Annie Besant, one of the most important leaders of the Theosophical Society, had significant ideas about childhood education. She was an ardent supporter of education and established schools in India, including the Central Hindu College in Benares in 1898, which later contributed to the development of Banaras Hindu University.
Besant believed that each child has special gifts suited to the development of particular interests. Talents may arise in many different areas, but it is often up to the teacher to discern, encourage, and help develop these abilities.
In rare situations, a young prodigy is recognized. These extraordinary abilities seem to defy ordinary methods of training and appear to bring a talent to fruition very early in life. Prodigies such as Mozart demonstrated remarkable gifts that, from the viewpoint of reincarnation, could hardly have developed within a single incarnation.
Such individuals may rapidly recapitulate abilities acquired through many incarnations of focused study and training and then flourish as gifted artists, musicians, mathematicians, or thinkers in the present life. After many incarnations of development, their one-pointed concentration upon a particular talent may serve a divine purpose by bringing something of value into humanity.
These mental giants are exceptions to the rule. For most of us, training, motivation, intensity, patience, and focused hard work are necessary before our abilities can mature.
More often, a child must pass through graduated levels of experience and sample many different subjects before discovering a true direction. A love of science or engineering may not emerge until the mental body is more fully developed later in life. A child may have a strong interest in sports that eventually gives way to more intellectual challenges. Preferences change as children encounter the many possibilities offered through education.
For this reason, the young child should be given a broad selection of subjects and experiences. Later, as maturity develops, selection and discernment become more important. Certain inclinations become increasingly prominent in the personality and may eventually be nurtured into a primary focus or life work.
Each child may possess special gifts that remain dormant until, like a seed, they suddenly begin to blossom.
This may be the call of the Soul.
Children should not be coerced into learning but should be helped to discover themselves through study and experience. A child who is loved and encouraged in a nurturing environment is much more willing to try because failure is not something to fear.
Children want the approval and respect of a teacher they admire. They often take great pleasure in demonstrating what they have learned and showing that they have reached a new level of understanding.
Coercion can have the opposite effect. Excessive pressure may create resentment, resistance, loss of interest, truancy, or unwillingness to complete schoolwork. Difficult behavior may arise from many sources—family circumstances, fear, discouragement, relationships with authority, or a classroom in which the child does not feel accepted.
Children need encouragement so that their individual qualities have room to expand.
Reason should also be cultivated rather than relying too heavily upon rote memory.
Too often, success in the classroom is measured primarily through test scores. What can most easily be measured are concrete answers—dates, names, places, definitions, and other facts. Children quickly learn how to respond to this system. They memorize material, take the examination, and may soon forget much of what they have learned.
Information is much more likely to remain when it has meaning.
A historical event may suddenly become fascinating because something about it awakens the imagination. From an esoteric point of view, there may even be a karmic connection with a particular period or culture that produces an unexpected emotional response.
The Napoleonic Wars, for example, may be dull information to one student and intensely fascinating to another. The difference may lie not simply in the subject itself but in the personal significance it carries for the individual.
Subject matter is less easily forgotten when it becomes personally meaningful.
Education should therefore encourage students not merely to memorize the parts but to understand the whole. Students should be encouraged to think freely, express an opinion, defend a judgment, question assumptions, and understand why events occurred and what consequences followed.
The parts have value, but they gain greater meaning when their relationship to the whole is understood.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, children should be exposed to beauty.
Learning continues on a subtle level wherever beauty is present.
Beauty develops refinement, sensitivity, harmony, and an awareness of relationship.
What creates harmony?
Consider a classroom in which children are running around, shouting, fighting, and continually disturbing one another. Where chaos dominates, there is little opportunity for harmony, concentration, or beauty. The teacher may spend so much time restoring order that an intended story, creative activity, or lesson is abandoned altogether.
Disharmony affects everyone in the room.
The ideal classroom should therefore contain some degree of beauty and order. Beauty uplifts children and creates an atmosphere in which they can more readily express themselves.
Beauty can exist in the arrangement of the room, the use of color, displays of artwork, plants, books, natural objects, music, and the thoughtful organization of materials.
Materials should also be accessible.
Anyone who has been in a creative mood and suddenly discovered that a pencil, eraser, brush, paint, paper, or book cannot be found knows how quickly the creative impulse can be interrupted.
Disorganization creates its own kind of disharmony.
A good classroom should have a place for things, and children should gradually learn to respect and maintain that order.
Time is also an essential part of creativity.
A child who is deeply involved in a drawing, construction, experiment, or imaginative project needs sufficient time to become absorbed in it and bring it toward completion. Creativity is easily interrupted when activities are continually stopped before the child has had an opportunity to develop the idea.
The ideal classroom therefore provides not only instruction but variety, encouragement, reason, beauty, order, materials, and time.
Its purpose is not merely to fill the child’s mind with information.
It is to create the conditions under which the individual child can discover what is already waiting to unfold.
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