Education and the Aim of human life

II

The child has interest for an object when by that object he is capable of satisfying one of his needs. Hence the importance of knowing the needs of a child.

As a growing being, the child has certain needs, quite a number of them, of various kinds - physical, affective, psychological, intellectual - and even some so deeply rooted and so important that they may be called "psychic needs", needs pertaining to the soul in evolution.

If the parents and teachers know these needs and give them consideration and satisfaction, the child grows normally and is naturally happy. If they are ignored, two kinds of results may ensue. Some of these neglected needs may manage to get satisfaction in an indirect way and produce deviations or distortions in the child's character; the child may become unstable, irritable, restless, mischievous. The neglect of the other needs, particularly important. result in a more positive and definite harm: the growth is thwarted, stunted or crippled. Happiness may therefore be taken as a sign that the essential needs of a child are met. Conversely, happiness may be said to be the first need of a child because, of course, its presence shows that no important need is neglected, but also, more positively, because happiness is essentially a suffusion of a psychic influence from within, permeating the emotional being and through it the outer personality.

Happiness does not consist in laughing, shouting, clapping hands and running here and there. Happiness is first of all relaxation, a liberation from tension of all sorts, an expansion of the being in silence and peace. Then comes a mute joy, a smile, the effulgence of a sweet presence within, a look friendliness towards the world.

Such needs as condition the uncovering or revelation of the soul within may rightly be called psychic needs. They are

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manifestations of the soul's essential tendency towards beauty, nobility, truth, freedom, love and respect, right action and generous justice. It is only in an atmosphere where these qualities are displayed that the soul is able to pierce the outer crust and come to the surface. If they are absent and replaced by their opposites - vulgarity, meanness, wickedness, hate - the flower of the soul can not bloom. Reactions of defence will take place and produce distortions such as hardness, dissimulation, cynicism, revolt destructive impulses, that will permanently impair the child's character. The presence in the character of such traits is a sure sign that the child has found them rampant in surroundings and that his natural aspirations toward beauty, truth and good have met with misunderstanding contempt or ridicule.

One of these psychic needs is the necessity for the soul to row in freedom, in conformity with the essential nature of the inmost being, with the divine dharma of each individual This explains the exceptionally strong words used by Aurobindo in his second principle: "To force the nature abandon its own dharma is to do it permanent harm mutilate its growth and deface its perfection."

Does it mean that the educator is to follow all that the child wants or demands, his whims and fancies?

We shall see that there are several kinds of needs: natural needs and artificial needs, true needs and fancy needs, general needs and individual needs. But the distinction is not easy; it is so difficult that it requires patient observation and long experience, and teachers are often left in¦ a quandary.

However there is a solution, a way out of the difficulty. It is to appeal to the child himself, or rather to "the real man within" the child, to make the distinction and discard what unnecessary and futile.

Let us first study what the artificial needs are, in contrast to the natural needs. A need is artificial that results from intervention of the adult, or of society as a whole, in a child 's

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life. A need is natural that manifests without that intervention. Let us say immediately that we should not think that all artificial needs are to be eliminated. Some are essential to the life in society, but most of them belong to the adult mentality; they should come when the child has reached the necessary maturity, not be infused too early into the child's receptive nature.

Psychologists have sorted out a number of needs that are created by an intervention of the adult in the child's life. Much cannot be said here about this subject'; I shall only enumerate some of them:

The need to attract attention, to push oneself in the forefront, to play to the gallery, is due to the too great prominence given to a young child by his parents who like to show him off and revel in the praises bestowed upon him by friends and visitors.

A young child who cannot keep his hands off things has been deprived at home of sufficient very simple objects which every child needs to touch, to handle at leisure, to manipulate and play with.

Some children are incapable of sustained activity; whatever they undertake, they immediately give up and turn to a new occupation. This behaviour is unusual in a normal child who becomes literally engrossed in work and resents all intrusion, once he has found an object of interest. This kind of fickleness has been created by the action of parents who ignore this need of the child and constantly disturb him when engaged in working or playing (for a child playing is working).

Modern psychologists attribute the destructive tendencies of young people to a repression and deviation of their creative urge. In the same way, the boisterous, unruly and turbulent behaviour of children can be traced to the imposed immobility during long hours of class-work and lack of outlet for their plentiful physical energies.

The intervention of the adult can be positive or negative. The adult may act when his action is not required or is

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detrimental. He may also fail to intervene when his action would be required (for instance, in keeping the environment adequately supplied).

If it is found necessary to suppress or discourage artificial need, the first thing to do is to find out its cause to stop the intervention that lies at its origin. When this is done the need may persist for some time, but its insistence will decrease and in the end it will wither away and disappear, especially when there comes into play the criminating process we shall presently speak of.

When we examine the distinction between true needs and fanciful needs, the situation becomes more difficult. Once we admit the essential distinctiveness of each individual there is truly no criterion by which the teacher can decide whether a need is true or fanciful. What is fancy for one child may be genuine for another child's development. Here the solution lies, as we have said, in bringing gradually the child to take in hand the responsibility of his own education This process of shifting the responsibility from the teacher the student is fundamental in our new education and we shall return to it later. Suffice to say now that, when the child is faced with the necessity of taking for himself all kinds of decisions that hitherto were taken and enforced by parents and teachers, he spontaneously collects himself and turns inwards. He becomes "responsible" and begins to search for an inner guidance. In the child the soul is not far away, it is not yet covered by a hard crust generated by the "hard realities" of life. It is therefore relatively easy for the child, when he begins to look inwards quietly, to come in touch with his soul. Once this contact has been established true discrimination will surely come in and do away with any fancy need, whether obnoxious or futile.

General needs are common to all, or practically all, children, depending to a certain extent on age. They are true needs. Individual needs pertain to a child or to a period of his growth. They also may be true needs and have to be met. Their importance is considerable as their aim is often to

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restore the balance or eliminate a gap or a lag in the child's development.

It can be said that in our new educational system, except for needs that are visibly artificial or whimsical, every need that the child expresses quietly and confidently is to be met -as far as possible, of course. At the beginning this may seem a dangerous and unwise policy. But very soon, when the child on the way to responsibility is faced with the consequences of his decision or of expressing his likings or dislikings, it becomes evident that the wise policy is to give him a chance to make his own experiments. After all, every human being learns only by experience - one's own. Another person's experience can only be useful as a warningor a confirmation and shorten the duration of the experiment, it does not dispense with it. And when a child has reached this stage of responsibility, he learns quickly indeed, quicker than adults in most cases.

From the examples given above, we can see how a need to which a normal and legitimate fulfilment is denied tries to get satisfaction anyhow and thus generates abnormal tendencies in the child. Moreover, the feeling of dissatisfaction, of frustration, sinks into the subconscient and becomes the source of many psychopathic troubles, ranging from simple irritability to actual neurosis. Neurotic troubles, erratic behaviour, that confound and distress so many parents have no other origin. They are extremely difficult to deal with, as their real cause is not understood.

When I say that the natural needs of a child are to be satisfied, I do not mean that it is the educator who has to satisfy them. In fact, a child's needs are always satisfied by the child himself; the educator must only place the child in conditions where this satisfaction is possible. This is true from the physical needs to the emotional and intellectual needs. Through an active satisfaction of his own needs in answer to the stimuli induced by the external objects, the child develops his various instruments of knowledge and action, skill, strength, the use of his sense-organs, judgment,

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memory, intellectual capacity, etc. The educator should always remember that he should not try to act upon the child, nor upon the needs, but upon the environment of the child. 4

We are now in a position to review briefly the most important general needs of childhood.

I shall not speak of the bodily needs, whether belonging to nutrition, health or physical growth. They do not fall within the scope of these lectures. Moreover, they are somehow better known than the psychological needs with which I am particularly concerned here. I say "somehow" because out knowledge and attitude towards these needs are still very much open to improvement, as the little story I shall tell you now will show. It is the true story of an experiment with very young children, related by Washburne.

Fifteen newly weaned children were kept under a continuous scientific observation up to the age of four and a half. At mealtime a tray with a large selection of food was placed before each child: 12 to 15 plates each containing simple food, not modified by flavouring or mixed with another dish Pure milk or curd, a hardboiled egg, different vegetables. chopped raw meat, roasted beef, etc. The youngest child (9 or 10 months) was the first to make some uncertain movements with the hand and indicated, by chance, a plate Immediately the supervisor gave him a spoonful of what the plate contained. The child soon learned that whenever he indicated a plate he was given the contents of the plate. He also learned very quickly what each plate contained. The dishes changed from one meal to another, there were altogether 20 or 25, but not more than a dozen were given at each mealtime. Also at each meal the position of the dishes was changed for the very little ones, so that a child would not select a dish because of its particular position but because of its desire to have certain kind of food. The child could eat according to his choice, as much or as little as it wanted When a plate was empty it was filled again. The child could

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fill himself up solely with only one dish without the least disapproval being shown. The results were striking. The children grew up as beautiful and healthy a batch as could be desired. Some who were rickety were soon cured. The children were seldom ill, but when they had a cold, they themselves regulated their diet. They did not balance the diet at each meal, but within a certain period of time each child took the needed variety of food and made the very adjustment necessary for his growth.2

Let us revert to the psychic needs. The first amongst them is the need for happiness of which I have already spoken sufficiently.

Another need that belongs to the soul and concerns all the parts of the being is the need to grow. Fundamentally, the child is a growing being; growth is his raison d'être, the law of his existence. And in this growth the child is not passive, submissive, as a tyre when inflated grows in size through an outside action. For the child, to grow is to act, to do something, and by that action, that doing, his body acquires strength, resilience, health, his mind becomes sharp, alert, capable of reasoning, judging and deciding, knowledge grows and the capacity of using that knowledge. Growth is an activity that interests the whole being.

The body grows by the assimilation of suitable food, by exercise, practice and training. The emotional and vital being grows by contacts with other forms of life and beauty, by exchange of feelings and emotions, by a natural expansion in a suitable harmonious environment. Mind grows by dealing with objects and situations, by practice, exercise and training, by observation, experiment, invention and discovery, by assimilation of a freely accepted and suitable mental food, by exchange of ideas and experiences.

It is for this reason that activity is the mark of childhood. And activity can only bring its desired fruits if it is a free activity, spontaneously surging from within at contact with external objects and peoples. Any imposed work or action

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has little or no value for the soul's purposes, for from such an action the soul is absent.

In a normal child, placed in favourable surroundings, action is always purposeful, even when it is a game or a play. It becomes idle and wasteful only when bad habits have been formed, either through lack of suitable objects of interest in the environment or as a reaction against the dullness of imposed task and lack of freedom in the activity.

When a child takes interest in what he does, it means that the action is purposeful, that is, it brings a contribution to the growth of the soul. Interest is thus the mark of a participation of the soul - a veiled and distant participation, to be sure, but still an indication of the direction in which the educator has to proceed.

And when a child is interested, concentration is spontaneous and anything that disturbs that concentration is resented. He forgets to eat, to sleep and everything else, till he considers that his purpose is obtained. Adults do not generally recognize and value this need and are responsible for much suffering and deviation by disturbing the child and obliging him to conform to their preconceived ideas or plans; this causes habitual restlessness, inattention and fickleness.

A child spontaneously wants to complete his work. He feels satisfaction in this completion; the feeling of achievement is the reward he is expecting. If he is deprived of it, by the shortsightedness of the adult, the child will quickly lose the greater part of his interest in work and his tendency towards perfection. When a healthy child leaves his work half-finished, slap-dash and untidy, it is a distortion that has been caused by a habitual intervention of the adult in his activities. This point should always be kept in mind.

I would say to the teacher: "Let each child do his work to the best of his ability till he is satisfied and brings his work to you. Do not force him, but give him the necessary time and conditions. Then examine with him sympathetically, but without undue praise, the value of what he has done. Do it

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immediately if possible or at your earliest convenience, as the child is in a state of expectation. If your advice or correction comes after a week, the child will not have the slightest interest in it. He moves faster than you think."

This concentration upon a work till its purpose is fulfilled is part of a greater and deeper urge towards perfection. To observe a child to whom complete freedom is given is full of interest. When he has taken a liking for a work, his natural tendency is to do it as perfectly as he can. He will spend a considerable amount of time in perfecting it and evidently in this elaboration he gains something and obeys an urge deep rooted in him.

This brings us to the need of beauty. The appreciation of beauty in what is called works of art does not belong to the child stage - at least in the great majority of cases. But there is a tendency towards harmony and beauty in his own work. What the child is interested in is his own self-development, and self-expression is a part of self-development.

The aspect of beauty to which children are most sensitive is psychic beauty, the beauty resulting from the harmony with and the translucence to the soul within. The child is more awake to what is usually called moral beauty in a person, than to commonly recognized physical beauty. Psychic harmony and permeation is congenial to the child's nature and in such an atmosphere he feels happy, relaxed and confident. Generosity, fortitude, devotion, love, unselfish and heroic deeds always find their echo in him. They rouse his emotions to a very high pitch. Nothing repels the soul of a child more than vulgarity, meanness and wickedness. Unfortunately the soul's influence is not the only influence to which a child can open. If a child has not lived from early childhood in surroundings stamped with this psychic touch, the influence of his own soul may have become clouded or obstructed. He is then open to the contagion of vital influences of all kinds, coming to him from elders or classmates, especially if he has himself been a victim of distortions and deviations in the manner which we

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have described. A perversion of this kind is akin to possession and is very difficult to cure. The soul must awaken, through a great and painful shock generally and with much suffering, and reassert its presence - what is called "conversion". Otherwise such a state may persist for the whole life.

The need for independence and freedom in children is well known. What is less known is that it springs from the determination of the soul to become the leader. Any rule that is not freely accepted, any external compulsion cannot be endured long by the child, and the more he becomes conscious, the more he feels sensitive to any encroachment upon his freedom. Consequently, in our education great care must be taken that the child is not subjected, whether from parents or teachers, to compulsion or pressure, physical or moral, that would defeat or hinder the aim we have in view.

Curiously enough, there is a complementary aspect to the need for freedom; it is the need for security. By these words it is not meant that the child relishes a comfortable, monotonous and insipid life, devoid of thrill and adventure. The liking of children for risk and even danger is well known (because risk and danger give them a possibility of wider experience and greater mastery). What I mean is the necessity for the child to be sure that his growth will not be hampered or prevented. It is perhaps a feeling that he is not yet capable of meeting all situations and that the difficult ones must not be pressed upon him as long as he does not feel ready. We can say that he likes a risk but he must feel confident that he is capable of running it and succeed. He is surely more interested in success than in the risk itself, therefore he must be free to make the experiment or to refuse it. He does not like to be compelled either to make it or refrain from it. The child wants also the assurance that in case of difficulty the necessary aid will not be denied to him. Not that he dislikes effort and will actually take the help, but before he makes the forward move, he will make sure that the supporting hand will be available, if needed. It would be

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a great mistake if the ready hand supplied support before help was really needed or requested.

If the first task of the teacher is to keep the environment adequately supplied, his second task is to be constantly present, entirely present, at the child's disposal. The child must know that whenever he needs an explanation, a piece of information, a hint, a moral help, an intervention from hint should not be given before they are actually needed or asked for. Else they would spoil the whole value of the child's action. Remember that for a child every action is an experiment; do not rob him of the fruit of his experiment.

To inspire confidence and security, the teacher must be steady and unwavering. Nothing disconcerts the child more than changeable behaviour on the teacher's part. The child knows his teacher, in fact he knows him very well, he knows his weaknesses and does not expect him to be perfect, but he expects him to be consistent and reliable, he expects him to be tomorrow the same as yesterday. If the teacher behaves unexpectedly, if on some days he is severe and forbids something, and on other days without reason or explanation he is lenient and allows it, or vice versa, then the need of the child for security is affected. If the teacher is severe, let him be severe for all days and for every one, but he should not behave like an equivocal weather-cock unforeseeable and unreliable.

The teacher should also be the same within and without. When the children discover that the teacher behaves in private differently than when he is before them, when they find that his virtue is only pretence, they are shocked, and they will never give back their confidence to the person who has thus betrayed them.

In truth, independence and security are not incompatible. The child must be free; he must feel that freedom is guaranteed to him. But the granting of this freedom is not an absence of the teacher, an abstention or a surrender on his part. The child knows that the teacher will not prevent him

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from making the experiments he needs for his growth, but he is also confident that the teacher will always be present, effectively and efficiently whenever he will need his advice, his help, his support. Freedom and support are the complementary gifts that the child expects from the teacher.

Connected with security is the need of the child for success in his experiments. He is capable of swift and burning enthusiasm, but also subject to despondency and dejection if his expectations are not fulfilled. Consequently one should be careful not to give a child a work above his capacity. Failure is harmful for the child; it does not stir him to action as it does with the adult, it disheartens him. The problems and exercises must be well adapted to his strength, neither too easy nor too difficult. If he fails, do not tell him: "You see, you cannot do it"; and above all do not do the work for him, to show that you can do it. Try giving him a slight hint, a suggestion, or ask him to do at first a similar problem, but easier; help him unnoticed so that he may find the way to discovery and success.

When learning to ride, it happens that one is thrown from the horse. In such a case, except if there is a broken limb, it is customary that the instructor should request the novice immediately to bestride his horse again. One should not rest upon a failure.

The joy of achievement, of overcoming a difficulty, is one of the chief incentives to work, as for the child it is an indication of progress. In our new education it is perhaps the only incentive, as all others have been removed. Let the child understand that it is the true and only reward that is worthy of him. He must be asked to look into himself for the source of the joy that he feels in discovery, in achievement, in progress, to observe how and whence it comes, to go deep into it. This may help him to feel the touch of his soul and to grow under its influence.

Contrary to current opinion, a child likes order; it is apart of his need for security. But the child's order is rarely the parent's order. What the child requires is to be able to find.

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the thing he wants, at the place where he has left it. But his mother has another conception of order. She wants things to be arranged according to certain fixed rules which she has declared to be logical and proper, and she reprimands the child when he has left his toy on the chair or put his note- books on the sewing-machine. It is therefore good to select in the home and also in the class-room a place which will be the child's property and to which he shall have free access, where he can keep and arrange his books, note-books, pencils and the few odd things that have so much value for a child because they are related to his affective life.

Regularity in meals, time of sleep, time of coming to and leaving the school, has also a value for the child and normally he will adhere to it easily. The breach of rules comes most often from difficulties at home.

We shall see that in our system, although there are certain fixed timings, such as coming to the school and leaving it, the time-table is flexible. This is done with the view that the child should organize freely his own work. In many cases, he will feel by himself the need of drafting his own time-table. The teacher may point out to him that it is one thing to write down a time-table and quite another to stick to it, that the latter is worth trying, but that it will be a difficult achievement. He must encourage the child and guide him gently and patiently. Whatever form it takes, what is important is the assumption of responsibility by the child, the responsibility that is the fruit of freedom.

There are needs that belong to the emotional or affective life of the child, although, as you may have noticed, all the child's needs are truly tinged with affectivity. The most important is the need of sympathy, affection and love. And naturally, as the teacher is for the child the centre of his school life, it is in the teacher (after the parents) that he expects to find them. Everyone knows this, but let me insist that sympathy and love should be based on a true understanding and should not blur the vision of the teacher. Fondling is not to be encouraged, nor familiarity. The

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relation between teacher and pupil should be based upon trust and respect. Have confidence in your children and be worthy of their confidence. Respect them and they will respect you. Let the relation between them and you be, as much as possible, a contact of soul with soul, be always ready to give ungrudgingly your attention, time and care to them, and keep in mind the reason of your presence with them: to be the helper, the guide that moves along with them on their way to self-discovery and self-mastery.

We have spoken of the relation between teacher and pupil. At the school age the relation between parent and child must be much of the same nature. The extreme physical dependence of the early age has ended, but it remains often difficult for parents to understand the need of freedom in their child. They resent what they consider to be pride and ungrateful self-assertion. They expect a silent obedience, sure as they are that they know better than the child what is good or harmful for him. Here lies the greatest obstacle to a healthy relation between them. I shall not say more, as I am not addressing parents as such.

Let us come to the relation between the children themselves. At the age of about 8-9 a need begins to appear, which culminates at 12-13. It is the social need. The child begins to act, to build, to experiment with the help of other children; he feels the need of sharing his discoveries, inventions, with comrades, either to get their approval, or to modify his ideas in accordance with theirs. He finds pleasure in a common activity, far overpassing the playing relations which he had with them at an earlier age. It is also the time when children spontaneously form themselves into teams, bands or gangs, dividing between themselves the work and responsibility whether for games, picnics, scouting parties, exploration or work. The class-mate is a new object of interest that the child discovers in his surroundings. He begins to experiment with him as he does with the other objects of interest. He tries to evoke reactions and studies his own reactions, and by these exchanges comes to know

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his fellow-beings, and thus prepares himself for life in a society. Such association has to be accepted and helped to grow in a spirit of collaboration and mutual respect. It can become very fruitful and provision must be made for it in our methods of education, under the form of team-work or child in the choice of his associates, though hints may sometimes be given as to the effect of certain associations. Group-work is only fruitful when the group can form freely and dissolve freely. And if a child prefers to work alone, let him do so..

For a child, the teacher becomes an object of interest much in the same way as his class-mates. The child studies his teacher all day long, provokes and observes his reactions under all possible conditions, tests his sensitivity, his patience, his forbearance, and regulates his own conduct by his findings. A feeling of being deliberately tested has often been reported by teachers.

The end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence is marked by the appearance of a new object of interest for the child: it is his own inner being. There is a withdrawal within, an inner search. The child tries to understand his feelings, his emotions, his passions and to establish his relations with the world and peoples; he is looking for the meaning of his life and for the meaning of the world. It is frequently the time of a deeply felt crisis. The teacher should help the boy or girl to face squarely the problems of this age and pass through them. Here also a silent sympathy and a few words of encouragement are a powerful help. Advice should be given on books for reading - there is often a craze for novels - a well-chosen book may help to untangle a complicated knot.3

To end this chapter on the needs of childhood, I must emphasize the fact that needs are not fixed once for all; they are subject to change, not only with different children, but for one child with age, stage of evolution and the actual circumstances of his physical, emotional and intellectual life,

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at school and outside school. The multiplicity of the individual needs is great, and it will be one of our tasks to discover them and give them their due place in our scheme of education.

Childhood is indeed a preparation for adult life. But it is not a simple passage, like a flight of steps, or a suite of rooms that the child has to cross to reach his goal. A step, a room is lifeless and remains outside the being, while each stage of growth is not only a means for the soul to get experience and grow, but it is also the creation of the child and a part of his being, in fact it is at that time the whole of his being.

It is certainly true that childhood recapitulates the whole human evolution. Every educator knows how at various stages the child is fascinated by different stories, stories of the life in the jungle or in the Far West, of taming of animals, of adventure and heroic deeds, of scientific discoveries, of sentimental exchanges, of cultural associations, etc. Each stage must be well accomplished before entering the next one, as each has something to contribute to the wholeness of the being. There is no purpose in hurrying up he children through these various stages as if the last were the only one worthy of attention.

Truly, growth should continue throughout the whole life, and education also. It is like a piece of music, a song or symphony; each note or chord has a meaning only in relation with the others. The symphony has a meaning as a whole and not in any one of its notes or chords. It is the same with life.

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