without rituals, is not the kind of more or less forced ingestion of mere facts and/or techniques. It has essentially to do with the character of the change in terms of basic principles and concepts — and it should involve the use of profoundly and vividly experienced symbols dramatically impressed upon the mind and the feeling-responses of the young person. An outstanding example of what the new life of interpersonal and social relationship should mean, as well as should witness in terms of outer actions, should be far more important a knowledge of memorized data, the vital and experimental significance of which may well not be grasped by the learner.

The many books on happiness in marriage and how to enjoy conjugal sexual relationship can be taken as an example of what I mean. These books are totally fact-oriented; they tell the "how to" and describe minutely what ought to be done and what should be expected of the partner; but what is really important is that the participants in the relationship should have their consciousness keyed up to a new level of relationship — of which the sexual act and its byplays are only externalized manifestations. A superficial and sometimes traumatic knowledge of a variety of sex-facts, natural or not, can do more harm to the new relationship than it can serve the purpose of an expansion of consciousness — the essential purpose of the passage from one level of relationship to another. When bio-psychic growth is not meaningful, it tends to be destructive of the integrity of the person. The events accompanying the growth may be varied, some perhaps cathartic; but what matters are not the events in themselves, but rather — and, in a sense, only — the quality of the person's response to them, and the type of image which the events and the response have left in the conscious or unconscious mind of the experiencer.

A valid type of instruction should prepare the young person for any kind of event. A change of level may require the development of either certain muscles and body-attitudes, or of mental concepts and ego-attitudes; then a period of training may be necessary. But any significant form of training in terms of interpersonal relationships — which is different from training for the adequate handling of a machine — should be based on the meaning of the new type of relationship. This is where our American type of pragmatism has proven so inadequate, if not destructive, of truly human, and thus spiritual values — even if it has produced successful managers, just as ancient Rome produced successful administrators and proconsuls, and died of her successes. Where "doing" is emphasized over and against "being" any success must turn eventually into failure.

A corollary to the statements in the above paragraphs is that real instruction for living — i.e., in terms of interpersonal or even biospheric and inter-species relationships — should never be not only limited to the teaching of data, but presented as an "easy" process. Instruction at the level of mind is like giving food at the biological level. Predigested food is not wholesome. The child should be conditioned to "chew" his mental diet. This is why ancient education, in India for instance, made use of short aphorisms — hard nuts to crack open for a potent ideological substance — and, at the adult level at least, of paradoxes (in Zen teaching, Koans). Count Hermann Keyserling wrote in his essay on the culture-of-making-all-things-easy: "Nothing can be brought to life when one makes things easy. . . . Spirit only grows by the overcoming of natural inertia." Any passage from one level to a higher, i.e., more inclusive one, requires the overcoming of a basic resistance to change — which very often means passing victoriously through a more or less deep-rooted crisis. For this reason ancient initiations — still practiced in various cultures, for instance among the Pueblo Indians — always were preceded by series of tests, some very strenuous indeed; but what differentiates such severe trials from the silly tests of college fraternities is that the community as a whole was standing as an integrated psychic whole behind the candidates, inwardly watching and spiritually supporting the young person being tested.

Initiation means rebirth. It means a reordering of the energies of the total person — whether he or she be young, adult or old — in terms of new interhuman and communal (or all-human and planetary) needs. It is a process according to which a particular person and his mental-emotional-physical activities are being attuned and responsive to the needs and the progressive changes in his society. The whole process of, broadly speaking, education is a process geared to the will to rebirth. Will must be aroused — and behind will stands desire. One must desire to be reborn in order to overcome the ghosts of the past and the evasions or rationalizations of the ego and its slave, the intellect, and to withstand the trials of radical transformation. Level after level the victory of rebirth must be experienced. It cannot be an easy road. It is indeed often a tragic road. Harmony must be won; it is never "given" — whether it is personal or world harmony. It must be won as an individual; yet few indeed are the men or women who can win their supreme battles alone. The group is the natural helper. It prepares the field, of battle; it supports during the tests. It makes it possible for the victor not to become drunk with his success, so that he may, humbly and devotedly, place his new-won powers on the consecrated altar of the whole group's consecration to the service of humanity.

Education in the Communal Group

One should be realistic when it comes to action, however much one is idealistic in terms of imaginative vision of distant goals — goals which are necessary so as to orient our actions. When one sets for oneself and for one's associates the goal of a radical transformation of consciousness and of the social order, it is, as I see it, unrealistic not to start with the group. This means that one should start with what is possible within the group-structure and in terms of possibilities of inter-group cooperation.

This applies especially to education; and education is an essential feature of the seed-group, for it may take two, three or more generations before mankind can reorder itself along such lines as I have envisioned — and these generations very likely will not have an easy life. A good deal of "underground" living, or of existence in altered physical surroundings, can be expected. The culture of making-all-things-easy can not apply there. This may be the first hard lesson to learn.

The will has to be developed; but not the will alone. It must be will plus understanding, and both pervaded by love — that is, by an uneradicable desire for harmony and wide inclusiveness. Understanding is needed, because unless one is able to understand the past one will always tend to repeat it unconsciously in the future; and we are speaking here of a realistic approach to the building of a future which should be free from the ghosts of the past — "ghosts" being the shadows of a past one has failed, individually and collectively, to understand, and therefore to accept as a necessary prelude to the present confrontation with a possible future.

Unless the group operates in primitive conditions self-consciously isolated from present-day patterns of living, the children within the group will be subjected to the complex and multiple stimuli which overload our civilization. They will probably look at TV programs or hear the radio; they will see magazines and newspapers, meet other children, and, at a deeper psychic level, they can hardly escape from being impressed with the thought-currents and feeling-waves of our chaotic and violent social milieu. In order to avoid these impacts the group or commune would have to live in a remote place and to become rigidly structured by a type of binding faith similar to that of the Hanish communities, the children of which (at least until recently) seem to have been able to retain their psycho-mental separateness. This feat, however, can only be achieved by complete insulation and a trained refusal to respond to the general collective consciousness; and even if it could be duplicated today in a group not utterly and ancestrally committed to a past doctrine — which is questionable — it would not serve the purpose of the seed-group. Such a purpose is to answer a human need — to answer it carefully, wisely and under conditions which will protect from unnecessary hardships, yet in terms of a ready availability for meeting circumstances as they develop. This means that these circumstances have to be understood — even by the young children.

If one has to understand a situation and the reason for a series of events one has, first, to realize that it is there as a problem or challenge to be met, then to ask why it is what it is. In other words, one must recognize the situation as something definite confronting us, and not take its being there for granted. Most children take the existence of what they see on TV for granted; to them, this is the way the world is, in which they have to live for better or for worse. They should be stimulated to ask: "What does it mean? Why and how did it come about? Is it necessary it should be so?" — whether it is a war scene, a murder trial, a fight between husband and wife or a political campaign.

The first task of the educator is to lead children to ask relevant questions; and they are relevant when the child has observed attentively what has happened — that is, if he has become interested. How to structure life-situations in which the child participates in some way so that he be interested to really look at it, to focus his perceptions (attention) and then to ask questions: this is the problem of education. It -is so especially in early childhood because the young child's mind cannot easily hold a focus of attention for great lengths of time.

The interaction between a few children — and there would be but a few children in a seed-group or not-too-large commune — could presumably be directed subtly toward the formulation of questions by one or more participants in the confrontation which facts of the present day society — facts which are most likely to stimulate questions by the children. The Montessori idea of bringing children to a structured environment full of objects which arouse their interest and the desire to manipulate these objects is basically excellent; but the child should also and at a quite early age be led to relate actively — but actively in mental terms — with existential scenes and situations. He should not be told what they mean; he should ask the question. The child should be confronted with different scenes — on pictures, on TV and in the actual relationships between the members of the communal group — and led to perceive how different they are, in what the difference consists, and what causes the difference; and in other instances, the similarities instead of the differences.

Actually most children are quite perceptive, and often remarkably accurate judges of what takes place around them; but they are not encouraged to share their perceptions or judgments concerning grownups, and while they perceive accurately, they may not understand motives and causes, especially distant ones in the past. This is what they should be helped to do, so that they may meet existence not merely "here and now" — the great fetish of modern psychology and psychotherapy! — but as a flowing sequence of interrelated events. They should even be gradually led to see the persons nearest to them as flowing sequences of interrelated actions and reactions rather than as individual entities, always essentially the same, each carrying an invariable tag saying mother, daddy, sis, or John, Lucy, etc. They should be asked to see any situation as a whole, as objectively as possible — for instance, telling what are all the objects in a room, how different their arrangement is from what it was the day before; and also why they like or dislike a certain arrangement, including an arrangement of events in time — during a whole day, for instance.

Education is the art of making children — or adults — ask and answer questions. Only thus is growth stimulated and the capacity for understanding.

I cannot help feeling that if the questioner or answerer were a computer or a disembodied voice from a tape recorder or other mechanical gadget, a truly human factor would be missing in the interplay. If mass education is considered in terms of large numbers of children in over-populated cities, this automation of the learning process may be inevitable, but what would take place then would be learning as "instruction," rather than as "education." I cannot accept the idea of education as anything but the result of an interplay between persons — and preferably as group-interplay. In such an interplay functional differences cannot and should not be ignored; yet the stereotype of the teacher vs. student relationship in a drab schoolroom is evidently stupid, especially where these young children are concerned. This is why the group must become the field of activity in the education-process, a field in which living situations can be evoked, directly or indirectly through still or moving images, not away from the everyday group-situation but as a vital part of it.

What this means is that some of the members of the communal group would find the education of children their organic function in the group — and they certainly should not be all women, even in early childhood. But in terms of education, strictly defined, the whole group should be involved in the process, at least at specified times or when particularly important events in the social environment take place, for then the responses of the adults in such emergencies can be transferred psychically to the children, even if the events themselves involve an understanding still difficult for these children to manage with their inexperienced brains and nervous systems. Education has to be reintegrated into everyday life, for every member of the group; and this, not in a fancy electronically operating school, but in the very midst of a structured type of living — living in which everyone knows his or her place, even though these places may be interchangeable and open to constant variations and improvisation within the harmonic operation of the group as a whole and in response to the needs of the larger community and of humanity as a whole.

Instruction and Initiation

Little more can be added within the scope of this book to what has been already said concerning the process of instruction; but a number of points should be stressed which refer to what instruction necessarily has to include in our present world-situation.

The mind needs data in order to operate, whether it be sense-data or data found in books. But this data, however stimulating or mind-blowing it may be, becomes meaningful and useable only in relation to previously assimilated facts of experience or learned information — the latter having been in some manner stored in the conscious or semi-conscious mind. In our complex society overloaded with information, much of which is transitory, soon to be replaced or unassimilatable, the mere process of gaining the information required to keep in touch with the latest discoveries and techniques demands a skill. One has to acquire this skill, though in the perhaps near future computers may enable us to get without effort to an already classified and even "digested" mass of data. As this occurs, the function of schools and universities may be greatly transformed, because at present their main purpose is indeed to impart information and to teach how to get whatever data the mind may require for its operations. The present-day problem in both the high schools and colleges is how to present the information to the students so that they want to load their minds with it — i.e., to make the process of instruction intriguing and attractive.

In previous days a European teenager would go to school or college, theoretically at least, in order to acquire not merely data, historical or scientific, but essentially to develop his faculty of thinking. He was to do so, however, strictly on the basis of an ancestral traditional culture. He was taught and mentally disciplined to acquire and then pass on to his children this culture and all its symbols. This kind of instruction was essentially aristocratic, for it was addressed to an elite whose social responsibility it was to absorb, assimilate, and to some extent to modernize the culture. The new scientific knowledge was transmitted and developed in essentially the same way because, at least until this century began, the scientific approach was completely conditioned by the cultural Western mentality — the mentality which, during the early Renaissance, established numerous a priori concepts or postulates on the basis of which modern empirical science, and its progeny, technology, developed with amazing speed.

The study of Greek and Latin, and what is broadly called the humanities, were thought to be nearly indispensable to the full development of the cultured mind of the social elite, or of whoever was ambitious and intelligent enough to aim at reaching this elite status. These studies were indeed at least relatively necessary, simply because what was at stake was the preservation and modernizing of the very culture which had its roots in the Greco-Latin (and Hebraic) tradition. However, when science grew into an international and especially intercultural force challenging some of the most basic concepts of this Greco-Latin and Classical European tradition, and when technology began to completely upset the very fabric of social classes and of the old-type semi-tribal family, then the very foundations of the European type of school and college education began to lose their meaning. As a result a conflict developed between the "two cultures" — science and the humanities.

Modern science is basically an anti-cultural force, because it recognizes no ethnical boundaries or emphasis and indeed no morality. Late in the 19th century the arts also began to develop a definite anti-European attitude; that is, they sought to make Western men and women see, hear, respond to interpersonal relationships in ways which repudiated the old stereotypes and indeed the traditional approach to sense perception and mental generalizations taught in universities, art academies and music conservatories. These revolutionary attempts were often inspired by the discoveries of science — cf. the Impressionist schools in painting and music. The fascination with Oriental thought and African or "primitive" ritualistic art, and later Oriental music, was also part of the rebellion against a strictly European tradition, except for the Neoclassical movement which was a reaction to World War I and the fear of revolution.

Today the revolt against the Western traditions and cultural patterns is spreading everywhere, especially among the young people. Every type of thought which has been considered heretic or superstitious by the rationalistic and college-trained European and American elite is now avidly studied by the new generation; but an ambiguous situation exists because, for this new generation, science and technology — which in fact produced the social-economic and international conditions which formed the present-day youth — are mostly responsible for the tragic situation confronting us in every field, especially for the pollution of our environment and the cold impersonality of our automated system of education. A large number of young people accept this technological situation and are ambitious to reach the top positions it makes available to the potential technocrat. The rebels, to whom one should add many half-hearted and undecided youngsters, confusedly and often desperately try to have nothing or as little as possible to do with all that they link with the despised Establishment. In any case, they do not want the kind of instruction and the mass of data forced upon their uninterested and resentful minds through years of routine, dull, impersonal attendance at classes led by but too often uninspired teachers whose main interest and business lie outside of their role as teachers. What type of instruction do they want — or do they think they should have?

Actually, in many instances the youth do not want instruction; they want education. They want to be "led out" of what seems to them, and what indeed is, an impossible social-political world-situation; and if they do not find "educators," they seek the leading out process in psychedelic drugs, or the quieting escape of opiates. What complicates matters for many is that they have become fascinated by the quasi-mystical and superficially Oriental teachings of men who idolize the concept of "living in the Now." Such a concept is sound if applied in a very broad and imprecise way as a reaction against the formalism of the past with its dependence on tradition and a tendency to anticipate the future in fear or with ambitious hope; but it is also deeply confusing, because it wars against the basis of any type of understanding; that is, against the fact that you can only give meaning to a sensation or experience when you relate it to what you have experienced in the past. If you refuse to even consider the past — whether you do so in full consciousness, or more or less instinctively and spontaneously — then you do away with the possibility of understanding, that is of uncovering significance in existence.

The "living in the Now" advocate may feel that significance belongs to the level of the mind, and he may claim that he reaches beyond the mind to a mystical Eternal Now. But this can be construed as an escape from responsibility, an escape from time and space into the selfish Nirvana, against which the Northern Buddhists of the Mahayana School fought, extolling instead the all-compassionate ideal of the Bodhisattva.

This may sound very metaphysical, but it actually is a matter of the most practical and momentous importance today with the recrudescence of mysticism or (most of the time) pseudo-mysticism. In terms of our present discussion, the issue refers indeed to the value of instruction; for instruction always must mean bringing to the now active consciousness a knowledge of what humanity has experienced, lived through, known and aspired to in the past. The value of such a knowledge can be expressed in two ways: (1) It enables us to understand and evaluate what is now happening within a larger and (according to the philosophy I uphold) cyclic frame of reference, (2) It makes us realize that our life is the very spearhead of a vast evolutionary movement in which the whole of mankind is involved — thus, that we have behind us the immense power of multitudes of men and women who lived, felt, thought, experienced and, in a collective generic sense, are backing our efforts toward a more significant and more universalistic future.

The true instructor reveals to us that of which we are the end-results. The true educator mobilizes our energy, stimulates our power of vision and imagination, dynamizes us into taking the next step ahead in this vast process of human evolution — the truly creative step. This step will lead us to the next threshold of emergence, on which shall we meet the waiting "initiator" who will infuse us with the quality of livingness and of understanding which constitutes our passport to a new, more inclusive realm of interpersonal and eventually planetary and cosmic relationship.

The problem which any relatively small community, and even more a seed-group, may encounter during the coming decades is how to instruct the children so that they can consciously and understandingly take their place in the forefront of the vast all-human effort toward a global society. Because primary and secondary education is obligatory in most countries it is evident that it would be best if some members of the community would legally qualify as teachers, so that the children might be spared attendance in the usual public school; otherwise a kind of supplementary education and instruction would have to be made available to the children through day by day relationships, adult examples and discussions within the group. That is to say, the child should become a participant in discussions in which not only the purpose and some of the problems of the group should be stated in simple form, but the relationship between what the group stands for and what the child experiences or is taught outside of the group should be analyzed and interpreted.

The main factor here as everywhere is relationship. The child should understand that of which he is a part; and he can understand it only if he is conscious of how this new and special communal development is related to the official social concepts and behavior from which it has become spiritually, mentally and emotionally separated in terms of a more or less clearly definable purpose; and the more clear and convincing this purpose and the examples of the adults are, the better it is for the child's emotional and mental growth.

Such a process of education (inciting the child to ask questions) and of instruction (giving answers, not only by words, but by the living example of behavior and dedication to the group's task) should begin at the earliest possible age. Yet if a definite division is made between the periods of growth separated by what can be loosely called puberty, I do believe that the development of the child shall be greatly benefited.

In this connection we could refer to the seven-year cycle which is so basic in the natural development of a human person. The old idea that every seven years all the cells of the human body are changed may not be consistent with recent biological knowledge, yet the seven-year pattern is in most cases remarkably significant, and should be taken as a guide. The German educator, philosopher, artist and occultist Rudolph Steiner, stressed the meaning of such a pattern in his very significant system of education; and I discussed it long ago in a small work entitled, Education, Instruction and Initiation (1929).

Steiner made a great deal out of the appearance of permanent teeth around the seventh year, a symbol of the fact that the child is then truly able to "chew" his own life experiences and to give them a meaning relatively independent from the maternal psychic influence. A seven-year cycle later, puberty may be broadly linked (at least in temperate zones of the globe) with age 14. The "coming of age" of the grown adolescent has been traditionally related to age 21; and anyone who studies the development of the individuality of a human being from a depth of structural understanding will know how important the years just before and after the twenty-eighth birthday are in most instances. The period between 42 and 49 is still regarded as the dangerous forties, and I have described it as adolescence in reverse. It occurs twenty-eight years after puberty, and the 28-year cycle (four times seven) is, I believe, a very basic measure in a human life. While much was made some time ago of the measure of three scores and ten (70) for a normal life, I believe that, once man develops a certain level of his mind, the archetypal period of his life is 84, or three times 28. Interestingly enough this period is that of the revolution of the planet Uranus around the Sun — a significant point for astrologers.

This does not mean that human beings will not die at any age, or that the life expectancy may not be further prolonged; and obviously even today people live to be 100 and more. We are dealing here with structural patterns, not with physical events. Particular cases are obviously most important when one deals with particular persons, yet the realization that there are archetypal patterns which underlie external developments is a most valuable asset to life's understanding. A person may get very fat or extremely thin, yet obesity does not alter the original framework of his skeleton. A life may be prolonged, but the person may be for all practical and spiritual purposes already "dead."

Nevertheless the structural archetype of human existence can, I believe, be expected to change according to the collective level of development of the mentality of a period. One can evidently say that what increased the life expectancy of modern man was the advance in hygiene and medicine, and in general the impact of technology on man's living conditions; but our scientific achievements themselves are merely the outcome of a particular stage of development of the human mind during a particular period.

This is not the place to discuss in detail such matters, but they were mentioned because of their relevance to the problem of giving to a child — and indeed to adults as well — the types of education-instruction which is best attuned to the structural development of (1) their biological, glandular and nervous functions, and (2) the place and function they occupy, or should occupy for optimum results, in a definite social situation such as a small community or seed-group. Granted that these archetypal periods may appear to lose much of their significance in our complex and feverishly accelerated modern living, the question should be asked: is this acceleration necessarily constructive? Do we not confuse maximum with optimum? Our cars can speed up to 100 miles per hour, but is this the optimum speed for driving on congested freeways or mountain roads? One of the main characteristics of our modern society and mentality is that it does not bother to ask, and even less answer, such questions. In this sense, it is an uneducated society; for a true education gets at the basic questions implied in any existential situation and demands relevant and convincing answers from the instructors.

When the child is about to experience or has just experienced puberty, he concludes a period during which the main emphasis should have been the stimulation of his actional and creative activity. It is still highly questionable whether forcing the mental development of the child during his first ten years is a sound practice — and I mean by "forcing" also placing him within a kind of mental hot house. Plants can be stimulated to grow at unnatural speed in a special environment, and they can be given vitamins and other drugs; so can human beings in childhood, and perhaps eventually before they are born. But can we be certain that the end-results will be constructive in terms of the depth and plenitude of the personality? Are hot house products as vital and tasty as naturally grown ones?

When I speak of "world harmony" I have in mind a society and individual human beings that have learned to live in tune with the great rhythms of the cosmos. Perhaps we have come to a period when our planet itself will increase its speed of revolution and the whole biosphere will accelerate the tempo of its processes; perhaps. But could it not be also that mankind is passing through a period of feverish readjustment and that once the crisis has run its frantic course man will begin once more to live in harmony with nature, but a higher level of consciousness and activity?

That is the crucial question. Perhaps the whole of humanity is experiencing a tumultuous rite of passage — an initiation. It is being tested; and every human being is likewise being tested in terms of the kind of response he is ready and able to give to the fundamental question: "Where do you stand, little man?" There can be collective failures. The story of Atlantis — whether it be myth or reality — is meant to tell us that the possibility is there, ever present for individual persons, but today facing all of us collectively as well as individually.

It is therefore supremely important that we know where we stand, as individuals and as groups. It should be likewise important for the child in the new community that he should know where he or she stands at any age in relation to the harmonious functioning of the whole group. Thus the value of rites of passage which structure the individual life — and one might add, which also should structure any kind of stable, yet inevitably changing, interpersonal relationship. Structure, in this archetypal sense, defined function; and function in turn, defines the outer rhythm of the process through which this function is being exteriorized.

The process of education-instruction likewise should be structured, but essentially in relation to the initiation process which marks times of definite changes in the life-rhythm and particularly in the character of interpersonal relationships one is able to assume and to fulfill. Because the boy and girl who have experienced the bio-psychological crisis of puberty are able to assume and to fulfill a new kind of interpersonal and productive relationship, their participation in the discussions and the decision-making process of the communal group should take on a new aspect. Yet it should be still a structured aspect — which among other things means learning to keep silent when the facts necessary for a thorough understanding of a situation (i.e., the necessary instruction) are not yet available. But silence at certain times is meaningless if it is not followed at the proper time by questioning (i.e., the education process).

Instruction — i.e., the knowledge of past occurrences — is meant to increase the options a youth should have in his individual adjustment to the needs and the aspirations of his community. He can leave the group. All that should be asked of him is that he (or she) be able to state unequivocably why. It is then the community's turn to ask a basic question — and to be educated by the answer which the youth in a dissident mood will give. If he cannot give it, he himself fails as a potential educator, and in a sense as a truly "human" being; for there is no place for a human being outside of what at any time around him represents humanity — unless he consciously makes the decision to opt for a new kind of allegiance and a type of relationship which, at that time and in this particular situation, seems to him to be better attuned to his own individual needs and aspirations.

This decision becomes thus a self-induced rite of passage, an initiation. The individual must bear the responsibility for his act — responsibility to himself, to the group and to the whole of humanity. He has accepted the full challenge and the implied rights of individual maturity. Whether he likes it or not he now stands as the source of a future of his own making in relation to what he has accepted as a framework for new interpersonal relationships and new experiences of growth.

The ability to make decisions in terms of the meaning one has given to a situation seemingly calling for a particular decision; this is "freedom." But once the decision is implemented by action, the individual is bound by his new allegiance. He is no longer free to escape from what he has begun. Even if the decision should mean the negation of any steady relationship and an anarchistic type of existence, this still would be being bound — a negative form of bondage, as powerful as any kind of allegiance to interpersonal, group or social relationships.


1. The page numbers refer to Dewey's Democracy and Education.    Return

2. Charles Morris op. cited p. 167 from Dewey's Problems of Man (p. 109-110,) written in 1946.    Return

3. From Auroville: The Universe City, a new venture in education; written apparently by the editors of the magazine =1 published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, 1969, No. 3 (Pondicherry 2, India).    Return

4. For a discussion of what is involved in the concept of reincarnation — a very complex matter — cf. Rudhyar's Planetarization of Conciousness.    Return

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