The Noble Aim of Education

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 9 pages

A nine-page compilation opened by a contents and abstract of central ideas, built around a review of Moral Education: Its Laws and Methods, a monograph by Professor J.R. Buchanan, M.D. Revised in May 2024. Buchanan appears twice more in the library — in “The ennobling power of thoracic expansion” in this batch, and in the Higher Ethics and Devotion series.

The charge is made in the first line of the contents and the rest of the file supports it: that the cultivation of mere intellect, as a means of material advancement, is the cause of what the text calls ill-shapen monstrosities. The mechanism is stated plainly — that pampering the intellect to the utter starvation of the inner faculties of man can lead only to perdition — so the objection is not to learning but to a curriculum that develops one faculty while leaving the others untrained. The positive claim is the one the title makes: that the noble aim of education is to awaken the divinity that slumbers within, which sets a different measure of success from the accumulation of knowledge. A practical proposal follows, and it is unusually concrete for a piece of this kind: that the first eighteen years of life, counting from the first dawn of intelligence, are more than enough for the whole curriculum to be delivered — an argument that what is wrong with education is its priorities rather than its duration. Buchanan's monograph supplies the supporting material from the side of moral rather than theosophical philosophy.

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