THE NEW ERA EDUCATION

Helena Roerich, Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore and Torkom Saryadarian, all, during their experiences as educators of spiritual ethics and values, gave humanity a dream of the New Education. We hope the following compiled material will inspire you, help you feel a part of their dreams and visions, and serve as inspiration toward your own educational goals.

“The word ‘spiritual’ does not refer to religious matters, so-called. All activity which drives the human being forward towards some form of development—physical, emotional, mental, intuitional, social—if it is in advance of his present state is essentially spiritual in nature and is indicative of the livingness of the inner divine entity. The spirit of man is undying; it forever endures, progressing from point to point and stage to stage upon the Path of Evolution, unfolding steadily and sequentially the divine attributes and aspects.”¹

“Education to date has been largely memory training, though there is now emerging the recognition that this attitude must end. The [student] has to assimilate the facts that the race believes to be true, has tested in the past and found adequate. But each age has a differing standard of adequacy. The Piscean Age dealt with the detail of the endeavour to measure up to a sensed ideal. Hence we have a history, which covers the method whereby tribes acquired national status through aggression, war and conquest. That has been indicative of racial achievement.” ²

Albert Einstein (1879–1955), on education, is quoted as saying: “Most teachers waste their time by asking questions which are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning has for its purpose to discover what the pupil knows or is capable of knowing.”³

“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”⁴
“Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.”⁵

“The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who, however, see in the service to the community their highest life achievement.”⁶

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken
Up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the
Depth of truth;
Where tireless striving
Stretches its arms towards
Perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
Has not lost its way into the
Dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward
By thee into ever-widening
Thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom,
My Father, let my country awake.”⁷

Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate (1913), who tried to deepen mutual Indian and Western cultural understanding. He began to write poetry as a child; his first book appeared when he was 17 years old. A dedicated internationalist and educator, Tagore established a school in 1901 in his estate, Santiniketan, in Bengal, to teach a blend of Eastern and Western Philosophies. In 1921 his school was expanded into an international university, Visva-Bharati.

Tagore wrote, “I have been told that you would like to hear about the educational crusade I have undertaken, but it will be difficult for me to give you a distinct idea of my institution of learning, which has grown gradually during the last twenty-four years. My own mind has grown with it, and my own ideal of education has reached its fullness so slowly and so naturally, that I find it difficult to analyze and place it before you.”⁸

“In childhood we learn our lessons with the aid of both body and mind, with all the senses active and eager. When we are sent to school, the doors of natural information are closed to us; our eyes see the letters, our ears hear the abstract lessons, but our mind misses the perpetual stream of ideas from nature, because the teachers, in their wisdom, think these bring distraction, and have no purpose behind them.”⁹

“I tried to establish a school where boys might be free in spite of the school. Knowing something of the natural school, which Nature supplies to all her creatures, I established my institution in a beautiful spot, far away from town, where the children had the greatest freedom possible, especially in my not forcing upon them lessons for which their mind was unfitted. I do not wish to exaggerate, however, and I must admit that I have not been able to follow my own plan in every way. Forced as we are to live in a society which is itself tyrannical, and which cannot always be gainsaid, I was often obliged to concede to what I did not believe in, but what the others around me insisted on. Yet I always had it in my mind to create an atmosphere; I felt this was more important than classroom teaching.

“We had the open beauty of the sky, and the seasons in all their magnificent color. Through this intimacy with nature we took the opportunity of instituting festivals. I wrote songs to celebrate the coming of spring and the rainy season which follows the long months of drought; we had dramatic performances with decorations appropriate to the seasons.

“Education must enable every child to understand and fulfill this purpose of the age, not defeat it by acquiring the habit of creating divisions and cherishing national prejudices. There are of course natural differences in human races which should be preserved and respected, and the task of our education should be to realize unity in spite of them, to discover truth through the wilderness of their contradictions.

“We have tried to do this in Visva-Bharati. Our endeavor has been to include this ideal of unity in all the activities in our institution, some educational, some that comprise different kinds of artistic expression, some in the shape of service to our neighbors by helping the reconstruction of village life.
“I have tried to save children from the vicious methods which alienate their minds, and from other prejudices which are fostered through histories, geographies and lessons full of national prejudices. In the East there is a great deal of bitterness against other races, and in our own homes we are often brought up with feelings of hatred. I have tried to save the children from such feelings, with the help of friends from the West, who, with their understanding and their human sympathy and love, have done us a great service.

“It will be a great future, when base passions are no longer stimulated within us, when human races come closer to one another, and when through their meeting new truths are revealed.

“There will be a sunrise of truth and love through insignificant people who have suffered martyrdom for humanity, like the great personality who had only a handful of disciples from among the fisherfolk and who at the end of his career seemingly presented a picture of failure at a time when Rome was at the zenith of her glory. He was reviled by those in power, ignored by the crowd, and he was crucified; yet through that symbol he lives forever.”¹⁰

Torkom Saraydarian (1917–1997) is an internationally recognized scholar and author of comparative religions and philosophy.

“I have been a headmaster, teacher, and principal of various private schools. Through my experience, I envision the following goals for education:

1. To eliminate war from the surface of the earth
2. To make everyone in the world free from want
3. To eliminate every kind of crime, not by laws but through
    education
4. To transform the children of the world by cultivating in their
    hearts the vision of one world, one humanity, with great
    respect and appreciation for the culture of every nation
5. To wipe out the sources of disease
6. To build all the necessary steps to prove the immortality of
    man
7. To contact the Higher Worlds”¹¹

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1. AAB, Education in the New Age, p. 1, © 1954 Lucius Trust.
2. Ibid, p. 2.
3. Moszkowski, Conversations with Einstein, 1920, p. 65.
4. Frank, Einstein: His life and Times, on Thomas Edison’s opinion that a college education is useless;
(1921) p. 185.
5. From The Dink, Princeton freshman publication, December 1933.
6. Albert Einstien, “On Education” (From an address in Albany, New York, October 15, 1936) published in Out of My Later Years, © 1956 Estate of Albert Einstein.
7. Rabindrananth Tagore, A Tagore Reader, ed. Amiya Chakravarty, © 1961 The Macmillan Company.
8, 9, 10. Ibid., pp. 213–217.
11. Torkom Saraydarian, Education As Transformation Vol I, back cover, © 1999 The Creative Trust.