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which is now so popular, but which you seem to consider as an abomination of
desolation, is the large amount of misery and wretchedness which undeniably
exists, especially in our great cities. But surely you must recognize how
much has been, and is being done to remedy this state of things by the
spread of education and the diffusion of intelligence.
A. The future generations will hardly thank you for such a "diffusion of
intelligence," nor will your present education do much good to the poor
starving masses.
Q. Ah! But you must give us time. It is only a few years since we began to
educate the people.
A. And what, pray, has your Christian religion been doing ever since the
fifteenth century, once you acknowledge that the education of the masses has
not been attempted till now-the very work, if ever there could be one, which
a Christian, i.e., a Christ-following church and people, ought to perform?
Q. Well, you may be right; but now-
A. Just let us consider this question of education from a broad standpoint,
and I will prove to you that you are doing harm not good, with many of your
boasted improvements. The schools for the poorer children, though far less
useful than they ought to be, are good in contrast with the vile
surroundings to which they are doomed by your modern Society. The infusion
of a little practical Theosophy would help a hundred times more in life the
poor suffering masses than all this infusion of (useless) intelligence.
Q. But, really-
A. Let me finish, please. You have opened a subject on which we Theosophists
feel deeply, and I must have my say. I quite agree that there is a great
advantage to a small child bred in the slums, having the gutter for
playground, and living amid continued coarseness of gesture and word, in
being placed daily in a bright, clean schoolroom hung with pictures, and
often gay with flowers. There it is taught to be clean, gentle, orderly;
there it learns to sing and to play; has toys that awaken its intelligence;
learns to use its fingers deftly; is spoken to with a smile instead of a
frown; is gently rebuked or coaxed instead of cursed. All this humanizes the
children, arouses their brains, and renders them susceptible to intellectual
and moral influences. The schools are not all they might be and ought to be;
but, compared with the homes, they are paradises; and they slowly are
reacting on the homes. But while this is true of many of the Board schools,
your system deserves the worst one can say of it.
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The Key To Theosophy - HP Blavatsky.txt
Q. So be it; go on.
A. What is the real object of modern education? Is it to cultivate and
develop the mind in the right direction; to teach the disinherited and
hapless people to carry with fortitude the burden of life (allotted them by
Karma); to strengthen their will; to inculcate in them the love of one's
neighbor and the feeling of mutual interdependence and brotherhood; and thus
to train and form the character for practical life? Not a bit of it. And
yet, these are undeniably the objects of all true education. No one denies
it; all your educators admit it, and talk very big indeed on the subject.
But what is the practical result of their action? Every young man and boy,
nay, every one of the younger generation of schoolmasters will answer: "The
object of modern education is to pass examinations," a system not to develop
right emulation, but to generate and breed jealousy, envy, hatred almost, in
young people for one another, and thus train them for a life of ferocious
selfishness and struggle for honors and emoluments instead of kindly
feeling.
Q. I must admit you are right there.
A. And what are these examinations-the terror of modern boyhood and youth?
They are simply a method of classification by which the results of your
school teaching are tabulated. In other words, they form the practical
application of the modern science method to the genus homo, qua
intellection. Now "science" teaches that intellect is a result of the
mechanical interaction of the brain-stuff; therefore it is only logical that
modern education should be almost entirely mechanical-a sort of automatic
machine for the fabrication of intellect by the ton. Very little experience [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]