CHAPTER II - THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD - Part 2
The creative aptitude of the human being should also, under the new era, receive fuller attention; the child will be spurred on to individual effort suited to [59] his temperament and capacity. Thus he will be induced to contribute what he can of beauty to the world and of right thought to the sum total of human thinking; he will be encouraged to investigate and the world of science will open up before him. Behind all these applied incentives, the motives of goodwill and right human relations will be found.
Finally, education should surely present the hypothesis of the soul in man as the interior factor which produces the good, the true and the beautiful. Creative expression and humanitarian effort will, therefore, receive a logical basis. This will not be done through a theological or doctrinal presentation, as is today the case, but as presenting a problem for investigation and as an effort to answer the question: What is man? What is his intrinsic purpose in the scheme of things? The livingness of the influence and the proclaimed purpose behind the constant appearance of spiritual, cultural and artistic world leaders down the ages will be studied and their lives subjected to research, both historical and psychological. This will open up before the youth of the world the entire problem of leadership and of motive. Education will, therefore, be given in the form of human interest, human achievement and human possibility. This will be done in such a manner that the content of the student's mind will not only be enriched with historical and literary facts but his imagination will be fired and his ambition and aspiration evoked along true and right lines; the world of past human effort will be presented to him in a truer perspective and the future thrown open to him also in an appeal for his individual effort and personal contribution.
The above in no way implies an indictment of past methods except in so far that the world today itself presents an indictment; it does not either constitute an [60] impractical vision or a mystical hope, based on wishful thinking. It concerns an attitude to life and the future which many thousands of people hold today, and among them many educators in every country. The errors and mistakes of the past techniques are obvious but there is no need to waste time in emphasizing them or in piling up instances.
What is needed is a realization of the immediate opportunity, plus the recognition that the required shift in objectives and change in methods will take much time. We shall have to train our teachers differently and much time will elapse as we grope for the new and better ways, develop the new textbooks and find the men and women who can be impressed with the new vision and who will work for the new civilization. We seek here to emphasize principles with the recognition that many of them are by no means new but that they require new emphasis. Now is the day of opportunity.
A better educational system should therefore be worked out which will present the possibilities of human living in such a manner that barriers will be broken down, prejudices removed and a training given to the developing child which will enable him, when grown up, to live with other men in harmony and goodwill. This can be done, if patience and understanding are developed and if educators realize that "where there is no vision, the people perish".
An international system of education, developed in joint conference by broad-minded teachers and educational authorities in every country is today a crying need and would provide a major asset in preserving world peace. Steps towards this are already being taken and groups of educators are getting together and discussing the formation of a better system which will guarantee that the children of the different nations (beginning with the millions of children now demanding [61] education today) will be taught truth, without bias or prejudice.
World democracy will take form when men everywhere are regarded in reality as equal; when boys and girls are taught that it does not matter whether a man is an Asiatic, an American, a European, British, a Jew or a Gentile but only that each has an historical background which enables him to contribute something to the good of the whole, that the major requirement is an attitude of goodwill and a constant effort to foster right human relations. World Unity will be a fact when the children of the world are taught that religious differences are largely a matter of birth; that if a man is born in Italy, the probability is that he will be a Roman Catholic; if he is born a Jew, he will follow the Jewish teaching; if born in Asia, he may be a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, or belong to one of the Hindu sects; if born in other countries, he may be a Protestant and so on. He will learn that the religious differences are largely the result of man-made quarrels over human interpretations of truth. Thus gradually, our quarrels and differences will be offset and the idea of the One Humanity will take their place.
Much greater care will have to be given in picking and training the teachers of the future and particularly those who, in the war torn lands, will endeavour to bring educational facilities to the people. Their mental attainments and their knowledge of their particular subject will be of importance, but more important still will be the need for them to be free from prejudice and to see all men as members of a great family. The educator of the future will need to be more of a trained psychologist than he is today. Besides imparting academic knowledge, he will realize that his major task is to evoke out of his class of students a real sense of responsibility; no matter what he has to teach—history, geography, [62] mathematics, languages, science in its various branches or philosophy—he will relate it all to the Science of Right Human Relations and will try to give a truer perspective on social organization than has been done in the past.
When the young people of the future—under the proposed application of principles—are civilized, cultured and responsive to world citizenship, we shall have a world of men awakened, creative, and possessing a true sense of values and a sound and constructive outlook on world affairs. It will take a long time to bring this about, but it is not impossible, as history itself has proved. Some day an analysis will be made of the contribution of the three great continents—Europe, Asia and America—to the general unfoldment of humanity. The progressive revelation of the glory of the human spirit still needs expression in writing—its composite glory and not just those aspects of it which are strictly national. It consists in the fact that every race and all nations have always produced those who have expressed the highest possible point of attainment for their day and generation—men who have united within themselves that basic triplicity: instinct, intellect and intuition. Their numbers were relatively few in the early stages of man's unfoldment but today those numbers are rapidly increasing.
It will be only commonsense, however, to realize that this integration is not possible for every student passing through the hands of our teachers. Students will have to be gauged from the three angles which form the background of this chapter:
1. Those capable of being civilized. This refers to the mass of men.
2. Those capable of being carried forward into the world of culture. This includes a very large number.
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3. Those who add to the assets of civilization and culture an ability to function as souls, not only in the two worlds of instinctual and intelligent living but also in the world of spiritual values and to do this with a complete triple integration.
All, however, no matter what their initial capacity, can be trained in the Science of Right Human Relations, and thus respond to the major objective of the coming educational systems. Indications of this can be seen on every hand but as yet the emphasis is not laid in training teachers or influencing parents. Much, very much, has been done by enlightened groups everywhere and this they have done whilst studying the requirements for citizenship, whilst undertaking research work into social relations and through the many organizations which are trying to bring to the mass of human beings a sense of responsibility for human happiness and human welfare. This work should be started in infancy so that the consciousness of the child (so easily directed) can from its earliest days assume an unselfish attitude towards its associates.
It is bridging work which has now to be done—bridging between what is today and what can be in the future. If, during the coming years, we develop this technique of bridging the many cleavages found in the human family and in offsetting the racial hatreds and the separative attitudes of nations and people, we shall have succeeded in constructing a world in which war will be impossible and humanity will be realizing itself as one human family and not as a fighting aggregate of many nations and peoples, competitively engaged in getting the best of each other and successfully fostering prejudices and hatred. This has, as we have seen, been the history of the past. Man has been developed from an isolated animal, prompted only by the instincts of self-preservation, eating and mating, through the stages [64] of family life, tribal life and national life to the point where today a still broader ideal is grasped by him—international unity or the smooth functioning of the One Humanity.
This growing idealism is fighting its way into the forefront of the human consciousness in spite of all separative enmities. It is largely responsible for the present chaos and for the banding together of the United Nations. It has produced the conflicting ideologies which are seeking world expression; it has produced the dramatic emergence of national saviours (so-called), world prophets and world workers, idealists, opportunists, dictators and investigators and humanitarians. These conflicting idealisms are a wholesome sign, whether we agree with them or not. They are definite reactions to the human demand—urgent and right—for better conditions, for more light and understanding, for greater cooperation, for security and peace and plenty in the place of terror, fear and starvation.
Conclusion
It is difficult for modern man to conceive of a time when there will be no racial, national or separative religious consciousness present in human thinking. It was equally difficult for prehistoric man to conceive of a time when there would be national thinking. This is a good thing for us to bear in mind. The time when humanity will be able to think in universal terms still lies far ahead but the fact that we can speak of it, desire it and plan for it is surely the guarantee that it is not impossible. Humanity has always progressed from stage to stage of enlightenment and from glory to glory. We are today on our way to a far better civilization than the world has ever known and towards conditions which will ensure a much happier humanity and which will see the end of national differences, of class distinctions [65] (whether based on an hereditary or a financial status) and which will ensure a fuller and richer life for everyone.
It will be obvious that very many decades must elapse before such a state of affairs will be actively present—but it will be decades and not centuries, if humanity can learn the lessons of the world war, if the reactionary and the conservative peoples in every nation can be prevented from swinging civilization back on to the bad old lines. But a beginning can immediately be made. Simplicity should be our watchword for it is simplicity which will kill our old materialistic way of living. Cooperative goodwill is surely the first idea to be presented to the masses and taught in our schools, thereby guaranteeing the new and better civilization. Loving understanding, intelligently applied, should be the hallmark of the cultured and wiser groups, plus effort on their part to relate the world of meaning to the world of outer efforts—for the benefit of the masses. World Citizenship as an expression of both goodwill and understanding should be the goal of the enlightened everywhere and the hallmark of the spiritual man. In these three, you have right relations established between education, religion and politics.
The keynote of the new education is essentially right interpretation of life, past and present, and its relation to the future of mankind; the keynote of the new religion must and should be a right approach to God, transcendent in nature and immanent in man, whilst the keynote of the new science of politics and of government will be right human relations and for both of these education must prepare the child.
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