A Philosophy of Education for The Contemporary Youth - New Visions and Messages for the Contemporary Youth

A Vision of Philosophy
The unknown is not the unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations.

The Integral knowledge can only come by exploration, an unveiling of all the possible domains of consciousness and experience. This demands an evolution of our being and our nature by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and methods; its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation.

It then becomes obvious that there is something not yet accomplished. It becomes clear that there is much that has still to be done; there is a height still to be reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe.

A Vision of Culture
The higher mental life has been democratized, sensationalized, activized with both good and bad results. Through it all the eye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude but enormous change has begun.

Thought and Knowledge, if not yet Beauty, can get a hearing and even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet in the end effective will for their results: the mass of men who think and strive seriously to appreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all the surface veil of sensationalism, and even the sensational man has begun to undergo a process of transformation.

Especially, new methods of education, new principles of society are beginnning to come into the range of practical possibility which will create perhaps one day that as yet unknown phenomena, a race of men—not only a class—who have to some extent found and developed their mental selves, a cultured humanity.

A Vision of New Society
The new society would treat in its sociology, the individual, from the saint to the criminal, not as units of a social problem to be passed through some skillfully devised machinery and either flattened into the social mould or crushed out of it, but as souls suffering and entangled in a net and to be rescued, souls grown and to be encouraged to grow, souls grown from whom help and power can be drawn by lesser spirits who are not yet adult.

The aim of its economics would be not to create a huge engine of production, whether of the competitive or the co-operative kind, but to give to men—not only to some, but to all men each in the highest possible measure—the joy of work according to their own nature and free leisure to grow inwardly, as well as a simple, yet rich and beautiful life for all.

It would make it the aim of Art not merely to present images of the subjective and objective world, but to see them with the significant and creative vision that goes behind their appearances and to reveal the Truth and Beauty of which things visible to us and invisible are the forms, the masks or the symbols and significant figures.

The new society would be a field of unending education and of perpetual youth.

The new society would live, not in the ego, but in the spirit, not as the collective ego but as the collective soul.