Ancient East and Modern West: Universals of Education

Have they forgotten the celebrated hadith (Holy Tradition): "Seek after knowledge, even unto China"?

(Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 25)

           

            Anyone wishing to ground education in good theory has no farther to look than 500 B.C. Confucian China.  The tradition that ‘Abdu’l-Baha refers to above, for those that may not know, is from Muhammad, the Founder of Islam, who also certainly knew a thing or two about education.  In sixth-century A.D. Arabia, He took some backward, scattered, savage tribes and in less than two hundred years molded them into the greatest force for civilization that the world had seen to that time.  He did it by, in part, telling His people to get knowledge even from China.  That must have been quite a startling statement, but how else, save by His authority, would they overcome deep-seated prejudices regarding learning from other peoples.  Prejudice remains in force today.  A pernicious one goes something like this; what is most recent is most true.  Old people, old traditions, old history no longer have a place in either life or education, except as some sort of museum-piece which we can snobbishly ignore or about whom we can patronizingly exclaim: How quaint. 

            Let us not confuse knowledge, of which we have plenty, with wisdom, which is scarce in any age.  Yet, many of the essential categories within which we still do our thinking to gain our knowledge were laid down long ago.  Knowledge may come and go, one set of “facts” replacing another, but wisdom is perennial.  Noted twentieth-century philosopher Alfred Whitehead believed that most “western” philosophy was but a series of footnotes to Plato.  Baha’u’llah wrote that: “Although it is recognized that the contemporary men of learning are highly qualified in philosophy, arts and crafts, yet were anyone to observe with a discriminating eye he would readily comprehend that most of this knowledge hath been acquired from the sages of the past, for it is they who have laid the foundation of philosophy, reared its structure and reinforced its pillars.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah, p. 144)

            So, what does the wisdom of traditional China have to teach?   Plenty.  That which correctly guides the development of human nature is called, in Chinese, the Way.  What makes the Way possible is proper education, which Confucius called The Great Learning.  The Great Learning goes on when harmony between the universally human element at the bottom of one’s being (shu), and the corresponding action (chung) of learning and education is achieved.  The goal is the development of the full human (Jen) potential possible at any one time. Jen is variously translated as mankind, humanity, kindness, morality.  It is that which is intrinsic and original in the very nature of man.  It can also be translated as spirit.  The principle that there must be harmony between the human essence and its proper form of expression is restated in the Bahá’í view that truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtue.  How?

            It is a maxim of modern western education that children must be allowed to follow their natural talents, but this will only happen if, as Confucian thought says, education gives them the correct forms for these talents to find proper realization.  They must be true to their nature, and not lie to themselves, but neither can education lie to them.  In Confucian thought, an essential part of the education process, and of holding to the true and avoiding the false, is to have the correct names of things.  That means that the name given to each object should be the designation of the thing, as also shown in the story of Adam naming things in the Garden of Eden.  If an object or nature is correctly named, something essential should be revealed about it, something fundamental to the growth of that thing must be implied in the name, and lies cannot, therefore, be bred.  This was called the Rectification of Names (Cheng Ming)—words and names must correctly coordinate human potentials with actuality.  In this way Reality is formed, and reformed.  The thrust of spirit is always progress, and when there is progress new forms of realities come into mental view and these must be named and connected with previous reality so that continuity may be maintained and change be guided into progressive avenues.  All life on earth is a Book of Changes.  A new form means a reforming of the content and a new name given, as is declared in Revelations 3:12 of the Bible.

            In our world where lying is a veritable way of life, from heads of government down to the ordinary man in the street, with the proliferation of jargon, misspelled Twitter tweets, of euphemisms and misnomers, with all the double-speak and gobbledygook of news spin and political correctness, where words are used to conceal not reveal thought, we see that some modern-day rectification of names is required to do what was described by the poet T. S. Eliot in his poem Little Gidding:

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
     To purify the dialect of the tribe
     And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.

            Such ideas are crucial for education, because the attributes of the human essence and those external forms of knowledge which draw out and bring forth that bottomless reservoir of human potential must be in harmony.  When racism is masked in history textbooks or materialist assumptions rule in science, when art is often just shock tactics to grab attention, when sloppy and uncivil speech is tolerated in public and private in the name of honesty, the human essence finds expression in distorted and skewed forms and the result is prejudice, exploitation, discrimination and frustration.  For traditional Confucian teaching all outer forms lacking harmony with the inner essence are empty, meaningless and without value—much as current schooling is for many students.  But the inner essence always transcends the outer forms and is the source of their renewal.  The great law of form is only great when the inner essence is connected with its proper form.  For example, while the study of history is mostly of forms of violence against one another, Bahá’u’lláh comments both on the results of that study of history and on our true nature: “No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united. The evidences of discord and malice are apparent everywhere, though all were made for harmony and union.”  In another place He wrote: “Ye were created to show love one to another and not perversity and rancour.”  Much of our “educational” literature will need to be rewritten to achieve harmony between essence and form.