Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c6.s3.40

c6.s3.40

No doubt these ancient ideals of education have to be adapted to modern conditions. The principles on which the West is ordering life do not seem to make for stability. That can only come from the Indian view of life, which makes for universal peace by its toleration. The exaggerated nationalism of the West is defeating itself, a victim of its own system. In this world-situation, surely Indian thought has its own place to fill. India must carefully conserve and foster the particular type of personality or character she has been building up through the ages by a corresponding system of education. Modern Psychology conceives of the personality as built out of diverse planes of psycho-vital processes. Deep down in the recesses of the Self, as Jung points out, lies the racial unconscious representing the cues of the long forgotten storms and stresses through which the race has evolved. These supply the archetypes that create myths and fables and impart form to the yearnings and gropings of desires. There is then the plane of experience that the individual has passed through and has laid aside in the interest of imperative reactions which the immediate situation demands. Lastly, there are the configurations, impulses, and ideas of conscious life slowly and selectively built up by the forces of the society and the physical environment. A scheme of education introduced for the sake of transient interests and ideology often fails to encompass the total personality thus conceived. It violates the laws of self-development and leads the process of growth through tortuous alleys.