Alice Bailey - From Intellect to Intuition - II

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From Intellect to Intuition - Chapter Two - The Purpose of Education

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

There is an increasing realization among educators of this need to lift the more advanced educational processes and so raise those subjected to their influence out of the realm of the purely analytical critical mind into that of pure reason and intuitive perception. Bertrand Russell points out that "Education should not aim at a passive awareness of dead facts but at an activity directed towards the world that our efforts are to create." But we must remember that creation posits an alive and functioning creator, acting with intention and utilizing the creative imagination. Could it be said that this is the effect of our modern educational systems? Is not the mind standardized and held down by our mass [31] system and by the method of cramming the memory with ill digested facts? If Herbart is right when he says that the "chief business of education is the ethical revelation of the universe" then perhaps Dr. Moran is also right when he points out that "one of the underlying causes, perhaps the greatest, of our materialistic age is the lack of the spiritual element in our formal education."

Some of us feel also that there exists an even wider goal than an ethical revelation; and that it is possible that humanity is the custodian of an illumination and a glory which will only be realized in its fulness when the masses achieve some of the magnificence which has characterized the World Figures of the past. Is it not in line with evolutionary development that the real goal of education is to lead humanity out of the fourth or human kingdom into that spiritual realm where the pioneers whom we call Mystics, and the standard-setting Figures of the race live and move and have their being? Thus mankind will be raised out of the objective material world into the realm of spirit, where the truer values are to be found, and wherein that larger Self is contacted which the individual selves exist only to reveal. Keyserling hints at this in the following words:

"We are aware of the limits of human reason; we understand the significance of our striving; we are the masters of nature. We can simultaneously overlook the inner and the outer world. Since we can scientifically determine what are our real intentions, we need no more become the prey [32] of self-deceptions... From now on, this possibility must become the conscious motive of life. Hitherto it has not yet played that part. Yet this precisely is all-important for the center of consciousness determines the starting-point of man. Wherever he shifts the emphasis within himself, there it actually rests; the whole Being of man is reorganized accordingly... therefore, an education to the synthesis of understanding and action is necessary for a life based on recognition.

"All education in the East is purely directed towards Sense-understanding, which... is the only way that can be shown as leading to a raising of the level of essential Being... The essential thing is not information, but understanding, and understanding can be attained only by personal creative application... Sense-perception always means giving a thing a meaning; the dimension of Significance lies in the direction from within to the outside. Therefore, knowledge (in the sense of information) and understanding in reality, bear the same relationship to each other as nature and Spirit. Information is gained from without to the inside; understanding is a creative process in the opposite direction. Under these circumstances, there is no direct way leading from one goal to the other. One may know everything without at the same time understanding anything at all. And that is precisely the pass to which our education, that aims at a hoarding of information, has brought the majority."
- Keyserling, Count Hermann, Creative Understanding, pages 257, 216, 217.

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