Madame Blavatsky on How to Educate Children

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Joseph Rodes Buchanan · Down to Earth Series · 8 pages

A short and unusually practical statement, drawn from the Key to Theosophy. If we had money, she writes, we would found schools which would turn out something other than reading and writing candidates for starvation. Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else to think and reason for themselves.

The method follows from that aim and is stated in three moves. The purely mechanical work of memory would be reduced to an absolute minimum, and the time given instead to developing and training the inner senses, faculties and latent capacities. Each child would be dealt with as a unit and educated so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers, in order that its special aptitudes should find full natural development. And the aim of the whole would be to create free men and women — free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects and above all unselfish — which she believed could largely be obtained by a properly theosophical education. Material from Joseph Rodes Buchanan is set alongside, and the later pages treat the first eighteen years of a child's life.

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