The New Education

Two great systems of education have shaped humanity for centuries, each containing what the other lacks. The East produced, through its careful culture of the individual soul and its technique of meditation, the great Individuals who have sounded the note for every age — the Buddhas, the Christs, the world Saviours, and the inspired scriptures that have moulded the thoughts of generations. Yet in doing so it left the masses in material neglect. The West achieved the opposite: a sweeping system of mass education that produced civilisation, science, and a general level of knowledge unparalleled in recorded history — yet it left the soul entirely out of the equation, training the memory without touching the spirit, producing human beings who are skilled, functional, and largely unaware of who they truly are.

The Synthesis

The New Education is the synthesis these two streams have not yet, in any organised sense, achieved together. It begins from the premise of the East — that within every human form there is a soul, that this soul has a purpose which exceeds and outlasts a single lifetime, and that the deepest education is the one which brings that soul into conscious expression through the life of the personality. To these premises it adds the breadth of the West: trained minds, wide general knowledge, the ability to act in the world. The product of this union has been called the practical mystic — feet firmly planted on the Earth, and yet a seer, carrying inspiration and illumination into every field of daily life.

The Method

The method by which this is achieved — and which will find its way into every level of the educational process, from early childhood onward — is the interior discipline of meditation: not as a religious practice but as a scientific technique of mind culture. Rather than something imposed from without, this educational process is described as welling up from within — self-initiated, self-directed, rooted in the student's own nature. The shift is precise: from memory training to intuitive knowing, from imparted facts to inner recognition, from producing a useful member of society to revealing the soul the child already is.

What this yields, when soul culture is at last wed to sound general knowledge, is a generation of children who grow up knowing who they are before the world has had the chance to tell them otherwise. As one reflection on this work puts it: “All children are, by nature, bits of God; and God, if they but had their freedom, would unfold himself in them — till, as perfect flowers, they bloomed, fulfilled of loveliness unveiled.” Toward that unfolding, the New Education now turns — spanning, in time, every department of society, not only the schooling of the young.

Source: the East–West synthesis and the practical mystic are drawn from Alice Bailey's From Intellect to Intuition, held within the Elemental Grace Alliance's own record as the educational foundation named for the New Children.