A Project of Education by Swami Krishnananda The world has, first of all, to stand ‘outside there’ as an ‘object’ of the percipient individual, in order that the latter may make any sense of life at all. But, is it true that the world is really ‘outside there’, as an isolated object staring at the individual? This strange predicament which one encounters in the study of anything would testify to the value that seems to be attached to such processes and doctrines and ways of living as the purely astronomical, physical, chemical, biological, historical, political, social, economic, civic, aesthetic, and even ethical and epistemological envisagements of existence, as they stand today. The whole edifice may tumble down if the meaning of a life of this kind is rooted in the basic requirement that the world is ‘outside’ the individual. Modern astronomy and physics, to mention the least and the most obvious, fortunately, appear to have, unwittingly though, stumbled upon the fact that the universe is an undivided continuum, an organism, in which the space-time complex has to be transfigured into a four-dimensional perception, and that matter is not ‘outside there’ to be seen or dealt with by an ‘individual’. The ‘individual’ so-called goes with the universe. This should augur, evidently, a new vision of life in its entirety, awakening man from his slumber of empirical phenomenalism which, dream-like, is taken for reality, very erroneously. The return process to this great Fact of the Universe is education. A logical ascent to perfection is called for. The movement, then, is from the social scene to the psychology of the individual, the cosmical set-up and the Ultimate Reality. Education may be said to be the process of awakening to the structure of existence. It is a graduated widening and ascent in the dimension of consciousness to the degrees of reality. Life is essentially a system of adjustment of oneself to the laws of the universe. The meaning of human enterprise in the world, thus, is coordination of the individual with the facts of the cosmic arrangement of things and a harmonious cooperation in the fulfilment of its purpose. The evolutionary scheme of the universe would lay down the required curriculum of the educational career. But, the empirical insistence that the world is outside the individual has, however, to be taken into a matter-of-fact consideration, since all progress is from a lesser reality to a higher degree of being. This would also substantiate the empirical value of the stages of the evolution of the universe conceived and experienced as a reality of pragmatic existence in a world of enterprise and progress. The individual may be said to constitute a cross-section of the universe. The human being operates like a miniature cosmos. This would mean that the principles that are active in the universe direct and condition the existence and activity of all human life. The analysis would also reveal that there is a universal performance implicit in the existence of human beings and in their pursuits of what they consider as their objectives or aims. Towards this end, there is all the striving of human life, concerning which there has always been felt the necessity for intense educational training as a method of introducing a universal manifestation into the adventures of human individuality. These insights may perhaps be adequate to begin a spade-work for laying the foundation of a proper educational career for humanity. When a child is born and practically knows nothing except for the fact that it is evidently self-conscious of its bodily existence and has a feeling of awareness of a vague and nebulous atmosphere of persons and things around it, there is also in it a pressure towards objective consciousness, and the inclination of the child is more in the direction of externality of perception and feeling than an awareness of its own existence as a human unit. What we may call the cosmological scheme is naturally to be followed in an understanding of the educational project, since it would appear that education is nothing short of a conscious discipline of the individual to ascend gradually, stage by stage to levels indicated by cosmic evolution. The condition of the child-consciousness mentioned may pave the way with which the educational method could be commenced for implementation. In the earlier stages of education, call it the kindergarten, the Montessori stage, or the primary education level, there is always to be a psychological programme to bring slowly into a state of gradual integration the many-sided, rather distracted, perceptions of the external world by the child. Often education begins with training in writing reading and basic arithmetic and discipline. Later on, the mind of the child is allowed to move further in a similar integrated fashion along wider areas of human society around, together with the civic sense involved in every kind of human relationship, whether in the family or in the community of people outside, because, practically, the human individual is primarily concerned with other such individuals more than with things which are not human. There are instincts of the species which pull it to its own kindred individuals or kith and kin or others who are related humanly in any manner. Human relations may be said to be the immediately felt necessities in the process of study and training, which include the norms of civic duty and behaviour in regard to the immediate environment of any society, determined, of course, by the psychology, the social set-up or, rather, the sociological tradition and scheme operative. in the particular human environment,–it may be in a locality of a linguistic society bringing people together with an affinity of any cultural and fraternal thinking. With this method of what we may call human understanding scientifically introduced, an important barrier post in education is crossed. Then the student is further introduced to the world which is made up basically not only of human beings alone, but other things also that are there, which form the wider
