राष्ट्रीय शिक्षा प्रणाली एवं भारतीय मानस (श्री अरविन्द - एकात्म शिक्षा दर्शन)

THE MORAL NATURE 23
the moral temper we desire in our
young men, in the whole Nation. But
how can we get them if we do not
give opportunities to the young to train
themselves in the Aryan tradition, to
form by the practice and familiarity
of childhood and boyhood the stuff of
which their adult lives must be made?
Every boy should, therefore, be
given practical opportunity as well as
intellectual encouragement to develop
all that is best in the nature. If he
has bad qualities, bad habits, bad
samskaras whether of mind or body,
he should not be treated harshly as a
delinquent, but encouraged to get rid
of them by the Rajayogic Method of
Sanyama, rejection and substitution.
He should be encouraged to think of
them, not as sins or offences, but as
symptoms of a curable disease alter-
able by a steady and sustained effort

24 NATIONAL EDUCATION
of the will, falsehood being rejected
whenever it rises into the mind and
replaced by truth, fear by courage,
selfishness by sacrifice and renuncia-
tion, malice by love. Great care will
have to be taken that unformed virtues
are not rejected as faults. The wild-
ness and recklessness of many young
natures are only the overflowings of
an excessive strength, greatness and
nobility. They should be purified,
not discouraged.
I have spoken of morality ; it is
necessary to speak a word of religious
teaching. There is a strange idea
prevalent that by merely teaching the
dogmas of religion children can be
made pious and moral. This is an
European error, and its practice leads,
either to mechanical acceptance of a
creed having no effect on the inner
and little on the outer life, or it crea-

THE MORAL NATURE 25
tes the fanatic, the pietist, the ritualist
or the unctuous hypocrite. Religion
has to be lived, not learned as a creed.
The singular compromise made in the
so-called National Education of Bengal
making the teaching of religious beliefs
compulsory, but forbidding the practice
of anushtana or religious exercise, is a
sample of the ignorant confusion which
distracts men's mind on this subject.
The prohibition is a sop to secularism
declared or concealed. No religious
teaching is of any value unless it is
lived, and the use of various kinds of
sadhana, spiritual self-training and
exercise, is the only effective pre-
paration for religious living. The
ritual of prayer homage, ceremony is
craved for by many minds as an essen-
tial preparation and, if not made an
end in itself, is a great help to spiritual
progress ; if it is withheld, some other

26 NATIONAL EDUCATION
form of meditation, devotion or religi-
ous duty must be put in its place.
Otherwise, Religious Teaching is of
little use and would almost be better
ungiven.
But whether distinct teaching in
any form of religion is imparted or not,
the essence of religion, to live for God,
for humanity, for country, for others
and for oneself in these, must be made
the ideal in every School which calls
itself National. It is this spirit of
Hinduism pervading our Schools which
—far more than the teaching of Indian
Subjects, the use of Indian methods or
formal instruction in Hindu Beliefs
and Hindu Scriptures—should be the
essence of Nationalism in our Schools
distinguishing them from all others.

CHAPTER IV
SIMULTANEOUS AND SUCCESSIVE
TEACHING
A very remarkable feature of
modern training which has been sub-
jected in India to a reduction ad
absurdum is the practice of teaching
by snippets. A subject is taught a
little at a time, in conjunction with a
host of others, with the result that what
might be well learnt in a single year
is badly learned in seven and the boy
goes out ill-equipped, served with
imperfect parcels of knowledge, master
of none of the great departments of
human knowledge. The system of
Education adopted by the National
Council, an amphibious and twy-
natured creation, attempts to heighten
this practice of teaching by snippets
at the bottom and the middle and
suddenly change it to a grandiose

28 NATIONAL EDUCATION
specialism at the top. This is to base
the Triangle on its apex and hope that
it will stand.
The old system was to teach one
or two subjects well and thoroughly
and then proceed to others, and cer-
tainly it was a more rational system
than the modern. If it did not impart
so much varied information, it built up
a deeper, nobler and more real culture.
Much of the shallowness, discursive
lightness and fickle mutability of the
average modern mind is due to the
vicious principle of teaching by snip-
pets. The one defect that can be
alleged against the old system was that
the subject earliest learned might fade
from the mind of the student while he
was mastering his later studies. But
the excellent training given to the
memory by the ancients obviated the
incidence of this defect. In the future

SUCCESSIVE TEACHING. 29
Education we need not bind ourselves
either by the ancient or the modern
system, but select only the most per-
fect and rapid means of mastering
knowledge.
In defence of modern system it is
alleged that the attention of children
is easily tired and cannot be subjected
to the strain of long application to a
single subject. The frequent changes
of subject gives rest to the mind. The
question naturally arises: are the child-
ren of modern times then so different
from the ancients, and, if so, have we
not made them so by discouraging
prolonged concentration ? A very
young child cannot, indeed apply him-
self; but a very young child is unfit for
School teaching of any kind. A child
of seven or eight, and that is the
earliest permissible age for the com-
mencement of any regular kind of

30 NATIONAL EDUCATION
study, is capable of a good deal of
concentration if he is interested.
Interest is after all, the basis of con-
centration. We make his lessons
supremely uninteresting and repellent
to the child, a harsh compulsion the
basis of teaching and then complain of
his restless inattention ! The substitu-
tion of a natural self-Education by the
child for the present unnatural system
will remove this objection of inability.
A child, like a man, if he is interest-
ed, much prefers to get to the end of
his subject rather than leave it unfi-
nished. To lead him on step by step,
interesting and absorbing him in each
as it comes, until he has mastered his
subject is the true art of teaching.
The first attention of the teacher
must be given to the medium and the
instruments, and, until these are per-
fected, to multiply subjects of regular

SUCCESSIVE TEACHING 31
instruction is to waste time and energy.
When the mental instruments are
sufficiently developed to acquire a
language easily and swiftly, that is the
time to introduce him to many langu-
ages, not when he can only partially
understand what he is taught and
masters it laboriously and imperfectly.
Moreover, one who has mastered his
own language, has one very necessary
facility for mastering another. With
the linguistic faculty unsatisfactorily
developed in one's own tongue, to
master others is impossible. To study
Science with the faculties of observa-
tion, judgment, reasoning, and compari-
son only slightly developed, is to
undertake a useless and thankless
labour. So it is with all other subjects.
The mother-tongue is the proper
medium of Education and therefore
the first energies of the child should

32 NATIONAL EDUCATION
be directed to the thorough mastering
of the medium. Almost every child
has an imagination, an instinct for
words, a dramatic faculty, a wealth of
idea and fancy. These should be
interested in the literature and history
of the Nation. Instead of stupid and
dry spelling and reading books, looked
on as a dreary and ungrateful task, he
should be introduced by rapidly pro-
gressive stages to the most interesting
parts of his own literature and the
life around him and behind him, and
they should be put before him, in such
a way as to attract and appeal to the
qualities of which I have spoken. All
other study at this period should be
devoted to the perfection of the
mental functions and the moral chara-
cter. A foundation should be laid at
this time for the study of history,
science, philosophy, art, but not in an

SUCCESSIVE TEACHING 33
obtrusive and formal manner. Every
child is a lover of interesting narra-
tive, a hero-worshipper and a patriot.
Appeal to these qualities in him and
through him, let him master without
knowing it the living and human parts
of his Nation's history. Every child
is an inquirer, an investigator, analy-
ser, a merciless anatomist. Appeal to
those qualities in him and let him
acquire without knowing it the right
temper and the necessary fundamental
knowledge of the Scientist. Every
child has an insatiable intellectual
curiosity and turn for metaphysical
enquiry. Use it to draw him on slow-
ly to an understanding of the world and
himself. Every child has the gift of
imitation and a touch of imaginative
power. Use it to give him the ground
work of the faculty of the artist.
It is by allowing Nature to work
3

34 NATIONAL EDUCATION
that we get the benefit of the gifts she
has bestowed on us. Humanity in its
education of children has chosen to
thwart and hamper the rapidity of
its onward march. Happily, saner
ideas are now beginning to prevail.
But the way has not yet been found.
The past hangs about our necks with
all its prejudices and errors and will
not leave us ; it enters into our most
radical attempts to return to the gui-
dance of the all-wise Mother. We
must have the courage to take up
clearer knowledge and apply it fear-
lessly in the interests of posterity.
Teaching by snippets must be relegat-
ed to the lumber-room of dead sorrows.
The first work is to interest the child
in life, work and knowledge, to develop
his instruments of knowledge with the
utmost thoroughness, to give him
mastery of the medium he must use.

SUCCESSIVE TEACHING 35
Afterwards, the rapidity with which
he will learn, will be found that,
where now he learns a few things
badly, then he will learn many things
thoroughly well.

CHAPTER V
THE TRAINING OF THE MIND
There are six senses which minister
to knowledge, sight, hearing, smell,
touch and taste, mind, and all of these
except the last, look outward and
gather the material of thought from
outside through the physical nerves
and their end-organs, eye, ear, nose,
skin, palate. The perfection of the
senses as ministers to thought must be
one of the first cares of the teachers.
The two things that are needed of
the senses are accuracy and sensi-
tiveness. We must first understand
what are the obstacles to the accuracy
and sensitiveness of the senses, in
order that we may take the best steps
to remove them. The cause of imper-
fection must be understood by those
who desire to bring about perfection.

THE TRAINING OF THE MIND 37
The senses depend for their accu-
racy and sensitiveness on the un-
obstructed activity of the nerves which
are the channels of their information
and the passive acceptance of the
mind which is the recipient. In
themselves the organs do their work
perfectly. The eye gives the right
form, the ear the correct sound, the
palate the right taste, the skin the
right touch, the nose the right smell.
This can easily be understood if we
study the action of the eye as a
crucial example. A correct image is
reproduced automatically on the retina,
if there is any error in appreciating
it, it is not the fault of the organ, but
of something else.
The fault may be with the nerve
currents. The nerves are nothing but
channels, they have no power in
themselves to alter the information

38 NATIONAL EDUCATION
given by the organs. But a channel
may be obstructed and the obstruc-
tion may interfere either with the
fullness or the accuracy of the informa-
tion, not as it reaches the organ where
it is necessarily and automatically
perfect, but as it reaches the mind.
The only exception is in case of a
physical defect in the organ as an
instrument. That is not a matter for
the educationist, but for the physician.
If the obstruction is such as to stop
the information reaching the mind at
all, the result is an insufficient
sensitiveness of the senses. The
defects of sight, hearing, smell, touch,
taste, anœthesia in its various
degrees, are curable when not the
effect of physical injury or defect in
the organ itself. The obstructions
can be removed and the sensitiveness
remedied by the purification of the

THE TRAINING OF THE MIND 39
nerve system. The remedy is a simple
one which is now becoming more and
more popular in Europe for different
reasons and objects, the regulation of
the breathing. This process inevit-
ably restores the perfect and unob-
structed activity of the channels and,
if well and thoroughly done, leads to
a high activity of the senses. The
process is called in Yogic discipline,
nadi-suddhi, or nerve-purification.
The obstruction in the channel
may be such as not absolutely to stop
in however small a degree, but to
distort the information. A familiar
instance of this is the effect of fear
or alarm on the sense action. The
startled horse takes the sack on the
road for a dangerous living thing, the
startled man takes a rope for a snake,
a waving curtain for a ghostly form.
All distortions due to actions in the

40 NATIONAL EDUCATION
nervous system can be traced to some
kind of emotional disturbance acting
in the nerve channels. The only
remedy for them is the habit of calm,
the habitual steadiness of the nerves.
This also can be brought about by
nadi-suddhi or nerve-purficiation,
which quiets the system, gives a
deliberate calmness to all the internal
processes and prepares the purification
of the mind.
If the nerve channels are quiet and
clear, the only possible disturbance of
the information is from or through
the mind. Now the manas or sixth
sense is in itself a channel like the
nerves, a channel for communication:
with the buddhi or brainforce distur-
bance may happen either from above
or from below. The information
outside is first photographed on the
end organ, then reproduced at the

THE TRAINING OF THE MIND 41
other end of the nerve system in the
chitta or passive memory. All the
images of sight, sound, smell, touch and
taste are deposited there and the
manas reports them to the buddhi.
The manas is both a sense organ and
a channel. As a sense organ it is as
automatically perfect as the others, as
a channel it is subject to disturbance
resulting either in obstruction or dis-
tortion.
As a sense organ the mind recei-
ves direct thought impressions from
outside and from within. These
impressions are in themselves perfect-
ly correct, but in their report to the
intellect at all or may reach it so
distorted as to make a false or parti-
ally false impression. The disturbance
may effect the impression which
attains the information of eye, ear,
nose, skin or palate, but it is very

42 NATIONAL EDUCATION
slightly powerful here, in its effect on
the direct impressions of the mind, it
is extremely powerful and the chief
source of error. The mind takes direct
impressions primarily of thought, but
also of form, sound, indeed of all the
things for which it usually prefers to
depend on the sense organs. The full
development of this sensitiveness of the
mind is called in our Yogic discipline
Sushmadrishti or subtle reception
of images. Telepathy, clairvoyance,
claraudience, presentment, thought-
reading, character-reading and many
other modern discoveries are very
ancient powers of the mind which
have been left undeveloped, and they
all belong to the manas. The develop-
ment of the sixth sense has never
formed part of human training. In a
future age it will undoubtedly take a
place in the necessary preliminary