By Kathleen Leppek
With the Aquarian Age marching forward, it is good to consider what our future brings. Discovering the Hierarchical Values of the Aquarian Age and the Seven Tenets for Humanity offer a constructive way forward. The Fifth Tenet concerns the right to an education, with everyone provided with a basic education which includes the opportunity to know what is real and true. Alice Bailey’s book Education In the New Age (1954) is a collective opinion by the Hierarchy given on how education will be expressed in the future. This new education will build on our past learning history bringing forward the wisdom of our experience.
The public education system is being affected by societies’ many influences such as political, economic, social, and cultural differences. These opposing philosophies have three main approaches to education today. They include democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. The future holds a balancing of these influences combining with the new aquarian energies.
Our Founding Fathers and others had a democratic equality vision for education emphasizing it as a “collective social benefit essential for free government to endure.” They felt that education put power in the minds and hands of the people to make informed choices for our society and was needed to fulfill our democratic responsibility. The Founders also believed in getting facts and knowledge out to the mass of people and subsidized newspapers to distribute information as well as creating a postal system to help in that distribution. Schools and libraries followed.
Thomas Jefferson believed in public education as a common learning experience being funded by taxes to improve order and morality with the public being able to exercise their civic right and duty. Horace Mann coined the term “common school” in 1830 as a common social school for all children regardless of social class, gender, religion, ethnicity, or country of origin. He viewed education as “the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balancing wheel of social machinery,” and as “the absolute right of every human being that comes to the world,”
and that our “security and prosperity depended upon having a literate and law-abiding competent worker.” The democratic equality view to education was to prepare all with equal care, equal treatment, equal access, with a high level of shared education as a public good of being a responsible citizen in society.
The social efficiency model to education prepares youth for useful economic roles servicing the public good and the private sector. The demands of a competitive marketplace and social structure produce and distribute goods efficiently reducing loss and promoting economic growth with positive social welfare outcomes. Vocational and educational stratification is seen as a public good to the collective need. Currently, business is answering that education is needed help business compete in the global economy. In extreme cases the employer sees the employee as human capital that produce to society’s need to fill a job and are not necessarily educated.
The social mobility model is when education is used to provide a student with a competitive and personal advantage providing educational credentials to a desirable position to get ahead. Individual opportunity for private good and personal consumption are the goals verses both the democratic society or a productive economy.
Economics, the power of some businesses, and culture have caused an imbalance and separation in public and private education system. Unequal schools and learning opportunities need to be equalized to help our society as a whole and to assist the individual student. Political, economic, and social influences all need to balance to provide an equal opportunity for all children as well as bring out the best contribution to an individual’s potential and interests along with the potential of the greater society. I am seeing in the classroom now, the use of A.I. combined with the classroom teacher, stimulating an individual’s learning style along with setting the right pace for that individual. The average American pays taxes to the school system hoping to improve society; indeed, education is a symbol of hope for many. In recent years community service through volunteering with students and tutoring show the spirit of caring and helping improve both society and the students’ abilities. Volunteers tutor with the hope of opening opportunities so the child will find something meaningful and interesting that leads to an enriching and productive future.
Everyone has experience in the education system and there are many opinions and conflicts on how to move forward. Schools are a microcosm to the greater society; every ill, advantage, and good of culture is seen in schools. The energies of the new era will bring changes. Like all things, humanity learns through their choices and actions; understanding our mistakes moves us forward to make better choices garnering the wisdom from our past. This includes seeing a bigger more comprehensive picture through open-mindedness, stimulation of creativity, as well as understanding human behavior and cultures through the social sciences. Education will include what is good for the human psyche. Our future education system will teach the wisdom of the past and include discrimination with the power of choice and knowing the intent and purpose of a choice has responsibility to the consequences in relation to self and group society. Unity and synthesis will be taught as it relates to family, community, nations, and the relationship to other nations as a world citizen. The education of the future will include not only the creative process of exterior learning, but also the interior development with the soul of the individual and the soul of humankind.
The Fifth Tenet of the Values of the Aquarian Age will bring a true balance by understanding our past choices and mindful consideration of the Spiritual Hierarch’s collective opinion on education. Bailey’s book on education and Master Djwal Khul speaking on behalf of the Hierarchy include:
- “A developing mental control of the emotional nature.
- Vision or the capacity to see beyond what is, to what might be.
- Inherited, factual knowledge upon which it will be possible to superimpose the wisdom of the future.
- Capacity wisely to handle relationships and to recognize and assume responsibility.
- The power to use the mind in two ways:
- As the ‘commonsense’ (of the soul), analyzing and synthesizing the information conveyed by the five senses.
- As a search light, penetrating into the world of ideas and of abstract truth.
Knowledge comes from two directions. It is the result of the intelligent use of the five senses and it’s also developed from the attempt to seize upon the understanding of ideas. Both of these are implemented by curiosity and investigation.”
Some time ago, I read an article titled, Widening the Circle by Mara Sapon-Shevin, Beacon Press (2007). “There is an old story told about the difference between heaven and hell. In hell, all of the people have elbows that don’t bend and long spoons. They try desperately to get their food to their mouths, but because of the length of their spoons and their unbending elbows, they cannot reach. They are all starving, crying with the frustration of being so close to nourishment and so unable to get it.
In heaven, it is said, the conditions are the same: long spoons and unbending elbows. But in heaven, we are told, the people have learned to feed one another. All are nourished as they interact to take responsibility for one another.
Inclusion is a bit like that. We cannot wave a magic wand and make unbending elbows bend or requisition only short spoons. We can, however, learn new ways of interacting, new ways of supporting one another, so that all can be nourished within a community of care and mutual responsibility.”
Just as the past moved forward with step-by-step choices for constructive betterment for all, so will be the future. No matter what hasn’t worked before, we can come together to merge new ideas with our past choices and build with purpose for a harmonious humanity where the Seven Tenets for Humanity and the Aquarian Age work together for a constructive future.