Education for Life: Preparing Children to Meet the Challenges (Continued)


Please note direct word-for-word quotes from Education for Life are indicated by single quotation marks.

Chapter 3: Reason Must Be Balanced by Feeling


When it comes to science, we often come across the view that if a person can train themselves to adopt a completely scientific outlook they can rise above human nature and in this cold objectivity rise to a superior understanding. In this way of thinking human nature is seen as an obstacle to understanding rather than an aid.

Yet when we investigate the lives of the great scientists of the past we find the opposite: that feeling has a large part to play in their greatest discoveries. For instance the great scientist Albert Einstein claimed that the essence of scientific inquiry is a sense of mystical awe before the wonders of the universe.

In fact we find that 'Great scientists generally, like most great human beings, are dreamers as well as people of action. And they are committed to their dreams—their vision, if you will. One thinks here of Edison testing 43,000 filaments before finding one that would work in an incandescent light bulb. His assistants, after some 20,000 experiments, pleaded with him to abandon the quest. Imagine such extraordinary commitment to what seemed to everyone else an impossible dream!'

J. Donald Walters states, 'Sri Radhakrishnan, formerly the vice president of India, said during the conversation I once had with him, “A nation is known by the men and women it looks up to as great.” In light of his remark, rich in the simplicity of wisdom, does it not seem at times as though the model we are being offered today of the ideal human being were something akin to a robot?'

As a result modern school systems often encourages, preoccupation with physical things, and with abstract ideas, while fostering indifference to values that are more closely human.

'Psychology itself, however, tells us that human feelings cannot be suppressed. Ignore a person’s emotional life instead of trying to develop it along constructive lines, and those emotions will simply find other, and often destructive, outlets for self-expression.'

'Unfortunately, psychologists have also encouraged the unbridled expression of emotions as a means of ridding oneself of them. They don’t discuss how to refine the emotions. Emotions themselves are viewed merely as obstacles to understanding. Thus, people have been led to believe that the way to find release from their feelings is to give them free rein.'

Calm, refined feelings are the true norm for mature human behavior, and disturbed emotions bring the opposite immature human behaviour. 'Although the emotions can distort a person’s perceptions of reality, refined emotions, in the form of pure feeling, can clarify those perceptions. The intellect is one of the tools provided by Nature for accessing her secrets. Feeling, however, when calm, is the other tool. Of the two, feeling is the more important.'

'Science has taught us to learn from Nature. Why not, then, seek to learn from human nature, and also from divine nature?'

'This process may not be rightly the task of our school system any more than scientific discoveries themselves are expected in the classrooms. The purpose of schooling is to pass on to students what has been learned already in the great school of life. Much has been learned already, however, about human and divine nature through the millennia. Many discoveries have been made also regarding the search for true fulfillment in life. A good start in the schools, then, would be to include among the subjects covered in the classroom an intelligent study of these findings.

'The need, moreover, is to approach these findings with the same objectivity that true science has shown—not cold, intellectual objectivity, merely, but the objectivity also of calm feeling.

'From life only can lessons be drawn that have repeatedly, in the past, shown human beings the ways to better living.'


Chapter 3 in full can be found through this link for those who want to go into greater depth.