“What’s the relevance,” Will asked, “of all this elaborate training of the mind-body to formal education? Does it help a child to do sums, or write grammatically, or understand elementary physics?”
“It helps a lot,” said Mr. Menon. “A trained mind-body learns more quickly and more thoroughly than an untrained one. It’s also more capable of relating facts to ideas, and both of them to its own ongoing life.” Suddenly and surprisingly—for that long melancholy face gave one the impression of being incompatible with any expression of mirth more emphatic than a rather weary smile—he broke into a loud long peal of laughter.
“What’s the joke?”
“I was thinking of two people I met last time I was in England. At Cambridge. One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philosopher. Both extremely eminent. But one had a mental age, outside the laboratory, of about eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he refused to face. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally neglect to do anything for the mind-body which has to do the learning and the living.”
“And your system, I take it, doesn’t produce that kind of academic monster?”
The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Until I went to Europe, I’d never seen anything of the kind. They’re grotesquely funny,” he added. “But, goodness, how pathetic! And, poor things, how curiously repulsive!”
“Being pathetically and curiously repulsive—that’s the price we pay for specialization.”
“For specialization,” Mr. Menon agreed, “but not in the sense you people ordinarily use the word. Specialization in that sense is necessary and inevitable. No specialization, no civilization. And if one educates the whole mind-body along with the symbol-using intellect, that kind of necessary specialization won’t do much harm. But you people don’t educate the mind-body. Your cure for too much scientific specialization is a few more courses in the humanities. Excellent! Every education ought to include courses in the humanities. But don’t let’s be fooled by the name. By themselves, the humanities don’t humanize. They’re simply another form of specialization on the symbolic level. Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot doesn’t educate the whole human being; like courses in physics or chemistry, it merely educates the symbol manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude. Hence all those pathetic and repulsive creatures that so astonished me on my first trip abroad.”
“What about formal education?” Will now asked. “What about indispensable information and the necessary intellectual skills? Do you teach the way we do?”
“We teach the way you’re probably going to teach in another ten or fifteen years. Take mathematics, for example. Historically mathematics began with the elaboration of useful tricks, soared up into metaphysics and finally explained itself in terms of structure and logical transformations. In our schools we reverse the historical process. We begin with structure and logic; then, skipping the metaphysics, we go on from general principles to particular applications.”
“And the children understand?”
“Far better than they understand when one starts with utilitarian tricks. From about five onwards practically any intelligent child can learn practically anything, provided always that you present it to him in the right way. Logic and structure in the form of games and puzzles. The children play and, incredibly quickly, they catch the point. After which you can go on to practical applications. Taught in this way, most children can learn at least three times as much, four times as thoroughly, in half the time. Or consider another field where one can use games to implant an understanding of basic principles. All scientific thinking is in terms of probability. The old eternal verities are merely a high degree of likeliness; the immutable laws of nature are just statistical averages. How does one get these profoundly unobvious notions into children’s heads? By playing roulette with them, by spinning coins and drawing lots. By teaching them all kinds of games with cards and boards and dice.”
“Evolutionary Snakes and Ladders—that’s the most popular game with the little ones,” said Mrs. Narayan. “Another great favorite is Mendelian Happy Families.”
“And a little later,” Mr. Menon added, “we introduce them to a rather complicated game played by four people with a pack of sixty specially designed cards divided into three suits. Psychological bridge, we call it. Chance deals you your hand, but the way you play it is a matter of skill, bluff and co-operation with your partner.”
“Psychology, Mendelism, Evolution—your education seems to be heavily biological,” said Will.
“It is,” Mr. Menon agreed. “Our primary emphasis isn’t on physics and chemistry; it’s on the sciences of life.”
“Is that a matter of principle?”
“Not entirely. It’s also a matter of convenience and economic necessity. We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet. We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes.
Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind. If the politicians in the newly independent countries had any sense,” he added, “they’d do the same. But they want to throw their weight around; they want to have armies, they want to catch up with the motorized television addicts of America and Europe. You people have no choice,” he went on. “You’re irretrievably committed to applied physics and chemistry, with all their dismal consequences, military, political and social. But the underdeveloped countries aren’t committed. They don’t have to follow your example.
They’re still free to take the road we’ve taken—the road of applied biology, the road of fertility control and the limited production and selective industrialization which fertility control makes possible, the road that leads towards happiness from the inside out, through health, through awareness, through a change in one’s attitude towards the world; not towards the mirage of happiness from the outside in, through toys and pills and nonstop distractions. They could still choose our way; but they don’t want to, they want to be exactly like you, God help them. And as they can’t possibly do what you’ve done—at any rate within the time they’ve set themselves—they’re foredoomed to frustration and disappointment, predestined to the misery of social breakdown and anarchy, and then to the misery of enslavement by tyrants. It’s a completely foreseeable tragedy, and they’re walking into it with their eyes open.”
“And we can’t do anything about it,” the Principal added.
“Can’t do anything,” said Mr. Menon, “except go on doing what we’re doing now and hoping against hope that the example of a nation that has found a way of being happily human may be imitated. There’s very little chance of it; but it just might happen.”
“Unless Greater Rendang happens first.”
“Unless Greater Rendang happens first,” Mr. Menon gravely agreed. “Meanwhile we have to get on with our job, which is education. Is there anything more that you’d like to hear about, Mr. Farnaby?”
“Lots more,” said Will. “For example, how early do you start your science teaching?”
“We start it at the same time we start multiplication and division. First lessons in ecology.”
“Ecology? Isn’t that a bit complicated?”
“That’s precisely the reason why we begin with it. Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in.”
“And let me add,” said the Principal, “that we always teach the science of relationship in conjunction with the ethics of relationship. Balance, give and take, no excesses—it’s the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people. As I said before, children find it very easy to understand an idea when it’s presented to them in a parable about animals. We give them an up-to-date version of Aesop’s Fables. Not the old anthropomorphic fictions, but true ecological fables with built-in, cosmic morals. And another wonderful parable for children is the story of erosion. We don’t have any good examples of erosion here; so we show them photographs of what has happened in Rendang, in India and China, in Greece and the Levant, in Africa and America—all the places where greedy, stupid people have tried to take without giving, to exploit without love or understanding. Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well.
Hurt or destroy Nature, and Nature will soon destroy you. In a Dust Bowl, ‘Do as you would be done by’ is self-evident—much easier for a child to recognize and understand than in an eroded family or village. Psychological wounds don’t show—and anyhow children know so little about their elders. And, having no standards of comparison, they tend to take even the worst situation for granted, as though it were part of the nature of things. Whereas the difference between ten acres
