Taken partly from: "Learning How to Learn" by the Afghan sufi-author Idries Shah, published near 1968.
A Curriculum of a School
Idries Shah
"Q: Could you give us a view of the curriculum
of a School, from 'inside the School' so to speak?"
"A: In our teaching, we must group correctly these elements: the pupils,
the teacher and the circumstances of study. Only at the right time and place,
with the teacher suitable to these, and with the right body of students,
can our studies be said to be capable of coherent development."
"Does this sound difficult or unreasonable? Let us compare these requirements
with an analogy of our needs: the ordinary educational institution."
"If we are learning, say, physics, we must have a man skilled in physics
[having successfully completed his own training; able also to teach; and
with a mandate to teach]; students who want to learn and who have capacity
and some background for the study; and adequate laboratories and other facilities
for the studies to take place."
"A physics teacher could not make any real progress with a class of idiots,
or people who primarily wanted power or fame or gain through physics. These
factors would be getting in the way of the teaching. A class of brilliant
students, faced with a man who knew no physics, or who only had a smattering,
would make little progress. A good teacher, with a student body, could do
little unless the instruments and equipment, the building and so on, were
available as and when needed."
"Yet this principle, so well established in conventional studies of all
kinds, is largely passed over and has fallen into disuse, among esotericists.
Why? Because they have a primitive and unenlightened attitude towards teaching.
Like an oaf who has just heard of physics or only seen some of its manifestations,
the would-be student wants it all *now*. He does
not care about the necessary presence of other students. He wants to skip
the curriculum and he sees no connection between the building and the subject
of physics. So he does not want a laboratory."
"Just observe what happens when people try to carry on learning or teaching
without the correct grouping of the three essentials:"
"Would-be students always try to operate their studies with only one, or
at the most two, of the three factors. Teachers try to teach those who are
unsuitable, because of the difficulties of finding enough people to form
a class. Students who have no teacher try to teach themselves. Transpose
this into a group of people trying to learn physics, and you will see some
of their problems. Others group themselves around the literature and methodology
of older schools, trying to make the scrap material of someone else's physics
laboratory work. They formalize rituals, become obsessed by principles and
slogans, assign disproportionate importance to the elements which are only
tools, but which they regard as a more significant heritage."
"Anyone can think of several schools, cults, religions, systems of psychology
or philosophy which fall into the above classifications."
"We must categorically affirm that it is impossible to increase human knowledge
in the higher field by these methods. The statistical possibility of useful
gains within a reasonable time is so remote as to be excluded from one's
calculations."
"Why, then, do people insist on raking over the embers and looking for
truth when they have little chance of finding it? Simply because they are
using their conditioning propensity, not their capacity for higher perception,
to try to follow the path. There is intellectual stimulus and emotional attraction
in the mere effort to plumb the unknown. When the ordinary human mind encounters
evidences of a higher state of being, of even when it conceives the possibility
of them, it will invariably conclude that there is some possibility of progress
for that mind without the application of the factors of teaching-teacher-students-time-and-place
which are essentials."
"Man has few alternatives in his search for truth. He may rely upon his
unaided intellect, and gamble that he is capable of perceiving truth or even
the way to truth. This is a poor, but an attractive, gamble. Or he can gamble
upon the claims of an individual or institution which claims to have such
a way. This gamble, too, is a poor one. Aside from a very few, wo/men in
general lack a sufficiently developed perception to tell them:"
- Not to trust their own unaided mentation;
- Who or what to trust.
"There are, in consequence, two main schools of thought in this matter.
Some say 'Follow your own promptings'; the other says: 'Trust this or that
intuition'. Each is really useless to the ordinary wo/man. Each will help
him use up his time."
"The bitter truth is that before man can know his own inadequacy, or the
competence of another man or institution, he must first learn something
which will enable him to perceive both. Note well that his perception itself
is a product of right study; not of instinct or emotional attraction to
the individual, nor yet of desiring to 'go it alone'. This is 'Learning How
To
Learn."
"All this means, of course, that we are postulating here the need for preparatory
study before school work takes place. We deny that a man can study and properly
benefit from school work until he is equipped for it: any more than a person
can study space-navigation unless he has a grasp of mathematics."
"This is not to say that a man (or a woman) cannot have a sensation of
truth. But the unorganized and fragmented mind which is most people's heritage
tends to distort the quality and quantity of this sensation, leading to
almost completely false conclusions about what can or should be done."
"This is not to say, either, that man cannot take part in studies and activities
which impinge upon that portion of him which is connected with a higher
life and cognition. But the mere application of special techniques [often
to everyone, regardless of their current state and requirements] will not
transform that man's consciousness. It will only feed into, and disturb,
more or less permanently, centers of thought and feeling where it does not
belong. Thus it is that something which should be a blessing becomes a curse.
Sugar, shall we say, for a normal person is nutritionally useful. To a diabetic,
it can be poison."
"Therefore, before the techniques of study and development are made available
to the student, he must be enabled to profit by them in the direction in
which they are supposed to lead, not in short-term indulgence."
"Thus our curriculum takes two parts: the first is in the providing of
materials of a preparatory nature, in order to equip the individual to become
a student. The second is the development itself."
"If we, or anybody else, supply such study or preparatory material prematurely,
it will only operate on a lower level than it could. The result will be
harmless at best. At worst, it will condition, train, the mind of the individual
to think and behave in patterns which are nothing less than automatic. In
this latter way one can make what seem to be converts, unwittingly play
upon emotions, on lesser desires and the conditioning propensity; train
people to loyalty to individuals, found and maintain institutions which
seem more or less serious or constructive. But no real progress towards
knowledge of the human being and the other dimension in which he partly
lives will in fact be made... ... ...."