GENERAL INTRODUCTION

NATARAJA GURU

A gentleman is different from a boor. Education in the ordinary sense could be said to be what makes a gentleman out of a boor. The word itself comes from the Latin ex and ducere (to draw from, or out), and the more modern of educational theories today have insisted on this aspect of education. Classical notions of education are diametrically opposed to such modern ones, which thus believe in drawing out what is already present in the child, rather than in putting book-learning into him by hard lessons to learn involving the tears and drudgery of the classroom. This change in perspective was ushered into existence by a bold man called Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes referred to in encyclopedias of education as the Father of Modern Educational Theory.

In spite of such recognition given to him, with his picture appearing on the frontispiece of Monroe's Encyclopedia of Education, Rousseau's theories are still a closed book to many moderns. His Emile might be the bible of educationists, but it contains too many enigmas which have puzzled and continue to puzzle even such intelligent modern minds as H. G. Wells, who calls Rousseau a hypochondriac who believed in shedding his sentimental tears into the Lac Leman of Geneva. Rousseau remains an enigma to modern educational authorities today, and his name hardly figures in the training courses of teachers at all. The modern teacher knows Montessorie, Froebel and Pestolozzi. He understands the project method of John Dewey, and how the school and society have to be related organically according to the standards of what is called the project-active school based on a pragmatic socialized outlook. The study of nature is also understood by him to be important-not in itself, but because of its benefits to society. The Herbartian educational theory flavouring of post-Kantian speculation is too theoretical and bookish to appeal to the minds of modern experimental educators. Even Herbert Spencer as a naturalistic educator and the ideas of John Locke are considered as being outside the scope of education as understood in a pragmatic setting. One learns by doing, and play and work in the modern school room have to go hand in hand, instead of being divorced from each other. It is here that Montessorie, Pestolozzi and Froebel are still respected in the modern educational world. Otherwise, the humanities are seen to recede into the background in any syllabus of modern schools generally.

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ONE-SIDED APPROACH

Instead of programmes built around book-knowledge as the humanities are bound to be, one hears of programmes based on interests and possible useful activities commonly referred to under the designation "project-method." How does it work is a more important question than in what philosophical light does one understand it. That is the problem involved. Thus, the whole centre of gravity of modern education has drastically changed its position; there is little Latin and less Greek, while grammar and syntax have been thrown to the winds. Science has displaced humanities, thus putting outside the pale of the field of normal education of a young man or woman of our generation all of those subjects in which human values are directly involved. Aesthetics, ethics, economics and education are subjects that are studied without any normative reference presupposed by them. Mill's utilitarianism could thus go hand in hand with this kind of approach in which science and technocracy have a lopsided chance to enter the minds of young scholars or pupils, whether at college or high school.

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THE TRAGIC PARADOX

These processes, it is true, are conducive to the education of a citizen of a welfare state, or of one that has got to develop vast territories in order to build bridges or long tunnels or otherwise exploit the resources of a big country to the best advantage of the beneficiaries directly concerned. Thus, educational progress in its outward march goes from one technocratic victory to another, producing heroes interested in exploring other planets than our own, and forgetting values nearer home residing within the Self of man himself. A bomb gives power to a nation so that it could dominate and dictate to a neighbour, even if it does not do so openly. Armies are maintained and the stockpiling of armaments goes on, instead of the carrying out of good intentions expressed at international conferences piously intending the golden day of world disarmament. Tensions mount up in the meanwhile, and cold wars, like subterranean fires, kill life by various forms of injustices that are not allowed to erupt into the open. Conflicting ideologies create situations far worse than in the days of the slavery that was supposed to have been abolished long ago. All this results from a tragic paradox hiding at the core of education itself.

This paradox can be stated in terms of the two standards revealed by the story of H. G. Wells, of the great school-master who fell dead while he was lecturing the Ondel School on the occasion of ceremonies there over which Wells himself happened to be presiding. The conflict was clearly between the two mutually exclusive positions represented by the slogans, "Love thy neighbour as thyself," and "Britannia rule the waves." No educator except perhaps Rousseau ever faced this paradox squarely. He said that it is impossible to educate a citizen and a man at the same time. State educational. systems are seen to shut their eyes to this obvious verity, and pretend ostrich-wise that it did not exist. Neither Montessorie nor Pestolozzi nor Froebel is prepared to face this paradox with its tragic implications. Herein lies the basic drawback of modern education. One has to love Pakistan on the one hand, and watch millions of refugees suffer and starve on the other. This is what it amounts to. There is a helplessness here which should only need to be proved once, yet still the educational policy-makers look on helplessly and suggest watered-down palliatives falling far short of curing the disease.

The hand of God is revealed to no man, and there is no panacea for all ills. We can only travel from error to error, and those who say there is an absolute answer to such questions are derided in these days of scepticism, relativism, and the approach of trial-and-error. Final answers are suspected of being dogmatic as in the Middle Ages. "Down with the Absolute" is the modern slogan. "Let us invade the domain of knowledge piecemeal, and never try to storm the citadel wholesale." Such notions indicate the prevailing trend of modernism.

It is no wonder then that Rousseau stands condemned as a sentimentalist and that his ideas sound strange to modern ears. He speaks, for example, of a form of negative education which holds that a child should be allowed to be a child before being a grown-up. Such a doctrine of negative education cannot be fitted easily into what gives meaning to education as could be understood at all in the West to day. This is the reason that modern educators, as mentioned already, have nothing to say about the book Emile. The paradox in education was faced by Rousseau, but the same paradox killed the great schoolmaster of Ondel by pulling his loyalties in opposite directions.

What we have to say, therefore, from the standpoint of One-World Education consists of recommending a fresh study of Rousseau to see how he is able to resolve the paradox and develop a theory of education in which the tragic implications of it are no more allowed to work havoc. Any theory of education must be capable of reconciling the two rival or conflicting positions of educating a citizen and a man at the same time. Such is the educational problem that confronts us in this Conference, for stating which we have just finished clearing the ground preliminarily.

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FOUR STAGES OF EDUCATION

Education is a process to be conceived of in terms of a life-time. There is the education of childhood, the education of the adolescent and the adult, the education of the man of affairs whether as a citizen or as a householder, and there is also finally the education that applies to a pensioner or a man who is thinking in terms of passing on from this life to the next. The child must not be deprived of play, the adolescent should not be deprived of the legitimate enjoyments of life proper to his age, including the pleasures of romance and love. The man of more mature years, when tired and weighed down by his responsibilities and worries, must be allowed some retirement and rest. And fourthly and finally, the man whose next event in life would consist in facing his own death has to find a more serious solution. Kalidasa in his Raghuvamsa refers to just these stages which he visualizes under ideal conditions when he describes the citizens of King Dilipa's time as learning lessons in infancy, seeking pleasures in youth, practicing austerities in advanced years, and finally learning to leave the body beautifully by the practice of Yoga.

These four divisions readily suggest to us four different types of education which we could distinguish as: (1) Negative Education of Rousseau; (2) Naturalistic Education of Herbert Spencer; (3) Pragmatic or Socially Responsible Education of John Dewey for a man at middle age combined with some contemplation proper to his age; and (4) a programme of full-fledged Idealistic Education which covers spiritual disciplines such as Yoga. Of the four broad divisions thus conceived, Negative Education would take us to the age of 14 or 15, varying only slightly in respect of a boy or a girl. Adolescence could cover the ages of 15 to 20, comprising the period of Naturalistic Education. From 20 to 45 could be called the period of practical social adjustment proper to Pragmatic Education. And finally, a fully contemplative discipline would apply from the age of 45 until death. Keeping these broad features in mind, it is thus possible to think in terms of four such stages of education in which we would expect variations both in respect of the activities proper to men and women, as also in respect of the content of both theory and practice involved in each of the stages of the process.

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EDUCATION AS A BIPOLAR PROCESS

Here we have also to remember that education is a bipolar process. It always involves a relationship between the teacher and the taught, who are sometimes referred to as the educator and the educand, respectively. The personality of the educator is considered all-important to the process, which has sometimes been compared to an osmotic interchange of essences between a highly evolved personality called the Guru and the less evolved educand who is called the disciple. In certain countries, under certain prevailing theories of education, the personality of the educator is not given as much importance as in other traditions, philosophies or schools of thought. Adjusting the pupil to the needs of fitting into a society correctly does not involve the teacher's personality as directly as when Rousseau and Emile consider themselves as inseparables. In advanced years, when a man is engaged in problems of life beyond death, the guidance of a spiritual teacher or Guru comes into the picture again more imperatively. In Naturalistic Education, the open book of nature itself could be treated as the educator, as one of the counterparts of a dialectical process. The workshop or the project in Pragmatic Education need not necessarily involve respect for a personal teacher, because hydrogen and oxygen can be shown to combine to make water irrespectively of whether the student loves or respects the teacher.

Thus, the bipolar process called education has to be studied in all its phases and aspects as it progresses through the broad stages that we have indicated, and each phase has its own type of bipolar process to be imagined as proper to it. The education of a woman has to differ drastically from that of a man, because of the difference of the functions they have to fulfill in their lives. It is always the personality of the pupil that has to be given primacy in the forming of any educational theory. Furthermore, the interaction between teacher and taught has to be secured and maintained as a constant and uniform one so that the process could develope or unravel harmoniously throughout life, and more especially during the stages that we have tried to distinguish above as the Negative and the Idealistic, marking the first and the last of the four broad divisions.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

Such are some of the guidelines which are suggested here for us to formulate a One-World Education for peace through Unitive Understanding. We know of no other textbook which satisfies these basic requirements than Rousseau's Emile. Other precious indications can be found in works such as those of Kalidasa. Education and economics and ethics are all presented in a blended form in various parts of his works, whether poetic, lyric, epic or heroic. To glean educational theory from them would require detailed research into them which we cannot undertake here, inasmuch as these remarks are merely meant to be broad guiding considerations for the time being.

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ONE-WORLD EDUCATION

BRIGITTE LACHAERT

HISTORICAL EDUCATION

EDUCATION is a bipolar process to be thought of as taking place between two personalities, one of whom could be distinguished as the educator, the other as the educant. This concerns the development of the full possibilities and potentialities that lie hidden in what is understood as the human personality. The textbook definition of education refers back to the Latin words ex-ducere, to draw out. This starting definition presupposes that there are certain tendencies, urges or life-expressions, whether called intellectual, emotional or instinctive, which belong to the educant and which are capable of being drawn out from having only a potential and unmanifested status into a more overt form, as belonging to the revised convictions and patterns of behaviour that would form the qualifications or attributes of a person who has been fully subjected to this bipolar process between educator and educant.

On the Indian soil, we have traditionally well-known names that refer to the two counterparts involved in such a bipolar process called education. The educator is called a Guru, and the educant or pupil is referred to as a sishya or disciple. The perfect or archetypal educational institution belonging to the Indian context is known as the Gurukula. The pupil whose personality is subjected to this bipolar process of ancient Indian education is generally supposed to be a less evolved personality, while the teacher or Guru represents a more perfected person who is a model for the pupil to emulate or at least understand sympathetically.

It is not mere information or intelligence that is to be imparted by the teacher to the pupil. All serious aspects involving life, as it develops from a conditioned or imperfect state to one that is unconditional and perfect, are to be presupposed as normally belonging to the process of education conceived in all its basic and broad est implications. When the Guru and sishya affiliate themselves to each other, there is supposed to take place a form of subtle osmotic interchange of value-factors. Throughout the process, this same difference of pressure is supposed to be maintained uniformly until a certain type of equilibrium becomes established between the personality of the Guru and that of the disciple. For securing the best primary conditions for such an osmotic interchange of personal values or qualities, it is necessary that the affiliation between the educator and educant should at least be in terms of a lifetime.

Thus we arrive at the archetypal educational institution known to the wisdom context of India wherein we find a pupil, generally a twelve year old boy who finds himself a misfit in ordinary society, seeking a Guru doing tapas or intense contemplation in an out of the way place, removed from society, traditionally in a forest. The Guru, whether he is married or unmarried, lives in a family of his own, and the discontented teenager in question here, who could be a Devadatta, a Svetaketu, a Satyakama or a Naciketas, is to be imagined as making his appearance at the door of the Gurukula where the Guru is supposed to be. Such a boy is the typical educant, and could be said to have a certain attitude such as that of a wisdom-seeker willing to sacrifice his life and career, and even his love of father and mother, in his desire to gain the purest and highest enlightenment or wisdom. After being allowed to light the fire in the ashrama or Gurukula and to serve the Guru, the boy is expected to wait for an indefinite period in which he is supposed to be a listener in silence rather than one who offers his own opinions to the Guru. Such a receptive attitude is technically known as susrusha, which means "willingness to listen," as against eagerness to express his own opinions.

Pythagorean and Plotinian counterparts of similar contemplative institutions near Greece and Rome are also known to have had a sufficiently long period of silent submission and service, before the teaching was openly imparted in so many words. This silence ensures the permanency and the strength of the bipolar relationship which is inevitable for the highest wisdom to be transmitted from the personality of the Guru to that of the disciple as with communicating vessels in which water flows from one side of a U-tube to the other. This condition of firmly securing bipolarity before any actual teaching can result, as underlined and stressed so many times in literature such as the Upanishads, is the primary and basic prerequisite for the educational process as envisaged in the ancient Gurukulas, and is often referred to as gurubhakti (devotion to a teacher). A certain rapport results when the relations are correctly adjusted and secured. Such adjustments are sometimes known to take place after 12 years as a minimum unit period of time. Prajapati is said to have taught Indra and Virocana in units of 33 years; Virocana got his promotion after 33 years, while Indra, who was a dignitary in heaven, had to live with Prajapati for three times 33 years plus 5 years before he could understand a certain wisdom teaching which is supposed to be contained in the Upanishads. ¹

Such are some of the bare outlines of the system of education dear to the Gurukula that we are presenting here. It is true that these far-off historical models might have only indirect application to what we understand as education at the present day. However out-moded they might be, there are certain fundamental features in the total educational situation portrayed here which can be said to hold good perennially, and are thus still valuable today.

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THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING

Now let us turn our eyes towards what we habitually refer to as Modern Education. When we use the word education in its most dignified sense, it is necessary, in the first place, to clearly distinguish it from what could be called mere schooling. All children, in every state in the world, are expected to go to school. In most developed states of the world of the present day, schooling is both compulsory and free. By this, a citizen stands to gain certain advantages over citizens in other states, who might be rivals or friends to the state in question. Literacy and minimum ability to write at least a post card occasionally to a friend or relation, removed from or near to himself, are advantages of a common utilitarian order. These, along with the ability to do sums, are referred to as the "three Rs," that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Although monkeys can be expected to be happy without the three R's, human children cannot live in a modern utilitarian society or in a welfare state without having at least that first basic element of freedom or emancipation which they acquire by being able to read, write and calculate Communication through speech is taken for granted, and can come without much effort.

Schooling depends upon disciplined ways of learning, often with in closed buildings, and a great quantity of young people's tears are often involved in the process. Just as animals are trained to overcome natural dispositions which might make them wild or disorganized, so schooling is meant to regulate and canalize nature by what is called nurture. Every state is interested in the schoolboy as also in the girl guide or boy scout, with a view to their eventual service to the state as good citizens who will fight for the cause of that geographic cal or natural unit, for whose safety or integrity they are expected to be willing to one day lay down their lives. Through all the stages of the primary and secondary schools, up to the schools dedicated to military training as in the English public schools, it is the slogan of "Education for citizenship" that holds good. The various professionesional training centres to make lawyers, engineers or doctors are also primarily geared to serve the purpose of the survival of individual states, in normal times as well as in times of emergencies such as wars, famines or pestilences.

Schooling and education are not the same. If the former tends to make citizens, the latter refers to the making of a man, in a freer and unconditioned, or a more absolutist, context. If hedonism or relativism together with closed and static loyalties normally belong to state programmes of education, for whatever period they might be according to the prevailing theories and practices of education, such schooling must always fall short of what could be called education in its most dignified and fullest sense.

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THE MECHANISTIC APPROACH

A whole-hearted affiliation to the personality of a mentor or a preceptor, by which a bipolar process of osmotic interchange of value is maintained throughout life, through all its stages of childhood, adulthood, middle age, mature years, old age and through death, is the perspective that is proper to classical educational theory. The modern tendency, however, in the name of experimental education, is to think of the educant objectively as an organism or mechanism responding to stimulus. The stimulus-response approach to education prevails at present in "advanced countries," such as those of Europe and America. One hears of brass instruments and measurements, based on which what is called scientific education largely depends. Science is always associated with apparatus, and the modern mind attaches much importance to equipments which are supposed to be required for proper education. The training in, and use of, such mechanical devices and equipments proper to stimulus-response theory open up for the modern educator in charge of state educational programmes an educational world which has hardly anything to do with a process of life-long education. Such an approach favours a cross-sectional and piecemeal view of life, and tends to leave out the longitudinal view of personal reactions to stresses or strains in life in general, where reflex action, rather than character or sentiment, enters into the picture.

The educational authorities of the Columbia University in New York, for example, have succeeded in building up a whole edifice of educational theory and practice based on such a mechanistic outlook of stimulus-response, or stimulus-equals-response. From this attitude, there emerge into view many other schools or specialized branches of modern educational discipline such as professional orientation, otherwise called "vocational guidance." The famous Montessori method itself is understood as a form of sense-training through the help of what is known as special educative apparatus or material. The Montessori method, so favoured by state authorities throughout the world, proceeds to train the child's nervous system to wean it from old habits to new ones. The experimental nature of the scientific setting in which such a method is conceived must be the cause of its disproportionately gained popularity, in spite of the fact that Madam Montessori, together with other great personalities of modern education like Pestalozzi, Froebel and others, also gave importance to respect for the nature of the child for its own sake. Paedocentricity is thus the hallmark of modern educational theory, as distinguished from classical methods which placed the educator at the centre, rather than the child itself. Classical education before the time of these great modern educators relied more on book-learning, and information was driven into the minds of the young people by the teachers by harsh and not necessarily interesting programmes of teaching Greek, mathematics or grammar. It goes to the credit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to have protested against such a kind of book-biased schooling, together with the tears and tribulations of the school room.

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"THE FATHER OF MODERN EDUCATION"

Modern education is said to begin, in textbooks such as Monroe's Encyclopedia of Education, with one who is called the father of it. His picture figures as a frontispiece for the volumes of this encyclopedia dedicated to modern education; and the greatest of the founders of such a movement distinguished by the word "modern," as opposed to that of the ancient or dark ages, is no other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This brings us to a personality similar to that of Voltaire in the history of thought. Modernism is said to have been ushered into existence by these thinkers, Voltaire and Rousseau. In spite of being so, however, their's are the two most enigmatic names in the history of thought in the Western world of more recent times - particularly in the case of Rousseau.

It was Rousseau who entered into the world of education with the dictum by which he asked all educators to begin by trying to understand better the child. He says in the most unequivocal terms, "Begin therefore by studying your pupils more, for very assuredly you do not know them." ² Thus paedocentricity became for the first time the cornerstone of what came to be distinguished as modern education. Other features of Rousseau's approach to education could be enumerated as follows: 1) a programme of interest had to substitute the programme of information; 2) education had to be emancipated from the world of Latin and Greek, grammar and mathematics; 3) it had to follow the lines of the child's own personality with a degree of freedom for the child; 4) it had to be based on the natural succession of experience to which the growing child would be exposed during the slow unfolding of its life in the most natural and harmonious way; 5) the child was to be protected like a young plant in a garden, and the grown-ups had to keep from interfering with the development of its own proper nature. During the earliest stages of such a natural unfolding of inner tendencies, the policy of non-interference, to allow the child to learn by its own experiences, had to be so strict that, compared with more ancient standards, it was capable of being labeled as negative in character.

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NEGATIVE EDUCATION

This term "negative education," of which Rousseau was the progenitor, has been a much misunderstood one. It was quickly mixed up with the movement then in vogue of poets and artists in general after the Renaissance as belonging to the context of a "return to nature." Even Voltaire laughed at this idea of returning to nature, without sufficiently understanding what Rousseau meant by the term nature. Rousseau defined it as none other than that certain kind of innate habit found in the personality of the child. In Vedantic par lance, we would use the terms vasana or samskara, which are nothing other than memory dispositions of an incipient and amorphous kind. Each child brings with it a bundle of such instinctive dispositions, and the vagueness and beauty of child behaviour itself, with its prattling errors and its confused activity, all of which taken together make the child always interesting to the grown-ups, is exactly what refers to the negative factor. Childlife is richer because of these errors, but most parents tend to think that it is the other way about, and wrongly try to abolish the most precious part in the child's nature by trying to bend its natural inclinations, which by some force of innate habit tend always to be vertical or right, in spite of all the wrong educators and in the world against whom the child has to fight singlehanded, with the majority of his elders taking a position opposed to him.

Such is the tragedy lurking in the core of education itself, and it was Rousseau who insisted on underlining it for the first time in educational theory. He even went so far as to say that the child need not know the difference between its right and left hands, even when it attained the status of a pupil in a secondary school. All that the educator had to do during this initial period was to protect the child from extraneous influences prejudicial to the natural and harmonious adjustment of its innately negative tendencies, which had to take place without interference in its own way.

Besides underlining the continued relation with one and the same teacher, Rousseau sees that the teacher and pupil influence each other as two inseparables in life. This resembles the idea so prevalent in Indian educational life, which is that of the sentiment of gurutvam (Guruhood), by which the teacher and pupil are bound together seriously and whole-heartedly by bipolar personal relations uniformly sustained through the whole process called education. Living with the teacher as Emile did with his own preceptor, to secure perfect conditions in education, is nothing other than what is familiar in India as gurukulavasa (life in a Gurukula).

Thus gurubhakti (devotion to a teacher), protection from outside influences for letting deep innate tendencies develop, which is the essence of the notion basic to Indian education called brahmacharya (walking in the way of the Absolute), and learning by as many hard experiences as life could present during boyhood, are some of the basic notions that Rousseau emphatically recommends and which one surprisingly finds as those very factors fundamentally distinguishing what has been known as Gurukula education from the most ancient times.

Thus, the father of modern education had starting postulates much misunderstood by other modern educators who came after him, not to speak of educational authorities of India itself, who still think wrongly that modern education must be basically different from the education offered by the Gurukulas in ancient days. New theorists in education such as Pestalozzi, Froeble, Montessori and a host of others, culminating in Kilpatrick, Dewey, or Josiah Royce, and not omitting continental representatives such as Clapparet, Bovet, and Ferriere, who stood for the new school, could all be looked upon as merely continuators of the first modern impetus given to the idea of the liberty of the child. The so-called "Declaration of Geneva" of the League of Nations also recognized the limiting points in the swinging of the pendulum of education between stuffing the child with information on one side, and conferring on it the freedom to play and to be emancipated from the trammels and tribulations of outmoded schooling on the other.

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NORMATIVE NOTION

Here especially in India we are called upon to take up our position correctly in respect of our educational programmes, both public and private. One hears in many modern convocation speeches, delivered by great educational authorities in this country, that we have to harken back to the ancient model of Gurukula education, which is expected to be character-forming and to help to perfect the personality. State programmes are defective exactly herein; disciplined strikes by students against authorities have become the rule now instead of exceptions. Gurutvam (Guruhood), to which even now the peasant woman attaches at least lip loyalty in India, is beginning to fail to "deliver the goods" altogether. Although educators cry for such ideals as "education of the whole man" or "education for the brave new world," etc., in moments of great enthusiasm or patriotism, there is hardly any book in India on which a proper educational programme could be put into practice by any of the several states of this large sub continent. The word education was once applauded, and found the correct approval of the father of modern India himself, Mahatma Gandhi, whose notions have now been discredited by his own progenitors and have been pushed down to the ground from the high vogue that they enjoyed until recently. There are hardly any texts on education which are based on the natural aspirations of this ancient land. What applies to India could easily apply to the whole world, because of the single fact that its 3,000 years of history has kept it loyal to certain basic notions about the Absolute, as contained in the writings of rishis (Seers), called the Upanishads, which have always enjoyed a non-sectarian, international and universal appeal.

Thus, the notion of what is vaguely referred to as "the whole man" comes into the picture. The notion of the whole man must also include that of the educant, whether as an infant, an adult, a middle-aged man, or a person about to die. The most generalized picture of the human psyche or soul is to be envisaged clearly before we can chalk out any programme which could legitimately be said to apply to this so-called whole man. The whole man is none other than the atman or Self, which is a term belonging to the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. If the pupil represents the atman or the subjective Self, then the whole of nature spread before him as his natural environment must correspond to the natural counterpart of the Self or atman as the non-Self, as even Fichte would classify it in his philosophy. Thus, education is a dialectical process with the Self and the non-Self as its counterparts. The non-Self could be represented by the teacher or Guru, whose function it would be to interpret the book of nature to the growing curiosity of the child as it unfolds naturally. This justifies our starting definition that education is comparable to an osmotic process of interchange of value factors as between the educator and educant, who correspond dialectically to the two counterparts that we have presently tried to distinguish as belonging to the side of the Self or the non-Self. Further, there is an inter-subjective and trans-physical or a psycho-physically double-sided affiliation between the teacher and the taught to be kept in mind as valid throughout the process called education.

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FOUR STAGES

Such a process must also necessarily have its four broad subdivisions which have already been clearly distinguished in our previous Gurukula publications as: 1) The negative (mentioned above); 2) the naturalistic; 3) the pragmatic; and 4) the idealistic stages of education. The naturalistic phase would apply to the teenager up to adulthood, when the book of nature itself is to be experienced step by step through direct contact with it by means of an educator who is able to stimulate curiosity and interest in natural subjects as they unfold in the pupil himself. Pragmatic education envisages the grown-up pupil before entering college or university. He is to learn by active at "participation in the life of society, through miniature projects under taken within the school itself, by which his life would become more a practically successful when he enters the society to which he naturally would belong as a grown-up. The last stage of education would consist of the education of the will power of man, which requires the highest theory in respect of the right orientation of the personality; the will to life, the will to believe, and a willingness to undertake the highest values in life, are all to be comprised within this attitude which is the prerequisite for the final adjustment of the personality of man through the fulfilment of his own life purpose, treated as seriously as a man near to his own death should normally be expected to do. Such a final aspect of life requires its own sternly idealistic disciplines, such as the practice of yoga.

Yoga is not meant for the kindergarten. School children are natural yogis and do not require pranayama (control of vital breaths) or asanas (special postures) to keep them normal. Kalidasa under lines this fact when he says, in a famous verse of his epic work, Raghuvamsa, that in King Dilipa's kingdom the ideal life of the people consisted of school learning during infancy, the seeking of normal pleasures during adulthood, the cultivation of austerity during mature years, and finally seeking to abandon the body normally through yoga. Thus, the most important function of yoga is made by Kalidasa to refer to the stage of idealistic education, rather than to that of the kindergarten. It is as important to die beautifully as to begin to live beautifully. Thus, the whole process of education has been harmoniously conceived, and its broad lines indicated, by poet-seers in India like Kalidasa, from most ancient times. This Conference is only to remind us of such precious indications found in the contemplative Sanskritic civilization. It behoves the present educational authorities to pay heed to such valuable guidelines found nearer home, so that education could again be established on its own proper bearings and foundations.

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REFERENCES

1. Hume, R. E., The Thirteen Principle Upanishads, Oxford, 1968; cf. Chandogya Upanishad, eighth khanda.

2. Rousseau, J-J, Emile, Garnier Freres, Paris; preface p. 2, (translation ours).

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