The true purpose of education is, surely, to develop mental faculties and unfold the inherent and latent qualities in man.
At present education, all over the world, is concentrated upon the purveying of information. A mass of knowledge is communicated to all students and those whose minds are able to grasp and understand the bulk of it pass their examinations and proceed to higher classes. Those whose capacity to understand is smaller are, generally speaking, simply obliged to remain in the same class where they will have the same lessons repeated. Even after many repetitions they still fail to absorb the teaching and it is then felt that all that is possible has been done to help them. It has not, because no amount of repetition of informa¬tion will turn a dullard into a brilliant scholar.
A process of mind development, such as this system of meditation, will do for the dull student what repetitious teaching can never do; it will develop the latent powers of the mind naturally to the point where information can be assimilated through understanding.
There is, of course, no question of replacing the dissemina¬tion of information, in which is contained all the glories of learning. What is offered is simply an addition, to support and make meaningful the giving of facts. Meditation could be of the utmost value to all grown-up students because it would increase a thousandfold the depth to which their grasp of any teaching would reach.
By unfolding the latent powers of discrimination and understanding, meditation makes it at last possible for a man to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. Education as it is at present provided does not satisfy but increases the thirst for knowledge by giving facts and arousing the curiosity of the mind but not satisfying it. The more a man reads about a subject the greater the field of the unknown seems to become. By the acquisition of information he is made painfully aware of the vast extent of his own ignorance and, paradoxically, the effect of wide reading is only too often to give a man a sense of helpless insufficiency. From this the only escape seems to be self-confinement in a rigid speciality—which may be learning but is not education.
This situation has been brought about by centuries of man's swimming upon the surface of mind, where the scenery is immen¬sely varied but confined entirely to manifest creation. The way in which all knowledge can be related and brought to the essential state of wisdom is through access to cosmic consciousness. There is no other way.
If the world is to grow wiser and better, and if the family of nations is to live in peace, prosperity and harmony, then not only the leaders, teachers and scholars but each and every citizen must learn to explore and discover for himself the wonders of the inner life. If meditation were to be introduced into the educational systems of the world then it would be possible, without exaggeration, for a new humanity to be born. For the fulfillment reached through meditation is the fulfillment of all learning, of all science, of all philosophy, of all religion and all truth.
