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FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM EFF 

Including the entire INTRODUCTION and then short excerpts from the first section titled FUNDAMENTALS consisting of 7 chapters.

Chapter 1   The nature of a child

Chapter 2    A child’s consciousness

Chapter 3    How do we know?

Chapter 4    The reality of values

Chapter 5    The ethic of conscious love

Chapter 6    Freedom

Chapter 7    Individuality

INTRODUCTION

As we stand at the beginning of the third millennium, there is a growing realization world-wide that our education systems are failing. They are falling short in their task of educating children as they should be educated for the time in which we live. But our systems of education are merely a reflection of our society and the materialism that pervades it at every level. To change our education systems to any significant degree, therefore, we need to look to fundamentally changing our society and our whole system of values. And that means changing ourselves. There is no other way but to initiate monumental changes at all levels, both societal and personal, if we are to create a world that can educate our children humanly and that is fit for all of us to live in.

This book puts forward an approach to education that is human-centred, that gives expression to the needs and aspirations of human beings: our children and everyone who is involved in teaching them.

But who are these people who teach our children? Firstly, their parents – parents are the first and most powerful educators that children ever have. Secondly, their teachers. Thirdly all the children and adults they know. And fourthly, all of the people in our society, because it is we, all of us, who determine the values our society promulgates and which are inevitably transmitted to our children. We can’t blame anybody else but ourselves for the failings of our education systems – there is nobody else to blame.

Inevitably, therefore, this book in subversive. It looks to a future society which has progressed beyond materialism and it aims to contribute towards that society by putting forward an approach to education which incorporates values and practices which give strength and power to the real nature of the human being.

This approach stands in contrast to the varieties of traditional and so-called progressive education, as well as to the massive structures which have been our society's response to the demands placed upon it to educate masses of children and young people up to the age of eighteen or so.

In all these varieties of education, human needs of one form or another are insufficiently fulfilled. Both children and teachers tend to become lost and mutually alienated as they grapple with schools and systems that have become altogether too vast. All too many of them, pupils and teachers alike, lose their way in this vast societal machine and begin to feel themselves to be little more than cogs in a seemingly endless array of grinding wheels.

Traditional education is too conformist. The need for the individual to be himself or herself, to become himself or herself, is essentially denied, and teachers and pupils all too often keep their distance from each other in accordance with a set of unspoken and unconsciously enforced rules.

Progressive education – so-called – was the pendulum swung: the excessive reaction to the tight conformism of traditionalists. But in this form of education children are denied their need for discipline, and their teachers, aware of the necessity of good relationships with their pupils, try to buy it with indulgence.

It might be thought that both traditional and so-called progressive education are things of the past, but this is not so. Many of the faults of present day schools come from elements engrained in them which embody the traditionalist or progressive errors, and Korowal in some of its practices has been no exception.

The approach to education of this book stands in contrast to these earlier forms. It provides a philosophical, psychological and sociological framework both for the development of new methods and structures, and for incorporating others which are congruent with it from existing systems. A large part of this book provides examples of this process of development and selection in accordance with human criteria.

It does not matter from where a particular method or structural element derives or from what period of history, it does not matter whether it has originated directly from the approach of this book or whether it is taken from an educational philosophy that appears antithetical to it. All that matters is the fundamental humanness of the element itself and the possibility of applying it humanly.

The final touch-stone for everything is humanness. Every element in the form of education which this book represents must be weighed and considered in the light of the question, ‘Does this contribute to the humanness of the situation, or is it dehumanizing in some way?’

It is important to realize that this question can only be asked in the light of experience – everything needs to be tried out in practice. It is not sufficient to use theoretical or a priori criteria. It must be realized, too, that context is all important. What may be dehumanizing in one context or when applied by one teacher, may be entirely human in a different context or at the hands of a different person.

Education for Freedom, although it outlines the framework for a human approach to education, does not attempt to define what ‘human’ is. Rather the whole book represents an attempt to work towards an understanding of the reality that being human represents.

The same thing applies in practice in a school based on the approach of this book. Such a school is one which works towards a practical understanding of what it is to be human in the context of educating children. For this reason a school of this sort can never be finished, but needs to be continually changing and evolving in the light of experience and a deepening understanding of its vision.

The problem of definition arises because we cannot understand what ‘human’ means at any degree of depth without gaining self-knowledge. Because I am human, I can only really understand what ‘human’ means to the extent that I can understand myself. This is the reason that, again and again, the theme of self-knowledge and self-development recurs throughout Education for Freedom. This theme was not part of the original plan of the book; it simply arose, time after time, during the writing of particular chapters, because what was being discussed could not be adequately dealt with without it.

In practice, however, this question is a vexed one. The encounter with oneself which is entailed in self-knowledge can be a painful and unnerving experience. Moreover, it is a requirement which cannot be imposed as one of the conditions of working as a teacher in a particular school. The conscious work of developing oneself and gaining self-knowledge is something that can only be entered upon in complete freedom. In this respect also therefore, Education for Freedom can only indicate a direction in which to proceed; it cannot delineate a finished system.

It follows, of course, that nothing put forward in this book is put forward dogmatically. We are all participants in the human condition, we are all struggling to understand ourselves and our significance in the world, we are all in the process of learning what it is to be human. A school which endeavours to work as humanly as possible is merely a school which is aware of this consciously and which consciously tries to increase the humanness of its structures and methods.

Because the purpose of Education for Freedom is to indicate the general parameters and the direction for developing a form of education which grows and evolves humanly, there are some aspects of it which are not covered in sufficient depth to fully substantiate their validity. The first section of the book outlines a set of philosophical, psychological and spiritual considerations which provide a framework for the more practical considerations dealt with in the following sections. To fully substantiate these basic considerations would require not just one book but many. All that it has been possible to do in a single book on education has been to indicate ways in which the reader can, if he or she wishes, think about what has been discussed on the basis of his or her own experience and thereby possibly come to a realization of its truth. Consequently, in this first section I have placed a great deal of reliance upon the techniques of intuition and what I have called feeling-knowledge to substantiate the material. I do, however, consider the use of these techniques to be just as valid in their own right as the more traditional methods of rational discourse and argument.

The last section of the book has no pretensions of completeness. It is intended merely as the barest outline of some of the factors which need to be taken into consideration in the preparation of a curriculum. It is intended to do no more than point the way for future work. The preparation of a detailed curriculum is something which requires much time and effort on the part of teachers working in conjunction with curriculum designers. It is a task which can never be finished, but will necessarily be continually ongoing in the evolution of any education that is truly centred in the human being.

It should also be pointed out before beginning this book that whatever being human entails, it does not mean being perpetually nice or gentle, but rather it embraces the entire spectrum of human possibilities. An education based upon human relationships will naturally attract idealistic people who seek better ways of relating to children. This book, however, is not based just upon ideals but also upon the objective perception of reality, including those aspects of it which are commonly referred to as spiritual or ideal. Better ways of relating to children are indeed what this book is about, and these will be found by people who are prepared to approach children with love, kindness and gentleness, but also with strength and even at times severity when this proves necessary. To suppose otherwise is to live, not in reality, but in the rose-coloured delusion that children are wonderful little angels. They are, of course, but only sometimes.

All varieties of education systems have their own validity and justification for existence. All contribute in one way or another to the progress of humanity, and all possess some elements which satisfy the requirements of humanness. Consequently there are elements of the approach described in this book which are derived from the experience of the whole educational spectrum, including the traditionalists and the progressives. Grateful acknowledgment is particularly made to the Steiner Schools, which possess a combination of human concern for their pupils and cultural excellence that is unique. They have provided one of the sources of inspiration and some of the material for this book.

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1

THE NATURE OF A CHILD

What is a child?

This is not an easy question, nor is it a trivial one. If we are going to educate children we have to consider it seriously, and we must be careful how we answer it. Though it might not appear so on the surface, its answer is far from obvious. But upon that answer a great deal depends.

The understanding that a culture has of the nature of a child determines the whole character and form of its education systems. Over the course of history, many answers have been given to this question of the nature of childhood, and each of them has influenced the form of education derived from it.

The reality and importance of the fact that a child is completely a person and an individual can only be properly grasped and understood by someone who enters deeply into the child's world, someone who, while remaining an adult, can also in a certain way become a child and see the world through a child's eyes. This requires not just an intellectual understanding, but an understanding that is also of the feelings, an understanding which necessitates an intuitive crossing of the barrier which separates one person from another. It takes time, trouble and effort to learn to know another person in this way; it cannot be done easily. But if the time, trouble and effort are taken, then the answer to the question of the nature of the child becomes apparent, and its results and implications are surprising.

Frederick Leboyer learned to enter the world of childhood in this intuitive way. The children he observed were very young indeed – they were just in the process of being born. Leboyer was a French obstetrician whose methods influenced the way children are brought into the world. In his book Birth Without Violence he describes his methods and their rationale.¹ The questions he asks and the answers he gives are very simple – deceptively so – yet they can really only be grasped properly by someone who is prepared to open his or her senses fully and see a child as the child really is, without being prejudiced by theory or confused by dogma.

Leboyer tells us how we must communicate:

It is through our hands that we speak to the child …

Touch is the first language …

It is skin speaking to skin …

The newborn baby's skin has an intelligence, a sensitivity that we cannot conceive of …

The child knows if the hands are loving. Or if they are careless. Or worse, if they are rejecting.

In attentive and loving hands, a child abandons itself, opens out.

In rigid and hostile hands, a child retreats into itself, blocks out the world.

Only a little patience and humility. A little silence. Unobtrusive but real attention …Unselfconsciousness.

And love.

Without love, the delivery room can be perfect – lighted only as strongly as necessary, the walls soundproofed, the bath temperature at just the right degree – and still the child will scream.

If there's still some trace of nervousness, some ill-humour or impatience, some suppressed anger, the baby will sense it.

Its judgement is frighteningly sure.

The baby knows everything. Feels everything.

The baby sees right into our hearts, knows the colour of our thoughts.

All without language.

The understanding, however, that a child is fully a human being, needs to be grasped deeply by every teacher involved in a school. It needs to work deeply into a teacher's feelings so that he or she speaks to children and responds to them in a completely human way. It needs to work deeply into everything that is done in a school: into the school's structures and its methods, as well as into the curriculum itself.

Unless this understanding of the humanness of the child does work through a school so that it makes a profound difference to the quality of feelings that are present as well as to the school's methods, then any claims of the school to acknowledge the child as a person are merely lip-service and of little value.

Frederick Leboyer was not only an obstetrician, but also a teacher. In the crucial minutes of birth he taught children something that will remain with them and be a source of strength all their lives. He taught them that the world is a good place, that there are people in it who can see and understand, who can care and love. This lesson was not taught with spoken words, but as a primal experience which will remain deep in the child's unconscious and even be imprinted upon his or her body. By recognizing and acknowledging it, he also taught them, reassured them, that they are indeed persons and individuals. When they grow to be adults it is very likely that they will take any theories which tell them otherwise with a grain of salt.

To know, through empathetic perception, that a child is a person and an individual is to perceive the spiritual nature of the child and, through that, to perceive the spiritual nature of the whole of humanity.

If we enter deeply into the events of the beginning and the end of life – into birth and death – with our senses open in the way of Leboyer, we can begin to see that we are far from being mere biological mechanisms. We can begin to understand that we are beings of body, soul and spirit whose reality extends beyond the boundaries of our present lives.

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2

A CHILD'S CONSCIOUSNESS

When we make the discovery that we are changing, evolving inwardly in our consciousness, we can surmise that this process has been going on for a long time, presumably for as long as human beings have been alive on Earth.

The challenge to modern educators is to bring to the school situation the highly developed form of objective consciousness which Leboyer used with children being born. We need to bring the same new powers of observation to our children that Leboyer brought to his, so that we can gain the knowledge we need to develop new techniques and methods to form and shape the school situation in a new way and so enable us to step beyond the impasse in which modern education finds itself.

If there is one thing we can be sure about, it is that this will not be an easy task. It will be much more difficult than what Leboyer did. He was working in a situation that was very intense and relatively clear-cut, and with normally only one child at a time. Schools involve many children with a wide range of ages, and a situation which is much more amorphous and complex. We can expect that the development of an educational science and method based upon an evolved objective consciousness will take a great deal of time and the devoted attention of many people. It is the purpose of this book to provide a framework for the development of such an educational science and method.

If we learn to bring our own newly evolving powers of perception and empathy to the children in our care, we have, as Leboyer did, the possibility of developing the educational techniques we need. If we learn to enter the child's consciousness at his various stages of development, then we can find out whether the things we are trying to teach him at a particular stage and the ways we are trying to teach them really are appropriate. And if they are not, we can change and modify, learn and adapt, until we come to find out what is appropriate – and then I think we will be surprised.

Because if we find the right things to do, then the whole way in which children – and teachers – experience the school situation will change.

It does not take much practice at entering the consciousness of a young child, provided his earlier educational experiences have not already destroyed something in him, to discover several things. To begin with, the world, to a child's consciousness, is wonderfully fresh and new, and wonderfully, incredibly exciting. This freshness and excitement is something our jaded adult senses have normally all but forgotten.

What is more, the young child, before he enters school at any rate, has an incredible lust to learn. It is this desire that drives him upright and teaches him to walk and talk, and urges him to ask the incessant questions that can drive adults to distraction.

But how long do these aspects of the child's consciousness survive in the normal educational environment? Maybe a year or two – at most. But if we do everything right, these gifts of childhood – the wonderful exciting freshness of everything and the lust for learning – should last right through into adolescence and beyond.

When the attempt is made to force the young child prematurely into rationality, then either he becomes alienated from learning, or his developing sentient consciousness is stifled, or both. Whichever happens, the freshness and joy in the newness of things which is a basic characteristic of childhood sentience is lost, and the natural joy and desire to learn is eliminated or diverted to other and perhaps far less socially acceptable channels.

To attempt to make a child into an adult too soon is to cripple the forces of childhood, to destroy the wellsprings of spontaneity, and to engender possible unbalance and impoverishment in adult life. There is time enough to be an adult when a child grows to adulthood – when he is a child he should be left his childhood intact.

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3

HOW DO WE KNOW?

If we are going to attempt to develop an educational science and techniques based on an evolved objective consciousness, we must begin to understand as much as possible about how adults and children gain knowledge, particularly where such new faculties of perception as we have referred to in the last two chapters are concerned.

First and most obviously of all, knowledge can be gained in a conscious intellectual way – the way most theories and practices of education are concerned with. Intellectual knowledge embraces virtually the whole of the ordinary school curriculum, from the basics of reading, writing and number to the sciences and humanities in the fields of higher learning. Intellectual knowledge is mediated by conscious thinking, and it is where most educational accounts of learning begin and end. It is of course vital that schools teach intellectual knowledge and teach it well – the teaching of intellectual knowledge is one of the important reasons for the existence of schools.

However, there is much more to a human being's inner faculties than intellectual knowledge and the conscious thinking process that goes with it. To begin with there are the unconscious mental processes that have been discussed by Freud and the analytical psychologists. These obey rules of their own which are very different from the rules of rational thought, and even from the rules involved in the form of thinking which appears in sentient consciousness.

Unconscious mental processes and unconscious learning cannot be avoided; they are going on all the time, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. If we are teaching something consciously to children, like arithmetic, then we are at the same time teaching something unconsciously as well. Normally we do not pay any attention to this unconscious lesson, and have no idea at all of what it is. But if we do begin to pay attention to it, we may find that it is often even more important than the things we are trying to teach consciously.

If we are to develop new educational techniques that are really related to the child's consciousness, then we must stop paying attention to just the intellectual content of what we teach, and start to become conscious of the educational framework of our lessons and our schools, and the unconscious effects they have on children. Instead of giving unconscious lessons that we are unaware of, we must become conscious of them and learn to use them so that we can start to give the child what he needs unconsciously as well as what he needs consciously. If unconscious lessons as well as conscious ones that are appropriate to the child's particular stage of development are taught, there will be much less likelihood of causing the problems of alienation which occur so frequently in schools.

There are other dimensions to human knowledge as well as that of consciousness and unconsciousness. Inner mental processes include feeling and volition, or will, and each of these conveys a form of knowledge that is of comparable importance to the knowledge mediated by thinking.

Will-knowledge is something we make use of extensively, but when we are aware of it we are inclined to equate it with thinking-knowledge without realizing just how different it is.

Will-knowledge is the basis for much more of the educational process than we are usually aware of. It is what is involved, for example, in both learning to read and learning to write. Because we learned to write when we were children, we have forgotten just what was involved. When a child first begins to write he has to shape every single letter carefully, precisely and consciously and put each letter carefully together with others to make simple words.

Eventually, with the practice of years, we learn to write as adults, and then our fingers even know how to spell. With the exception of unusual words, we don't have to think consciously how to spell, we just think the word and our fingers write it, just as they do with typing.

Talking, that quintessentially human activity, is also an aspect of will-knowledge. The precise shape and movement of tongue, larynx and lips required to form the sounds of speech depend on the finely coordinated unconscious control of musculature that is the hallmark of will-knowledge. If we pay attention to what happens when we talk, we find that we don't think words, we think meanings, and our vocal apparatus speaks the words to convey our meanings without, normally, our conscious intervention being necessary.

When the implications of the fact that will-knowledge is the fundamental basis of so many essentially human activities are fully grasped, we can begin to see how it is perhaps even more important for civilized human existence than the conscious thinking-knowledge with which our schools are predominantly concerned.

Will-knowledge is such an important aspect of education that its conscious application must have a central place in the development of any school curriculum which is really concerned with the education of the child as a complete human being.

Consequently, in order to develop new educational techniques that reach the child's unconscious as well as his conscious mind, we must begin to be aware of the atmospheres that are generated in the school situation. We must start to become aware of the atmosphere that comes from the children and how it changes, and we must also start to become aware of the atmospheres we create ourselves, so we can begin to shape them consciously and use them as the powerful educational tools that they have the potential to be.

Everything we do creates its own atmosphere, whether we like it or not. The way we speak, the way we stand, the way we move. How the classroom is arranged and decorated, whether we use colour on the chalkboard or not, the sort of lighting used – all affect the ambience. Every lesson and how it is taught creates its own ambience in the classroom. The ambience of a mathematics lesson is intrinsically different from the ambience of a music lesson. And certainly the ambience of a lesson given over television or through a computer is quite different from the ambience of a lesson taught by a living teacher.

We can learn to perceive these atmospheres not only through our own direct, evolving perceptions, but also by watching the children we are teaching. Their reactions provide a reliable barometer to the atmospheres that form in the classroom, and if we can empathize with their feelings, something which we must learn to do if we are to teach in the new way we are concerned with, then we can use them as a kind of instrument to see just what sort of atmosphere is present.

It is beginning to be realized, too, that intuition is the way almost all scientific and mathematical discoveries are made. Such discoveries must be confirmed later by experimental or logical proof, but their initial discovery is frequently intuitive. This is why so-called ‘inductive’ logic has never been able to be adequately formalized. Many scientists and mathematicians have observed for themselves that intuition is the way in which they make their discoveries, but there can, I think, be no better authority than Albert Einstein:

The supreme task …is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws: only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them

Children do not appear to be able to use intuition consciously any more than they can feeling-knowledge. But unconsciously they can use both, even from the very first. As Leboyer said:

The baby knows everything. Feels everything.
The baby sees right into our hearts, knows the colour of our thoughts …
Its judgement is frighteningly sure.

Unconsciously there is nothing we can conceal from children, or for that matter, from each other. Unconsciously we do know everything that happens, and we react and respond to it unconsciously just as children do.

The important role that sleep plays in the learning process must also be appreciated and applied in the school situation. It is well known that in learning motor-skills – will-knowledge – the greatest improvement comes between practice sessions, and if we observe this phenomenon carefully, we will find that intervening sleep appears to be the most important factor. Sleep plays a vital role in the acquisition of will-knowledge. During sleep, conscious learning is thrust down to the unconscious levels of will-knowledge, where it becomes automatic and much more efficient.

Consequently, we must always allow the lessons we teach our children to be consolidated by sleep – it may well be that several nights' sleep is necessary to complete the process, even at an elementary level. It is quite wrong to expect anything of value to be immediately retained and understood as soon as it is taught. Often a child who cannot grasp something to begin with will be able to understand it when he has slept on it for a few nights. More difficult things may need even longer. Something that is not grasped when it is taught initially may be readily understood if it is returned to a few months later.

Failure to allow for this factor can lead to serious errors in curriculum design.

Modern developed objective consciousness and new faculties such as empathetic perception which have evolved within it, provide a powerful armory of methods for gaining knowledge which can be at the conscious disposal of the educator. What was, in the past, available only unconsciously can, because of the evolution of consciousness, be consciously used in education to provide for the real – conscious and unconscious – needs of children.

Intuition, thinking, feeling-knowledge, will-knowledge and sleep-elaboration can all be deliberately used in framing a more developed educational technology – one with the possibility of doing for the education of children what Leboyer has done for children newborn.

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4

THE REALITY OF VALUES

One of the most dangerous and destructive doctrines of our supposedly enlightened times is the idea that values are relative – that they are just a matter of individual taste. On the basis of this view there is nothing that is really good and nothing that is really bad, nothing that is truly beautiful and nothing that is really ugly. Things just appear to be one way or the other depending on how you look at them, or on the sort of training you happened to get when you were a child.

If an educational science based on developed objective consciousness is to emerge, then the question of values must be dealt with. This question is a crucial one for all of the social sciences and our society as a whole, not just education.

To begin with, the view that values are relative appears plausible because we live in a time when values are being called into question and we can see for ourselves how rapidly they can change. Such things as divorce, abortion and homosexuality, all of which were regarded as wicked and shameful earlier in the twentieth century, have progressively become socially acceptable. We can assume that this process of change will continue in ways that are difficult to foresee at the present time.

We can perceive values, just as much as we can perceive physical objects. We can, if we use our own perceptions, tell that some things are good and that others are bad, that some things are of high quality and others low. And we can do this for ourselves, with our own direct perceptions, without depending on authority, or on any system of moral or aesthetic rules.

When we look at things on a large scale we can immediately see that good and evil are realities. We see it by a process of direct perception: the intuition we spoke about in the last chapter. We appear, moreover, to have evolved to the point where we can begin to depend upon it. Indeed, we must. Because good and evil are realities, and because the traditional guides are no longer enough, we have no alternative but to fall back upon our own resources.

Because quality – excellence – is real and fundamental to everything we do as human beings, we must as educators begin, to teach it. Particularly as children, unlike adults, cannot perceive it for themselves – it is something they have to learn, like everything else. As teachers we are not just concerned with reading, writing and arithmetic or history or natural science or whatever. We are, we must be, concerned to teach quality, not merely as well as other things, but above and within everything else.

To do this we must bring quality into everything we do, into every lesson we teach. This doesn't mean that we should be forever preaching about quality – that would be the last way to go about it. Instead, quality must become, in a really human-centred education, the main subject in the hidden curriculum: the one we teach at unconscious levels.

The fundamental element in both these aspects of teaching quality is care. If we really start to care for what we do and the children we teach, then quality will begin to appear of itself. Care is one of the variations or metamorphoses of love. If we care for our work we grow to love it, just as we can grow to love any human being or anything at all if we start to care for it

In the final analysis, there is one thing and one thing only that we have to teach our children: we must teach them to care. Everything else we do, every single aspect of every subject that we teach, must be directed to this purpose. If only we get this right, everything else will follow. It is not possible to teach care in the abstract – only in the reality of the nuts and bolts, of the detail of things.

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5

THE ETHIC OF CONSCIOUS LOVE

If we begin to care for something we will begin to love it – the two, care and love go hand in hand. And if we begin to care we will also find that we are beginning to work morally, beginning to work with love. And, equally, if in some situation we find ourselves not caring, we will notice, if we pay attention to it with developed objective consciousness, that there is something wrong, that what we are doing is not as good as it should be; that it lacks love.

Considerations such as these lead to some of the most important tenets of human-centred philosophy. The foremost of these is that morality and love are essentially the same thing. Something is moral to the extent that it embodies love, immoral to the extent that it does not.

There is, however, a great deal of complexity that lies behind this seemingly simple statement. Love is not something simple; it is extremely complex and works on many levels. On the bodily level there is sexual love and love expressed through physical contact, on the level of the psyche or soul there is emotional love – the love between friends, between couples, between parents and children or even between animals, and on a higher level again there is a form of love which people are now beginning to become aware of, which goes under a variety of names. Unconditional love, spiritual love, transpersonal love, transcendental love are a few of them. This form of love is characterized by absolute devotion to the welfare of the other, whoever or whatever the other may be: a human being, humanity as a whole, a rain forest, or the Earth itself.

6

FREEDOM

Like care and quality, responsibility and freedom are also internal and external aspects of the same thing.

To attempt to impose adult freedoms on young children is to fail completely to see that a child's consciousness is different from an adult's. It is to attempt to put an adult's head on a child's shoulders and force him to be grown up too soon. Like forced intellectualization, to impose freedoms he is not ready for upon a child is to deprive him of something of his childhood as well as of the vital lesson that freedom means responsibility.

An education which is really for freedom, one which educates children to become free adults, must consciously possess, as part of its hidden curriculum, a full comprehension of the fact that freedom and responsibility are two faces of the one coin.

This means, of course, that the appropriate freedoms must be given to children progressively throughout their entire education, as soon as it can be seen that they are capable of taking the appropriate responsibility, but never before.

Understanding when particular freedoms should be given comes back once again to the perceptions of parents and teachers themselves. Only educators (and remember parents are the most important educators of children) who are actually educating children can learn to be aware of what freedoms can be given to a particular child at particular levels of his or her development, and whether that child is capable of carrying the corresponding responsibilities.

A conscious education for freedom must go beyond the errors commonly associated with freedom and the child. It must depend, as we have already seen so often in this book, on the perceptions of educators who are working with developed objective consciousness and who are in continual contact with children and able to watch them through the developmental stages of their unfolding consciousness. It must give to the child throughout his or her development every freedom he or she can take responsibility for, but it must withhold freedoms for which the responsibility is too great a burden.

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7

INDIVIDUALITY

Individuality implies uniqueness, and this uniqueness manifests in many ways, every one of which has far-reaching implications for education. Individuality itself comprises the ultimate uniqueness of the person's own I – the inner core of the human being which can say ‘I’ only of itself and not of any other person. I in my own inner core – my I-hood or ego – experience myself as myself: a person unique and different from every other man or woman or child on Earth.

The uniqueness of the individual's experience applies to children as well as adults. A class of children will not all gain the same experience from a particular lesson, for example. Each of them will filter the lesson through their own level of consciousness and competence, and view it from the background of their own unique set of life-experiences. Above all, each of them will experience it in relation to his or her own unique ego or I.

Associated with each individual is a unique set of propensities or potentials which he or she alone possesses. A newborn baby possesses a large set of propensities which at birth are still unrealized. The baby, if it is biologically normal, has the propensity to learn to walk, to talk, to run, to sing, to play music, to read, to become sexually mature and become in turn the mother or father of children. In addition the child will have the propensity to do certain sorts of work but not others, to excel or not at certain sorts of sport, to relate to people, society, religions, ideologies, and so on in certain sorts of ways rather than others.

In a newborn baby none of these propensities has been realized or actualized. The actualization of propensities requires the child to be given the opportunity of having certain sorts of experiences. Providing these experiences is what education is about. If the appropriate experiences are not given to the child, a particular propensity will not be actualized. A child brought up by people who never spoke in his presence would never learn to talk. It is the same with almost every human propensity: it needs the appropriate educational experiences to become actualized.

Education – in school or out of it – is the process by which potentials are realized and propensities actualized. Only an education which recognizes and values the unique individuality of every single child can enable the potentials which that child possesses to be properly realized and expressed.

It is one of the basic tenets of human-centred philosophy that it places ultimate value upon every individual person – child and adult. There can be nothing of greater value in the human world than an individual human being.

Any educational practice which attempts to treat all children in the same way, or which attempts either at conscious or unconscious levels to force all children into the same mould or produce a standard educational product, does violence to the concept of the value of the individual. Such educational practices, for example, as wearing a school uniform speaks, on the level of the hidden curriculum, the message that all children are, or should be, the same. The expectation that all children should learn to read by the same age, or be able to do anything at the same time has exactly the same effect.

Recognizing that each child possesses a unique set of propensities implies that individual differences between children need to be taken fully into consideration. All children do not learn at the same rate, nor should they be expected to do so. Nor should children who naturally learn more slowly than others be penalized or made to feel inferior. Often such children, if they are given the time they need, gain a greater depth of understanding than children who learn more quickly and hence, possibly, more superficially. Equally, children who can progress faster and further need to be given the opportunity to do so, bearing in mind the appropriate cautions about pushing children too quickly and attempting to force them prematurely into adult forms of consciousness.

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SOURCES AND COMMENTS

1 Frederick Leboyer Birth Without Violence Wildwood House, 1975.

2 This quotation from Einstein is reported by Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance New York: William Morrow, 1974.

The concept of the evolution of consciousness is presently fairly well established among adherents of New Age views. It has been associated with a belief in the emergence of a new ‘Aquarian’ consciousness and the threshold of a new ‘Aquarian Age’. Theodore Roszak in the Unfinished Animal London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1976, gives a detailed account of the concepts of the evolution of consciousness which are current at the ‘Aquarian Frontier’. It is to Rudolf Steiner, however, that I am indebted for pointing out the historical dimension of the evolution of consciousness. See, for example, Rudolf Steiner Occult Science London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1963. Steiner's account of the historical evolution of consciousness is similar to the one which I give in this chapter. The terms which he uses to describe the different stages of consciousness: sentient soul, mind soul, and consciousness soul, appear to correspond to my terms sentient consciousness, rational consciousness, and objective consciousness. The correspondence is probably not complete however. In particular it is difficult to tell whether what Steiner refers to as consciousness soul and what I refer to as developed objective consciousness are the same thing. The problem is that Steiner's descriptions of consciousness soul in particular are far from clear and are couched in mystical language. The approach that Steiner uses in elucidating these stages of consciousness is also different from the approach which I use. Steiner's approach is that of occult esoteric mysticism, whereas I believe that it is possible for a developed objective consciousness actually to perceive the evolution of the different stages of consciousness within the historical process.

Detailed accounts of the magical qualities of children's thinking are contained in Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1976, and in the works of Jean Piaget. Bettelheim and Piaget use entirely different approaches to this phenomenon – Bettelheim the standpoint of Freudian psychoanalysis and his experience in working with disturbed children, and Piaget the standpoint of the experimental psychologist. The congruence of Bettelheim's and Piaget's findings and their relationship to the thinking of primitive animistic cultures provides convincing confirmation both of the evolution of consciousness and of the ways in which the consciousness of children in our society differs from that of adults.

Freedom House estimates that only forty one percent of the world's population lives in countries which have both political and civil freedom. Countries which are considered to be free are predominantly Western European or of Western European origin or settlement. Freedom in the World 2001 – 2002: The Democracy Gap New York: Freedom House, 2001.

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