School
for the Young A brief introduction through a selection of quotes |
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| Gerald Heard . . . proposes that man's exit from his contemporary crisis will be by way of paidomorphic variation on the present theme. Man will cast a form, or forms, younger still than the one we are now, and thus escape constrictions that presently threaten us. (pp. 12-13) | ||
| Survival has favored the timid, the unfinished, the flexible, the unspecialized. And to remain unspecialized is to refuse the allure of a too complete success, the bait of absolute security, the temptation of unbending toughness, the rush to maturity. (p. 20) | ||
| We live today in that time when the censor-analyst in us takes everything apart; when, left to its own devices, it opens and finds meaningless every bond, every decency, every value, every restraint; it exploits childhood and resents youth and dreads old age, and drives the final wedge between mind and body. (p.29) | ||
| Look where
we stand. The elevation of the cortical, critical mind to supreme legislator,
judge and executor has brought us into the unprecedented power and affluent
means for living the life without meaning. The very capacity which gave
us the means, obliterated our perception of the ends. We’ve made our world one world, and somehow have lost the energy and inclination for developing bonds with the next door neighbors. One generation, careless of its own progeny and their future, would devour the reserves of a dying Earth, extracting a diminishing return in pleasure and security as the consumption increases. (p. 48) |
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| In education--it should be plain--it’s not the degrees you’ve won, but the who that you’ve become, that counts. (p. 122) | ||
| The result, the thing that actually happens to any of our projects or institutions, can often tell us, if we wish to know, what our assumptions really were. We do not over long periods of time violate what we assume to be the basic facts of life. (p. 59) | ||
It is precisely because of this power of our assumptions--our logical systems--that this Report has set out from the start to introduce theoretical grounds for new assumptions that may be more accurate and useful than the ones we have inherited. My basic premise in wishing to make this study is that we need nobler assumptions, that nobler assumptions are available, that these nobler assumptions do in fact have a better basis in research than the faulty ones under which we continue to operate, and that one assumption, good or poor, right or wrong, breeds a thousand techniques, while any number of techniques will remain powerless against one entrenched assumption. (pp. 60-61) |
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| Man as we have educated him with our . . . misguided methods, has it in him to be another short-termer on this planet. As the Universe reckons time, he could be gone in but a moment more. . . . But man has in him the opposite potentials as well. . . . We are called upon to devise what might be called a nobler education, . . . to make Creation’s business our business--to stay young longer, to learn longer, to make the living of a life that is more conscious the object of our life-long education. (pp. 222-223) | ||