"Who is paying us," said the Principal, "one of his periodical visits of inspection."
"And who thoroughly approves of what he sees," the Under-Secretary added with a courteous bow in Mrs. Narayan's direction.
Vijaya excused himself. "I have to get back to my work," he said and moved towards the door.
"Are you specially interested in education?" Mr. Menon enquired.
"Specially ignorant would be more like it," Will answered. "I was merely brought up, never educated. That's why I'd like to have a look at the genuine article."
"Well, you've come to the right place," the Under-Secretary assured him. "New Rothamsted is one of our best schools."
"What's your criterion of a good school?" Will asked.
"Success."
"In what? Winning scholarships? Getting ready for jobs? Obeying the local categorical imperatives?"
"All that, of course," said Mr. Menon. "But the fundamental question remains. What are boys and girls for?"
Will shrugged his shoulders. "The answer depends on where you happen to be domiciled. For example, what are boys and girls for in America? Answer: for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes. And now that Europe has made the breakthrough into mass production, what will its boys and girls be for? For mass consumption and all the rest-just like the boys and girls in America. Whereas in Russia there's a different answer. Boys and girls are for strengthening the national state. Hence all those engineers and science teachers, not to mention fifty divisions ready for instant combat and equipped with everything from tanks to H-bombs and long-range rockets. And in China it's the same, but a good deal more so. What are boys and girls for there? For cannon fodder, industry fodder, agriculture fodder, road-building fodder. So East is East and West is West- for the moment. But the twain may meet in one or other of two ways. West may get so frightened of East they it will give up thinking that boys and girls are for mass consumption and decide instead that they're for cannon fodder and strengthening the state. Alternatively East may find itself under such pressure from the appliance-hungry masses who long to go Western, that it will have to change its mind and say that boys and girls are really for mass consumption. But that's for the future. As of now, the current answers to your question are mutually exclusive."
"And both of the answers," said Mr. Menon, "are different from ours. What are Palanese boys and girls for? Neither for mass consumption, nor for strengthening the state. The state has to exist, of course. And there has to be enough for everybody. That goes without saying. It's only on those conditions that boys and girls can discover what in fact they are for—only on those conditions that we can do anything about it."
"And what in fact are they for?"
"For actualization, for being turned into full-blown human beings."
Will nodded. "Notes on What's What," he commented. "Become what you really are."
"The Old Raja," said Mr. Menon, "was mainly concerned with what people really are on the level that's beyond individual ity. And of course we're just as much interested in that as he was
But our first business is elementary education, and elementary education has to deal with individuals in all their diversity of shape, size, temperament, gifts and deficiencies. Individuals in their transcendent unity are the affair of higher education. That begins in adolescence and is given concurrently with advanced elementary education."
"Begins, I take it," said Will, "with the first experience of the moksha-medicine."
"So you've heard about the moksha-medicine?"
"I've even seen it in action."
"Dr. Robert," the Principal explained, "took him yesterday to see an initiation."
"By which," added Will, "I was profoundly impressed. When I think of my religious training ..." He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.
"Well, as I was saying," Mr. Menon continued, "adolescents get both kinds of education concurrently. They're helped to experience their transcendental unity with all other sentient beings and at the same time they're learning, in their psychology and physiology classes, that each one of us has his own constitutional uniqueness, everybody's different from everybody else."
"When I was at school," said Will, "the pedagogues did their best to iron out those differences, or at least to plaster them over with the same Late Victorian ideal-the ideal of the scholarly but Anglican football-playing gentleman. But now tell me what you do about the fact that everybody's different from everybody else."
"We begin," said Mr. Menon, "by assessing the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence-his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn't recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he's working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up? All children are good hypnotic subjects-so good that four out of five of them can be talked into somnambulism. In adults the proportion is reversed. Four out of five of them can never be talked into somnambulism. Out of any hundred children, which are the twenty who will grow up to be suggestible to the pitch of somnambulism?"
"Can you spot them in advance?" Will asked. "And if so, what's the point of spotting them?"
"We can spot them," Mr. Menon answered. "And it's very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in your part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty percent that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies." "Dangerous?"
"Because these people are the propagandist's predestined vic-tims. In an old-fashioned, prescientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty percent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it's very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they're young. Once they've been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained not to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you'd be well advised to reorganize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence." "Which is the state of things, I gather, in Pala?" "Precisely," said Mr. Menon. "And that's why our potential somnambulists don't constitute a danger."