Island - Aldous Huxley [107]
“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 individuality. 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