Three Kinds of Education-Part I

Briefly, there were many universal cycles preceding this one in which we are living. They were consummated, completed and their traces obliterated. The divine and creative purpose in them was the evolution of spiritual man, just as it is in this cycle. The circle of existence is the same circle; it returns. The tree of life has ever borne the same heavenly fruit.

(Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 220)

            Northrop Frye reminds us that: “The theory of education, like other theories, should be based on the whole of its practice.” (On Education:29)  What is the whole of the practice of education?   It has grown in complexity over the centuries as more human powers have become manifest.  At the same time it has become simpler.  Let’s see how.

            ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote that: “Education is of three kinds: material, human and spiritual. Material education is concerned with the progress and development of the body, through gaining its sustenance, its material comfort and ease. This education is common to animals and man.

            Human education signifies civilization and progress -- that is to say, government, administration, charitable works, trades, arts and handicrafts, sciences, great inventions and discoveries and elaborate institutions, which are the activities essential to man as distinguished from the animal.

            Divine education is that of the Kingdom of God: it consists in acquiring divine perfections, and this is true education; for in this state man becomes the focus of divine blessings, the manifestation of the words, 'Let Us make man in Our image, and after Our likeness.'  This is the goal of the world of humanity." (Some Answered Questions:8)

            Divine education may be “true education”, but a theory of complete education today must include the material, human and divine as aspects of the totality.  Historically, these are enlarging contexts of understanding, with the divine being inclusive of the other two.  Yet, whatever its form and content, education has always been, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha mentions, about “the evolution of spiritual man” toward the goal of divine education.  It is similar to the growth of the fetus in the womb. Namely, that whatever its appearance at any particular stage, the purpose of the fetus is to pass through all conditions until it arrives at the human form.

            Today, at human maturity, educating the spiritual powers moves to the forefront of education, while the mental powers, which were the primary focus of education for past millennia, recede in importance.  I freely admit that in many countries secular, intellectual education does a very adequate job in the first two kinds of education, but in regards to divine education what happens?  ‘Abdu’l-Baha identifies the problem: “For the teachers of this world make use of human education to develop the powers, whether spiritual or material, of humankind…” (Compilation of Baha’i Education p.26 #68.)        

            Human education teaches about building a human environment out of Nature: about civilization—culture, art and science, law and government—those forms of rational thought and action which when taken together compose what Bahá’u’lláh calls “human learning.”  Human education develops the intellect, certainly one of our innate endowments.  But the intellect, unless aided by the spiritual only apprehends general ideas and things intelligible and perceptible.  Beginning with Adam naming things in the Garden, an eponymous “event” propelling humanity out of material education into human education, intellectual education has, over the past six millennia, passed through many stages, some of these I have discussed, notably mythical, language and numbers.  But, Abdu'l-Baha, notes: “The outcome of this intellectual endowment is science, which is especially characteristic of man.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 29)

            To use human education and its forms of mental and scientific training to instruct students in spiritual realities, though, is analogous to using only the physical senses to educate and inform about intellectual ones; that is, in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s terminology, using material education and its sensory modalities of knowing to develop the intellectual powers of abstract and instrumental reasoning.  This can only ever be partially successful, because, though the mind is connected with the senses, intellectual understanding is of another order, larger and more penetrating, than sensory knowing.  The mind penetrates behind the flux of appearances apprehended by the senses to grasp their inner relations.  Further, there can be no proof of the existence of intellectual or abstract objects using only sense data, only intimations of the existence of these invisible forms.  The proof of intellectual objects is by reasoning to logical conclusions.  When abstract realities are imprisoned within sensory impressions this distorts intellectual understanding, like using a two-dimensional map to comprehend the three-dimensional earth. 

            Finally, intellectual truth often overthrows what is obvious to the senses.  For example, to the naked eye the sun moves and the earth is stationary.  The intellect knows better–though it took several hundred years to figure out and prove the correct relation.  The senses, then, are, despite the influence of the theories of John Locke, signs and powers of the mind, not its essence and containing forms.
            Likewise, spiritual knowledge is another kind of knowledge than is intellectual knowledge and intellectual means of knowing can never prove the existence of spiritual realities, only mental ones.  Spiritual knowledge is knowledge of what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá calls “things-in-themselves”–and spiritual understanding is another order of knowing, though we use the intellectual powers to convey and help grasp it.  The mental powers are instruments and powers of spirit, branches of knowing, not the Root.  As the senses point to mind, so the mental powers point beyond themselves to something greater. 

                When we take the rational intellect to be the greatest instrument for knowing, and logical cognition as the highest form of knowing, then human learning becomes a veil to spiritual realities, closing the intelligence off from yet higher forms of knowing, even, when the veil becomes too dense and enshrouding, denying their existence.  Thus Bahá’u’lláh warns: “Beware lest human learning debar thee from Him Who is the Supreme Object of all knowledge, or lest the world deter thee from the One who created it and set it upon its course.  Tear asunder the veils of human learning lest they hinder thee from Him Who is My Name, the Self-Subsisting.” (Summons of the Lord of Hosts: 56.)  In another place He wrote: “Myriads of holy verses have descended from the heaven of might and grace, yet no one hath turned thereunto, nor ceased to cling to those words of men, not one letter of which they that have spoken them comprehend. For this reason the people have doubted incontestable truths, such as these, and caused themselves to be deprived of the Ridván of divine knowledge, and the eternal meads of celestial wisdom." (Kitáb-i-Íqán: 257)
                I will take up this discussion in the next post.