energy, time, evolutionary impasses and man

Energy, Time,

Evolutionary Impasses

And Man

Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.

Caleb Gattegno

Newsletter vol. XI no. 5 June 1982

First published in 1982. Reprinted in 2009.

Copyright © 1982-2009 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. Author: Caleb Gattegno All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-87825-311-1 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. 2nd Floor 99 University Place, New York, N.Y. 10003-4555 www.EducationalSolutions.com

Conceiving this issue of our Newsletter as the last of eleven years of publication gave the incentive to write it as if it were a monograph aiming at a synthesis. It is qualified in the text as a philosophical discourse to distinguish it from the contents of the earlier issues which can be qualified as empirical, practical, pedagogical, informational, about the state of some research and so on. Many years of reflection on fundamental and wide issues are here brought together. Since philosophers are those thinkers who specialize in thinking things together while scientists are jealous of their right to speak only on the specialized truth they found and to curb speculation, scientists often become philosophers when they speak or write on matters on which they let their imagination go beyond what the facts they have studied warrant. When they do that they know they are indulging themselves but feel good because something in them tells them they may have contributed more through this flight of their nourished imagination than through the individual papers on specific and bounded topics. They would also not mind being discussed and found at fault with rigor in some of these statements.

This issue is mainly one paper written by one person, attempting to reach more people than the educators usually served by this Newsletter. Will this happen? It will not be possible to know unless readers take the trouble to say it.

On this topic of feedback, we owe the handful of people who were kind enough to respond to last June’s appeal for it, to say that all were heartwarming and helped to keep the Newsletter going for one more year. Let them find our thanks here.

Table of Contents

Preamble .............................................................................. 1

Reality & Appearances.......................................................... 7

Relativity .............................................................................. 9

Epistemology....................................................................... 11

Perception Of Energy.......................................................... 13

Action & Virtual Action........................................................15

Sleep....................................................................................17

Evolution............................................................................ 21

Cosmic Energy.................................................................... 23

Molecular Energy ............................................................... 25

Vital Energy........................................................................ 27

Form & Plants..................................................................... 29

Evolution Of Form .............................................................. 31

Evolution Of Behavior ........................................................ 35

Instinct As Energy .............................................................. 37

The Animal Quantum ......................................................... 39

Evolution Of Energy ............................................................ 41

Mankind .............................................................................43

The Human Realm ..............................................................45

Education & Evolution ........................................................47

The Workings Of Awareness .............................................. 49

Transitions ......................................................................... 51

The Science Of Education....................................................53

News Items .........................................................................59

Preamble

At a time when so many groups and movements are attempting to find the foundations of a new civilization, it is possible to see that the integrating principle still remains to be grasped and to be tentatively formulated. The difficulty of this enterprise is in the inadequacy of analysis to cope with wide wholes, and in the specialized syntheses which are inspired by approaches that are only valid for less complex fields.

Not only must we take into account (from all quarters of living) all that which resists becoming obsolete, but also reach a comprehensive stand that is immediately acceptable to all serious investigators wherever they work and on whatever they reflect — a stance which is at once meaningful to them and serves the same purpose as their own personal themes. We must, in other words, integrate a great deal of the numerous sciences, philosophies, mythologies and religions which appear to conflict with each other or to compel differently.

If we agree not to yield to prejudice and try not to score any point for ourselves alone, but to contribute to the most urgent task which is to let more light in, or rather as much light in as is possible, while deliberately remaining comprehensively true and pinpointedly exact, we can be useful in the birth of a new earth-ian civilization which will harmonize diversity and open up endless layers of human evolution.

The task is hard because we must operate simultaneously at different scales, with different instruments, creatively and critically, empirically and with a broad vision, using only one language among thousands,

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referring to the little we know, as it has been known historically and, perhaps, not too well, by any one of us, explicitly involving part of it and implicitly calling in, perhaps, what is not yet so conscious, but maybe of greater importance.

A contemplation of all that may warn us not to try. Still, today there are many who do try; in their niche; from their singular viewpoint; with their limited experience; in a single language; addressing a small audience, and expect to add their contribution to the multiple assaults of the descending future which is mainly unknown.

In more than fifty years of alertness to change, imbibing what was coming my way from numerous azimuths, layers, times, sources, in a long period of study of what many other human beings have stated they had found in similar quests, I have come to the position where I see that what I too found can help, however feebly, in the delivery of the next civilization (which I call earthian, and sometimes even cosmic).

My published work and my public teachings in the field of education, which is for me the agent of evolution, are there to vouch that I pay attention to detail and test every one of my proposals. Having, thus far, taken care of the accumulation of evidence, on behalf of my comprehensive grasp of human affairs and evolution, it seems to me that it is time to attempt the writing of what can be labeled the philosophical equivalent of a life of work on behalf of the future.

This I will do in what follows.

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Energy, Time, Evolutionary Impasses And Man

Time

In the web of the numerous strains copresent in my thinking, it is the presence of the awareness of time which seems to dominate and is found everywhere.

This awareness translates itself in the inevitability that I am of the four realms which are copresent on earth, realms which took stretches of time to become what they now are: the realm of atoms and molecules, the realm of form, the realm of instinct and the realm of the “nothings” or the human realm.

Being in time and of the four realms makes me participate in my structure, my functions, my objectivations, in the billions of years that have been needed to give our universe the shape it now has, as far as we have been able to grasp it.

Being in time, and more and better integrated in the cosmic evolution compacted in my being, I am both conditioned by reality and affecting reality in so far as it, too, being in time and having a place for me in it, can be altered by the unique attribute of my single awareness of my awareness. This is as much a part of the cosmos as are the stars or microbes. If these have a role to play, then so have I. If stars are natural nuclear laboratories and microbes natural chemical laboratories, can I be permitted to be a natural spiritual laboratory whose products can be broadly labeled evolutionary human? What I do with my awareness, in this life, is as legitimately objective as what the atoms of a certain star or the chemicals of a certain bacterium do. If these are of significance for some people, for certain purposes on earth, maybe the products of

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my awareness can be too. My insignificance as one of the billions and billions of humans can be made to change into significance.

Being in time and aware of time, I can see that there is a now for me and that there were any, number of nows till this now. If I can reach the significance of this now, would I be able to bring out the significance of other nows and attempt to integrate them so as to make sense of all of them, or at least of a number of them? Thus I become sensitive to my own growth from conception to my death.

Being in time and being one of many humans, I have to see the meaning of time in a single life and in many lives. The many lives can be of those immediately around or remotely around. It is not only their impact on me and what I do and become in one life, but also my impact on them while the future descends among us (i.e., the various nows to come). Thus I become sensitive to culture, society, history, literature and art as well as to my education and that of others.

Being in time and of my time, I must notice what is special about the now called today. That is to say, the layer of time in which:

1 we are affected decisively by what is happening,

2 we sense as well as surmise,

3 there are demands on our alertness, involvements and actions,

4 we feel a different commitment with respect to how we give ourselves to it than we would, for example, when contemplating the Stone Age or a dead civilization.

Thus, I become sensitive to what directs the expenditure of my days and hours, and whether or not I am letting the essence of the expression of time, at this time, be perceived as affecting every minute of my being.

Being in time lets time exercise its two cardinal functions of simultaneously integrating all functions and stressing some and ignoring others. This dual role of time can serve to replace the

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conflicting appearances (that strike us all as the fabric of our observations in life) by a well-knit backdrop on which variety takes its forms, at the same time that we perceive the receptacle that creates the unity which is more real than the fleeting and changing appearances. Thus, I become wise since I do not confuse appearance and reality and can choose to remain more aware of the second and not identified to the perception of the first.

Reality & Appearances

I now know that I can attempt to replace the myriads of appearances (which are one aspect of my apprehension of reality) by a personal move which, while going behind appearances, retains of them that which makes them compatible as parts of a single reality. Where others see conflict and a need for choices, I see unity. I immediately accept its ways of working which generate the distinctive appearances and the apparent conflicts which result from particular stressings and particular ignorings.

It is just as true that I can stress attributes of reality (which generate some appearances) as it is true that I can stop stressing them. In so doing, another appearance is integrated with the previous ones and, in turn, serves as the reality apprehended in a new way.

Of the multitude of problems assailing our mind, some are stressed and some are ignored. This is sufficient to generate any number of appearances of reality. We can now see why conflicts between apprehensions of Reality (with a capital R) exist, although Reality is supposed to be the unifying element that eliminates the stressed significance of some appearances.

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Relativity

Within this fluctuating paradigm — fluctuating because all is in time — we can learn to be relativists. We can attempt to generate, as the frame of reference of an earthian civilization, a “General Theory of Human Relativity.” It alone can permit everyone to have a legitimate place in the cosmos, in which the instruments of one’s mind allow some observations and therefore some conclusions — which look true to oneself — while at the same time attempting to reach statements that are invariant with respect to a passage from one individual system of reference to another.

Such a General Theory can be formulated — albeit temporarily — and indeed serves to reduce the conflict between appearances and Reality. It makes Reality accessible while it extends to appearances the right to be what they appear. Every human being will be allowed his idiosyncrasies — while creating means to transcend them — to reach the source of appearances and, thereby, the disappearance of their transient singular attributes.

Human progress towards a “better” grasp of Reality is also present there. The histories of the various sciences can then become the stories of the changes in awareness from the grasp — or lack of grasp — of appearances to that of a reality behind them.

Asking questions about appearances to reach the realities behind them, or becoming aware of appearances — made to appear and carrying with them a modicum of reality — is the overall movement that accounts for

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the constant addition of new facts in the human context. Knowledge follows knowing or becoming aware. Since knowing is as much of appearance as of reality, knowledge shares these attributes and can be perennial or capable of becoming obsolete and, thus, replaceable by something else.

Thus the General Theory of Human Relativity leads us straight to a new epistemology which is more concerned with the varying ways of knowing than with knowledge and how we come to believe in its validity.

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Epistemology

The new epistemology is coextensive with how knowing appears when it is seen in time: in the time of one life, in the time of one period, or the time of one civilization, and then in the time of all civilizations.

In the time of one life, it gains the meanings of knowing as an embryo or a fetus, a baby, an infant, a boy or a girl, an adolescent, a post-adolescent, an active adult or an elder.

If there is knowing in that world (which in humans is being formed during the somatic growth in the mother’s womb) there is need to find out what part is played by the work of the cosmic energy that resynthesizes the molecules that go to form the cells and tissues. By this connection with the cosmos, each human integrates anew the successful working of evolution over billions of years. Since each individual has to do it again over months of gestation, variation keeps its chances open and each of us comes into the social world having done his own thing, in his own way, grafted over the transmission of inherited evolution. In particular, the knowing, which is through the sensory nervous system and its central part in the brain, is reached directly by each of us. The brain, as an instrument, is not only used in knowing, but also in letting one’s self know itself as a processor of energy. One aspect of this energy is affectivity which can, for example, use muscle tone for action and for keeping the self in contact with actions. Since the soma will be involved in so many ways in the acts of human living, the knowing of its functions and its functionings is required for a less than random successful living now and later. The

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new epistemology must consider the somatic ways of knowing that are part of the embryonic period of life, and that are integrated in other ways of knowing which will appear later in life.

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Perception Of Energy

If all transactions in our cosmos, hence on earth, can be viewed as energy transactions, the new epistemology has as one of its forms, a way of knowing which can be called the processing of energy. Perception is one of them. Indeed, the impacts of the environment on the soma are energy impacts. By knowing energy inputs and energy variations, the self knows the reality behind what will become appearances, once the self abandons contact with this energy behind them. Perception is a direct energy transformation of the level of energy in the soma as a result of energy added from outside our system. It is a way of knowing the changes of the actual energy within. Shifts or additions in the soma.

Perception of reality will form the sense of truth that is essential for the conduct of one’s actions in the rest of one’s life. Our sense of truth is functionally linked with perception and, in later experience, we spontaneously refer to it when we feel doubt or are certain. The new epistemology gives the energy from within and its awareness by the self as much importance as the energy from without. This differs from the old epistemology in that it considered the energy from without as being the only one capable of generating knowledge through a mechanical system which was conceived as only capable of responding. Knowing takes place in an inner system, where some of the energy that is known within has been generated by energy from without as is the case in our perception of color and sound. Hence, it is possible for the self to attribute reality to the outside world and to link with it through awareness; an awareness that states categorically that since the energy

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contemplated is not from within, it must, therefore, be from without, and defines this.

It then becomes possible for the new epistemology to find the specific attributes of the various ways of knowing that are to be developed by the selves that give themselves to them. If perception requires the inner processing of energy from outside and if it can be extended to notice the inner shifts of energy, then the perception of the expenditure of energy is a prerequisite for knowing about a way of knowing that demands that expenditure. Action is the universe in which the self pours out its own energy. Perception and action become intertwined and produce a new reality intimately experienced as a set of bridges that extent perception — hence knowing — beyond the boundary of one’s soma, giving a dual reality to the outside world. It is outside, but it is knowable and by knowing it, it is being made. It is made more and more objective, as more selves do the same work of knowing and of passing on the outcomes of that knowing i.e. knowledge, from one to the other, each knowing that one knows it and that others can also know it.

In this dialectic, Reality gains a social objectivity which is a dynamic equilibrium of the individual objectivities that are known to various individuals.

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Action & Virtual Action

However, in the universe of action, images and evocations are known as inner energy transactions. The self can act on images that attest to the success of earlier perceptions as they gain individuality as energy. Some energy can be sent back to the sense organ through which it came to produce an evocation, called an image, when seen for itself. Thus an activity upon the images which are evoked and which in turn, lead to alterations — compatible with their energy content and their permissible dynamics — generates an awareness that inner action is possible. A name can be given to that inner action in order to stress that it is action, although it only requires a very small amount of one’s energy to take place. This we call “virtual action,” a potential action which is known as not actually being performed, but capable of being performed.

The new epistemology accords to virtual action its place and sees it at work in many awarenesses, awarenesses that are necessary to extend to each learning which involve the soma, perception and action. Learning is the name given to all knowing that:

1 changes itself into an attribute of the self,

2 can be acknowledged by the self as structured energy, and

3 is available for some use in connection with any of the previously functioning energies.

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In particular, the new epistemology is the first to have made sense of early childhood learnings, the most spectacular of which is learning to speak the language of one’s environment.

However, virtual action gains a broader significance as it is the backbone of all intellectual activity.

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Sleep

The intellect is at work as soon as perception is associated with time, producing the content of one’s past that can be evoked and acted upon. This is the case in dreams as well as in evocable memories. However, since many of our somatic memories are not evocable, we must consider another kind of human knowing which concerns itself with the actual energy transactions that take place entirely within the system, and do not ask for inputs from outside. This is what sleep is all about, and since we sleep from the start of our life (certainly from after birth), we must relate to that part of our life as being functionally important. Rather than see sleep (which is one of the manifestations of the self) as a mysterious part of what we do with our time, and dump in it a number of our actions that are inaccessible in the state of being awake, we can now give it its proper role, finding other ways of knowing which the self could not escape giving itself.

In the new epistemology, sleep differs from the state of being awake in that it does not concern itself with the actual transactions, or with the variations of energy in the environment which impact the soma. By shutting off the channels of perception, the self returns to being in contact with the energy within. This energy has been affected during the time we are awake by all sorts of inputs which are not under the self’s control. Now, in sleep, the self can tackle — as it has done in all the earlier periods of sleep — the amounts of energy at its reach. That is to say, it can come in contact with all the accumulated energy that has been distilled from earlier impacts as well as the newly deposited energy from the preceding day. So, during sleep, the self has the whole

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of its past as its present, although it is not marked as such. This is not the case in the state of being awake.

Hence, the self has given itself two states of consciousness. One is sleep which is continuous and capable of extension, unifying each of our lives. The other, the state of being awake, is intermittent. In the latter, the self has to cope with what is: not itself, not under its control, unpredictable and essentially unknown, all the time requiring a reduction of the field of attention called concentration.

Consequently, different ways of knowing correspond to these two states of consciousness. The new epistemology does not favor the state of being awake as all others do or have done. If the self gave itself these two states, so different in nature and in functioning, then there must be specific knowing attributes that we can associate with each. Analysis, for example, goes with concentration and belongs, as a way of knowing, to the state of being awake. Action too. Perception too. Synthesis and intuition, however, do not require concentration and are ways of knowing of the self in sleep.

Since it is the same self that goes to sleep and wakes up, the self takes from one state to the other what it knows to be compatible with the specific attributes of these states. Dreams are a method of the self in sleep to prepare the material worked on in sleep for the self awake and to make it comprehensible to the self awake. However, much of what goes on in sleep is not necessarily to be prepared for the consideration of the self awake. This does not mean that it does not have a great impact on the state of being awake. Indeed, every time we wake up after a normal session of sleep, we know that our energy has been restored to a certain level. We are, once again, prepared for the demands of the next day’s functions. Whatever they may be. If we feel refreshed it is because of the self’s work in sleep having sorted things out. That is to gay, all the happenings that were experienced in the previous day were deposited in the self, and thereby put in contact with the storage of our experience from the beginning of our life (which include our physical make-up as well). Thus, in sleep, that which can be integrated is integrated, and that which can be worked on, in terms of

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energy, is handled, i.e. enhanced or reduced so as to be functionally available on later occasions.

Our self in sleep is more intelligent, more sensitive, and freer than our self in the state of being awake. This is due to our self’s access to all our experience, knowing what it is to be uninhibited, to be oneself and to be in contact with all the examples that have been met thus far. In contrast, when we are awake, we act social roles, experience the demands of others, and are asked to guess a lot, hence to feel insecure a lot. Later in life, much of what we find in ourselves, may have originated in the impacts of others on us while awake, or be the result of the work we do in our sleep. For instance, symbolism is a creation of the self asleep that the self awake has worked on when the self found that it was compatible with action and facilitated the shift to effective virtual actions. It is because of this discovery that the creation of the universes of the arts and of the sciences has been possible.

Still, one of the greatest contributions of sleep upon our individual and group lives is the awareness that we can change our past. Humans are not of the third realm and, therefore, have no instincts which condition their evolution by permitting only mutations. The past of each of us is the cumulative effect of sleep night after night.

This, on the one hand, allows each individual to select and subsequently, work on that which is kept in storage, i.e. that which happened before each sleep in our life. On the other hand, it produces a new integrated whole that will face the next day upon waking up. Hence, humans are species of one individual member only, each capable of generating, in any one life, a unique sample in which the new may integrate the old, and subordinate it to the ends of the self.

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Sleep

Evolution

All evolution has first taken place in individuals and, when possible, passed it on to others by various means of heredity. In humans, however, there are only individuals. Thus, evolution simply means experimenting with awareness individually, deciding whether to affect or not to affect all one’s life by the transfer of what one has managed to become aware of. Thus evolution (i.e. conscious evolution) is deliberate only in the fourth realm. In fact, evolution first had to make sense to some sensitive observers of the cosmic scenes and then projected by a mind as a way “nature” works in the first three realms. However, in the case of the fourth realm it has not yet been explicitly formulated to attract unanimous acceptance.

Ours, here, is one more attempt at this formulation.

The Darwinian views of natural selection and survival of the fittest are not satisfactory as they do not make clear what goes on in the first three realms of evolution in contrast to the fourth. In other words, an understanding of evolution in humans cannot be an extension of that which has been acceptable for plants and animals. Perhaps an understanding of human evolution will give us a better clue to what happens in the other three realms.

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Cosmic Energy

If it is true that energy is the most pervasive notion today, and if we learn from physics that energy transmutes itself into matter in the cosmos, perhaps we shall have a renewed chance to come to terms with the contents of the universe. The axioms are few, but for me, deeply supported by all the studies of millions of investigators over the ages.

The evolution of the stars has been vastly documented and we see them as nuclear laboratories in which cosmic energy becomes matter and, in many of them, matter becomes energy. Matter is made up of atoms whose nuclei become more complex as they attach particles to themselves. Although only a small number of particles are known for themselves — and scientists wish that there were only a handful of them — the atoms that are made of these particles are many. Not too many, in fact. Nature’s process of complexation soon reaches an impasse, and any new atom produced breaks down and reproduces already existing atoms. Cosmic evolution in the totality of space, with “enormous” forces and in enormous numbers, still can only go this far. It first became known that evolution could lead to an impasse when the decay of radioactive elements forced students of that field to accept the notions of stable and unstable atoms. Physicists and astrophysicists however, had enough problems with which to concern themselves that they were not alarmed either by nature’s inability to go on experimenting with cosmic energy or by nature’s inability to do as well as they did in their labs. (They have succeeded in producing a score more nuclei than those found in nature, although these have a very short lifetime.)

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Molecular Energy

Chemists and physical-chemists found that cosmic energy had another way of working. This they called molecular laboratories and found that the forces which bind atoms to each other were smaller than those forces in nuclei which bind particles.

These molecular forces were found to be at work in various regions of the cosmos, but more particularly in “cooler” places such as planets. A new streak of complexation of matter was systematically examined, thus, chemistry, as the field of study of these compounds and these combinations of some of the few atoms known, can become larger and larger. They have been called large molecules and are found in the realm of the living. They result mainly from the ability of carbon atoms, in numbers, to form stable molecules. They ordinarily include four or five other atoms and, occasionally, only a few more. The discovery of these large “organic” molecules fertilized chemistry, and man invented new molecules not found in nature; molecules which have physical properties that are decided upon in advance.

In the realm of the living, it became possible to understand many mysterious phenomena in biology by examining some large molecules like DNA, RNA, and a number of others. At a time when many challenges remained to be tackled, chemists noticed that the working molecular form of cosmic energy was also reaching an impasse, in spite of the enormous successes it had recorded. Large molecules cannot be made larger and larger indefinitely. At a certain level of complexity, molecules break down reproducing existing molecules.

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Vital Energy

Thus in the billions of years consumed by cosmic energy to pursue two of its two ways of working, i.e. nuclear complexation and molecular complexation (both of which represents cosmic evolution) two impasses were met. A new beginning would be needed in the way energy and matter work, if evolution was to proceed and the universe to be something else than a repeat of itself.

Two trials for the transmutation of energy were found on earth, and presumed to exist on other spots of the cosmos where conditions comparable to those on earth may prevail. Molecular energy transactions are much smaller than those needed for nuclear transactions. Thus, it may be expected that a further reduction in the level of energy that is needed to bind molecules may open up a new realm. Indeed the vegetable and animal realms became possible on earth when enough cosmic energy was available in minute regions of space, where a number of large molecules found themselves in close proximity and could exchange electrons. Thus, a new entity, called a molecular cluster or primitive cell, was generated.

Taking as its components the cosmic items of the environment, receiving cosmic energy radiation from the sun or the center of the earth and using the molecular bonds made from the exchanges of electrons, a new attribute of cosmic energy was involved in the molecular conglomerate of the primitive cell.

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Form & Plants

This attribute we call “form” and we consider the vegetable realm as made up of all the possibilities of form upon the appropriate brands of cosmic energy.

The billions of years of accumulated experience in the realm of cosmic energy served as a basis for some other billions of years of experimentation with form. This already existed in the mineral realm, and led to the finite number of rigid crystal forms. Now, form takes the precedence in the manner an electromagnetic field affects the positions, distances, and general configurations of sets of iron files, without touching the physical or chemical attributes of matter. Already at the monocellular level, bacilla, which are isolated cells carrying a large number of large molecules, have many forms. Their nomenclature, in microbiology, is precisely that of form which distinguished one species from the other for the first scientists who looked at them under the microscope.

If form seems far less well defined than the exchanges of electrons or increase in the number of protons and other nuclear particles, it is because form is a notion linked to our perception. It can also serve as a discussion among humans about the vegetable kingdom, seen as expression of the evolution of something we can easily circumscribe and keep under scrutiny. The form we are talking about is superimposed on to a set of molecules which can, as such, use all that is available from the previous realm of the cosmos.

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Plants are the realm of cells in which the new form of cosmic energy, called “vital energy,” acts upon molecular energy, not only to make more and new molecules, but also to organize them in space so that this aggregate remain together for some time. A plant takes from the environment the molecules it will keep in its cells, while maintaining its own form as its characteristics. Thus plants reach a stage of growth which creates a breakdown similar to the one met at the apex of the molecular universe. Complex plants will have other attributes which belong to how form uses time to experiment with the viable, i.e. how vital energy succeeds in producing forms that can go on doing jobs which take care of the chemical processes within the maintenance of their forms.

In plants, vital energy synthesizes the contents of the cells not only according to molecular energy dictates, but also under the overall supervision of a form found viable in each case. The molecules that form the material support for the various parts of the plant form do not have the plant form. Hence, form has to be considered as defined by each plant as a whole, and it is it which is passed on from one generation to the next. For humans, form is an abstraction. It seems difficult to believe that a plant knows its form and does all that is needed to have it passed on. However, if vital energy works via electromagnetic fields, it is easier to imagine that these can be captured by some arrangements of moving electrons, which perpetuate themselves within molecular arrangements that are present in the cells. I do not know whether this is the case or has been proved to be the case in microscopic plants or in other plants. Yet, it seems plausible to me that a property of molecules can be selected by an aspect of cosmic energy to be acted upon so as to preserve the property in the midst of other chemical changes, and see to it that, as the molecules are duplicated, that attribute is respected and passed on in the process of duplication. This is, of course, confirmed by the succession of plant generations that are recognized as belonging to the same species because of their form, without any attention to the processes of transmission.

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Evolution Of Form

Once we accept the existence of a new form of energy, more complex than that present in molecules and at work within cells, we are confronted with the many possibilities that energy gives itself on our planet. This means we can look at the working of vital energy over billions of years, and try to find out how one possibility generates another, as it has to do in cosmic terms to be compatible with the environment. Evolution in the vegetable kingdom is the movement of vital energy from one viable form to another, keeping what works, and experimenting with properties capable of being acted upon, but were not specially involved in the activities of previous species. If the experiment proves that such properties are a province of vital energy, a new plant is generated. If not, there is no trace left behind of that trial. The vegetable kingdom is only made up of the successful experiments of vital energy. Its immense variety can teach us how forms evolve, and how much room vital energy found for its trials upon objectified cosmic energy (atoms and molecules) as well as upon other forms working on the same matter.

As it is form that evolves in this realm, we find all sorts of combinations of properties copresent in various plants. Within the form of the plant, each combination represents a laboratory which manipulates the chemicals that are present in ways that are characteristic of the form, according to the workings of molecular energy in the cosmos and cosmic energy on earth.

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Each plant’s chemistry may be revealing some singularity which we shall consider as one of the sources of that form. However, if we take all the plants together — from bacilla to sequoia — we must find what creates variations as well as what maintains the species. We must also find a sequence of variations that takes us from monocellular plants to giant trees and everlasting ones. In order to cope with such challenges it seems easier to accept that once a new form of energy has determined itself and its field of action, it uses time to pursue the experimentation of what it can do with itself in the field it has defined for itself.

Vital energy is more subtle than molecular energy in that it can use the latter to achieve other ends not accorded molecular energy but compatible with it. By taking the pair, electron bonds on top of atoms, to produce molecules, and another pair, forms on top of molecules, we bring about the two components needed to have an evolution in a certain realm — evolution of energy over time.

An impasse, however, will be met in the vegetable kingdom. The immense variety of form will not permit more forms than we have inventoriated. Each new form, which goes beyond a previous one, exhausts one of the available possibilities. A priori there could be an infinite number of variations. Since they must get their support (in the form of molecules) from the energy in the cosmos, the viable trials are conditioned by the presence of the molecules they will synthesize and by the content of the soils on which the plants must place themselves. In actuality, once the environment contains cells, it has been totally transformed. New molecules can be generated and are available for new trials, which include their presence and so on. Vital energy gets hold of the local cosmic materials and generates, in time, the organic molecules that permit experiments excluded heretofore. Cooperation between coexistent organisms, impossible earlier, can now take place. The stuff on which vital energy will work, although ultimately cosmic, is now clearly earthian. This allows an evolution on earth (and perhaps only on earth) which is manifested by the simultaneous generation of new molecules because of the new forms, and new forms because of the new molecules. For example, as soon as chlorophyll is produced as a molecule, vital energy can use it selectively, in the laboratory of the

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plant, to extract needed atoms of carbon, thereby releasing new oxygen which will change the environment and permit a new adventure in the vital universe, i.e. the aerobic evolution of which we are part. Still, vital energy essentially acts on those attributes of molecules which are integrated into what we call form. In order to be viable in the vegetable kingdom, form must successfully integrate that which is present in the environment, all of which was produced by the activities of cosmic energy (nuclear, molecular and all other forms of energy which physicists study: radiation, gravity, thermodynamic, mechanical). Since we call successful what can perdure, and since variation is played at the edge of the preexistent, each marginal step compatible with the preexistent but not yet tried out, will generate a new possibility for another trial. This means that evolution is part and parcel of the formation of every individual in the universe, which has been made by an energy process, we call “objectivation.” Although temporal by definition, objectivation is never final. In other words, evolution is the expression of the indeterminate within the formed, an expression of possibilities, graspable mathematically, but conditioned cosmic ally by the presence or absence of sufficient material to make the objectivation first possible and then viable.

As the environment is transformed by the products of vital energy at work on the cosmic heritage, it produces new possibilities that offer new opportunities for the creation of new forms that in turn, affect the environment and so on. The environment evolves at the same time that the vegetable kingdom gets objectified; one viable success over another.

Since forms are being evolved, it is possible to see the stages by which vital energy has increased both the variety and the number of the existing plants at smaller and smaller costs. This is achieved by always working on the preexisting and, therefore, always having less and less to do in order to produce the newest specimens. This vector of variation towards smaller inputs of energy in order to achieve more was confirmed by geneticists and molecular biologists when they saw that a displacement of a gene on the DNA molecule produced a mutation. By working at the molecular level within a unique cell, vital energy has mastered variation, directing cosmic energy to do the jobs

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Evolution Of Form

of replacing one cell by two, a number of times, but stopping in-between to let each cell accumulate the material needed to attain the level of growth that will permit duplication. Forms are now conceived as mapped on the structures of the DNA, each form corresponding to one structure and conversely. However, since molecular energy alone would not explain the variety of forms, and the structures of the hereditary molecules must be more stable than chance permits or else the species wouldn’t perdure, thus, we give vital energy a place and a role in our contemplation of the plant realm, and to form, a characteristic significance.

An impasse is reached in this realm when vital energy has done all that could be done in earthian circumstances.

A new beginning is then contemplated.

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Evolution Of Behavior

Vital energy is being altered to produce the animal kingdom.

All that which vital energy can do in the realm of form is also available to animal energy which is, therefore, vital energy with a twist. It works on forms, as forms worked on molecules, to produce a new entity called behavior which is studied by zoologists. An animal is a set of behaviors that has given itself its form precisely to be able to express its behaviors. Evolution, in the animal kingdom, will find the energy level on which it will work so that changes of behaviors are possible, i.e. new forms arise which permit the display of the changed behaviors. It is then convenient to associate with each animal in a species an energy “quantum” capable of directing vital energy. The energy quantum affects the form to display one or more of the behaviors of that species, at a time when the cosmic energy in it can activate its parts precisely in order to objectify the behavior.

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Instinct As Energy

This energy quantum, quantitatively very small, has properties which are being maintained through its complex contact with the form, and altered by properties of the quantum itself. While the quantum has access to all the cosmic and vital energy retained in the objectified live animal, and through which it can display its behaviors, there are more possibilities in this connection than the maintenance of the contact. Hence, individual animals may be brought face to face with a need to affect the connection of the quantum with the energy in the behaviors, energy which we call instinct, they may thus reveal a possibility for that instinct to be altered somewhat and for a behavior to appear for the first time which needs, in turn, to be tested for adequacy in the encounter of the new challenge. If such is the case, the quantum has altered the instinct which is no longer identified with the preexisting set of behaviors. These behaviors are capable of being objectified by the form the instinct has selected for its expression.

Thus, instinct is that which evolves in the animal kingdom, parallel to the evolution of form in the vegetable kingdom. We can then understand that species perdure while new ones come into being and complexity remains.

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The Animal Quantum

No longer is there a need to look for a physical factor which affects atoms or molecules in the individuals of every species through biological procedures. Rather, the existence of individuals and the individual quanta of energy requests the instinct to adjust to singular circumstances which may reveal to the quanta a possibility not yet encountered in life. In so doing, the quanta of energy direct amounts of energy that have been retained from previous realms and act on the margins permissible to it. By staying with this revelation and its repeated use, the instinct is altered by the objectivation of the new behavior on the preexisting form. This, in turn, becomes distinctive and second nature. Other individuals of the species who witness this behavior, understanding how their quantum can affect their use of their form, will demonstrate that the boundaries, associated with the initial instinct, can be transcended and a new animal generated. This new animal will form a new species having a distinctive instinct which includes the energizing of the new behavior. Through this instinct the individuals of this species will separate themselves from those from which they originally stemmed. Since individuals are as much a part of this new species as of the previous one, new challenges to individuals will similarly affect their quanta, providing a possibility for modification of behavior, followed by a modification of the instinct. Hence another new species will be generated. As there is room in the universe for various adaptations to circumstances, all these species, old and new alike, can coexist and relate to one another in a logical and classificatory system.

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Evolution Of Energy

What this understanding brings to us can be summed up as follows:

1 We now have a precise answer to the question of what it is that evolves.

2 We no longer give one form of energy (which we call cosmic and which physicists study) the impossible job of accounting for all we see at work in the universe.

3 We now take into account the existence of individuals in the three realms and of energy transactions between them. At the same time, we never lose sight of the individual existence as being the actual locus of change. That is to say, change occurs in the individual before it becomes that of the group. This differs from the view in the past, where changes in the group were mistakenly thought to precede those of the individual.

4 We now begin at the right place, letting the future shape evolution as it obviously does, giving to chance its rightful place. Thus, the encounter of two independent set of events in which both are linked to energy in their proper setting and manner.

5 We account for happenings through a hierarchy of the ways in which energy works, whereby an attribute of the working at one level (which produces a realm) is integrated within another one. The newly integrated is clearly manifested as capable of doing what the previous did not do (and therefore we say did not attempt to do) in the universe it created. The new relations form a new

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universe that have new objectivations in which energy works in a new way.

6 We can now use new instruments for thinking of complex entities in complex ways. If we have a bias, it is not to reduce everything to a part of it (i.e., the one we are most competent in or suits us best). Rather it is a deliberate move to hold as much of the whole as possible, as a whole, and to benefit from this awareness of the whole in all our thinking. This we call the use of intuition.

7 We can integrate as much of what mankind has experienced, codified, analyzed, found relevant and kept as true knowledge. Thus, we can illumine the various parts with the light of the whole, not fearing to call in new notions, new lights, and new instruments, provided they serve the integration and shed some understanding on what has remained a challenge to our generation.

8 We can now test the value of the above by showing breakthroughs in a number of fields which, today, are being worked on by many of our adventurous contemporaries.

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Mankind

The distinctive attribute of our proposals is that they can be extended to include mankind without a forcing twist, and allow us to bring some order to that which remained inaccessible to the existing efforts to synthesize men’s endeavors. When biologists come across the challenge of man’s place in evolution, they lose some of the support their theories elicit by restricting their work to the other three realms. Biologists either accept to live with an exclusion of man from their overall understanding of nature’s way of working, or they reduce man to a member of the third realm. They see with difficulty what would open their paradigm to account for man’s singular achievements and, at the same time, keep the materialistic foundations of their science.

Human science thinkers have the opposite difficulty. They cannot find an approach that is valid for human affairs, as they see them, as well as be valid for the physical sciences and biology. The separation of humanists from scientists appears insuperable to them.

Still, there may be an approach which integrates the four realms and in which man finds his place fully, without arrogating to himself all the place. For that, it is sufficient to characterize the working of the individual human quantum as being on awareness. Man then becomes aware of his awareness. Human energy is solely that of that quantum, but as energy it is capable of directing through integration and subordination, the cascade of energies which are met in the descending hierarchies of instinct, form, molecular energy, and nuclear energy. These are needed as follows: all four of the above for each animal, three

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for each plant, and one or two in the material cosmos according to its location (stars, planets, clouds, etc.).

If we accept that the story of evolution is the story of energy we see that evolution through objectivation first produced matter. On top of that horizontal evolution which was still at work in the material cosmos and which ultimately led to an impasse by the small number of atoms, we see yet another horizontal evolution. This second evolution, presupposing the first, likewise reached an impasse when the large molecules, upon reaching a certain size, broke down. In a third horizontal evolution, the previous two are presupposed, but instead of aiming at only new molecules, it uses unused properties of molecules to generate forms. The evolution of form, coextensive with the evolution of the vegetable kingdom, objectifies new entities i.e., the plants, in which cosmic energy is subordinated to the integrated individual forms. In a fourth horizontal evolution, which only requires the third as a means of giving itself a form, we see energy specializing in energizing that form so as to objectify behaviors. When all constellations of behaviors have been given their respective forms, and thus have produced the whole animal kingdom, there is only one place to go, and that is away from behavior, away from instinct, in a jump above both. The realm of man is thus launched!

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The Human Realm

It is upon behavior that man acts. No set of behaviors can fully represent him, as it can do in the animal kingdom. That is why we can find many temporary combinations in man’s behavior, already existing separately in some animals, but never, in these combinations. By moving away from instinct and surmounting the boundaries instincts represent, man has reached the essence of individuality, making each man into a species. In other words, the disappearance of species among humans places evolution unequivocally on the individual and makes this fact accessible to man.

The human realm as a separate one can only be perceived through a special awareness which characterizes our time. This awareness has been reached only over the last few millennia as against the billions, or hundreds of millions of years, consumed by the other successive horizontal evolutions.

It was necessary to use cosmic lengths of time to do the jobs which involved:

1 atomic or molecular changes;

2 an expansion of the working of form to test viability;

3 an alteration in sets of behaviors by adding a new one and then testing viability with it.

However, such lengths of time are no longer needed on earth to feed back to humans that a human proposal (e.g. to use human energy to

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starve a behavior or enhance it) is open to all. In one life it is possible to know, sometimes in a few minutes, whether or not that which comes to one’s mind is compatible with the then prevailing conditions. From such feedback, one can decide whether or not to remain in contact with that which was being contemplated.

If mankind is to be looked at from varying and various angles, seen as a concept before it becomes a reality, and seen essentially in time, then new kinds of study present themselves in order to generate a true understanding of what man is.

Since man’s awareness of himself is the threshold of the fourth realm, the story of awareness will be told by all who can reach it. As Goethe said, “To live the whole man we need the whole of humanity.” In mankind, at present, we see representatives of all kinds of awarenesses of life, in the way we see samples of all the viable forms and instincts. We can also see evolution, human evolution, at work upon awareness. Less visible than form or behavior, it needs special movements of awareness itself to become perceptible. It needs the cooperation of the invisible memory, the invisible memories or pasts, the invisible visions, stands, stances and all the dynamics within.

However sight or all the other senses taken together is not all that humans use in order to know. Awareness of awareness is the specific method that mankind developed, in its fourth realm, to bring its potentials to reality. Thus, mankind has developed all the mythologies, arts, sciences, history, etc. to keep track of what it does with time, in one life, in one generation or over the generations, in one spot, in one region, on earth. Much of what it has valued and still values is of a subtle nature, so often kept behind words in sayings that they are only accessible when one works on oneself in specific ways so as to become vulnerable, to become sensitive to what has escaped one thus far. Through these subtle inner movements mankind has evolved, has become itself, explicitly, first by individuals reaching their evolving reality, then, by others who recognize that they too can have access to a similar reality and finally all or almost all, sharing in the awareness that it is a human birthright to own that attribute.

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Education & Evolution

Today, for example, education is seen as the means of:

1 taking everyone to the frontier of being,

2 integrating all that has been done by previous generations which is still viable,

3 opening the whole of past evolution to everyone and offering springboards for the conquest of the future,

4 liberating mankind from living in unawareness by making it live in awareness.

To be truly human, education not only requires the new epistemology and the understanding of all individual learning and learnings, but also the understanding of the dialectic between the individual and the group. That is to say, education requires an understanding of the effects of individual evolution on the group as well as of the group’s level of evolution upon the continuous human conscious growth of the individuals. In order for education to become the agent of human collective evolution, it is necessary to reach an explicit and pinpointed grasp of all that is implied in the exchange of one’s time for one’s experience. The findings of the new epistemology are woven into the fabric of education. The general theory of human relativity is woven in the implementation of education so that what is being attempted has roots in reality and is put into a form valid for each individual concerned.

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Hence, at this juncture, humanity has reached the awareness that the descent of the future can be eased. The descent of the future can be made realistic at all times by replacing aspiration to ideals, with human objectivations. This can be achieved through human educational techniques that are capable of integrating all that has been found viable and valid in mankind’s experience (conscious experience whether maintained conscious or made routine) and making it comprehensible to individuals at their respective levels of consciousness. This new spiritual technology, which does not hesitate to use instrumentally all other techniques (which are by definition human), leads to perceptible forms. The invisible can be made visible and capable of striking more people more easily. This state of affairs will make the transition of education (i.e., an education traditionally concerned with the past to one concerned with the descent of the future) much easier and more quickly acceptable to larger and larger groups to the point of being one day taken for granted. Then, humanity, as a whole, will take its evolution in hand (in all aspects reachable at that time) as has been the case of those individuals who have served mankind as lights.

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The Workings Of Awareness

The signs of this aspect of evolution, at this moment, are there to be picked up.

On the one hand, we have a sufficient number of insights into the individual inner dynamics, which give us access to the workings of awareness from conception to adulthood, to allow us to know reality differently from previous generations. On the other hand, we can witness the emergence of various forms of collective awareness that are capable, as never before, of handling complexities, and that are seeking to come together in order to manage the comprehensive and flexible encounters which give them the character of being comprehensible and adaptable to all individuals on earth.

A true earthian community is emerging from these mergers, merging free from all the mortgages that seemed necessary in earlier modes of being. This is now possible because we have moved collectively from being product-conscious to being process-conscious. We have offered the powers of the processing whose capacity to create product is recognized as being one among many. We look at the musician rather than his compositions, at the writer rather than his writings, at the architect rather than the buildings he draws, at every creation as assuming a creator and it is the creator that we relate to. Thus the ultimate stage is one’s being in contact with one’s creativity and the corresponding means of objectivation.

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This is, in fact, a summary of the human education that is descending upon us in a multiplicity of forms and ways. It is recognized as being human beyond all other attributes it may have. It is as true in intellectual circles as it is in groups working through affectivity, inspiration or social dynamics, including promotion and advertising.

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Transitions

In periods of transition or upheaval, those whose awareness is conditioned by the past lament, while those whose awareness is dedicated to the future accept, as necessary, the painful delivery of the new civilization. Every event permits differing interpretations, and all are true within the relativistic systems of reference. The inner state of the observer, once reached, can be made to alter itself to generate hope where only despair was, and to generate a new faith that tells that the descending unknown future is not really completely unknown. In this are all the workings which were successful over billions of years of events in which energy expressed itself in its own proper forms. Seeing the past in its making lets the future be present and affect it. As temporal beings, we see our memories, or memory, function in the present as if all our past is not past, but present. We see that we never cease to be in contact with the immediate future, as if to live this moment is to make room for it. In fact, the future precedes the past in the realm of action in which the preparation for action is necessary for action to take place. In our thinking, intuition precedes analysis. The directing of our working intellect must be present before we can reach the conclusion that a particular yield has resulted or is resulting.

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The Science Of Education

Education is all pervasive. To have seen it as the job of schools and universities was proper to the times when collective awareness was mainly involved in making sense, intellectually or socially, of what was needed by closed societies. Those times generated instruments which clearly today are not yielding what was expected of them. Every day brings evidence of their failure.

Professional educators working through institutions (created for specific purposes) do not see how they can alter these institutions to meet the new challenges that are pressuring societies and individuals. All the mendings that are being suggested end up in failure mainly because mending is not what is required.

To know what is required may be possible, but because education implies some collective dimensions for its implementation, knowledge may remain ineffective until such days when other forces are marshaled organically towards the implementation.

That’s where we are today.

The new epistemology and the corresponding technologies are available at a level of development far beyond sketches. Tested over a minute fraction of mankind (although counted in hundreds of thousands of individuals) these educational solutions issued from the science of education could:

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1 serve many more humans,

2 save years of repetition and replication,

3 provide broadening platforms to involve more people,

4 save more years in making the working of evolution the first function of education for today.

Only awareness is educable in man.

This we know today.

Shall we waste our time on anything else?

Those who do not know what awareness is or what education of awareness means, may agree that the evidence says that time is being wasted. However, since it did not seem so in the past, what is required is that they raise their sights to see what is in front of them.

Awareness was educated in each of us and by ourselves, when we were babies. For many it went beyond babyhood, into early childhood or even later. It has even been present for some in adulthood, generating the men and women we admire and who inspire us in various walks of life. Still very few have managed to see the universality of this spontaneous education, to extract from it a form that can be used in the education we want to offer each other to allow all of us to be in unison with evolution.

Hence, the jobs of the science of education are well-defined. We must first know exactly why we grow, what spontaneous growth is all about and how the passage of time, in any one life, generates the hierarchies of awarenesses for all of us. This, then, is the study of learning not only when we concern ourselves with the intellectual and social powers of the mind but has also to become the study of the learning when we concern ourselves with that which goes on in the embryo, the fetus, the newly born and little child in which the environment does no more than supply what must be and the individual does all the work needed. All the many functionings of the soma can be seen in terms of

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awareness, the invisible skills as well as the visible. The retention in one’s flesh of so much which cannot be isolated, counted, nor pointed at (but is essential for the successive expansions of our lives) tells of the difference between knowing and knowledge. Knowing is awareness of a certain kind. Knowledge requires awareness to gain the property of being human, real and itself. Cultivating knowledge falls under educating awareness. This can be done pinpointedly in many “fields of knowledge” — more appropriately described as “fields for knowing” — and in knowing oneself as knower.

The second job of the science of education is to discover what mankind has done with its time since:

1 awareness became aware of itself,

2 awarenesses could work on each other.

Since it is mainly change of behavior (rather than behavior) that is human, we can look at collectivities in order to see how they relate to change either to stress it or to discourage it. The latter implies an awareness that change is a spontaneous property of humans, even to those who loathe it. In all collectivities, we can stress this human component of change and learn how it is implemented, integrated, and becomes so much part of one’s fabric that it does not even need to become conscious. Immersed in the environment, each individual has had to single out all the items that influenced growth, either enhancing it or, mainly, hindering it. In making the environment part of oneself, and in not paying attention to so much of it, we state factually that we know how to produce the bridges between the inner and outer universes we perceive. This capacity can be used to help all individuals integrate that which mankind has managed to give form to.

Hence, the third job of the science of education — which can be called technical — consists in giving form to all that which is valued in human achievements and human evolution, making it akin to what the processes of integration do. Thus, each individual in a short time is brought to the threshold of where mankind is, pushing personal and collective evolution beyond where it has reached. Education then is clearly the agent of evolution.

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Fifty years of learning to be with the challenges that came my way — on top of all the spontaneous learnings that did not require to be singled out — have taught me that we must constantly discipline ourselves in as many ways as the actual content of human life demands. The most subtle occasion has been to learn to remain free of any investment in any approach, more so when it was fertile and yielded much. Slowly, over all that time, the ground shifted and I found myself having to be careful not to identify with anything so as not to stop that thing from being itself. Now I know how to be available, to be a user of less and less energy, and to involve those “nothings” in universes of the same kind in which a “nothing” causes a lot to become perceptible. In the constant dialogue with the inner dynamics, I became more vulnerable to less, and sensitive to the point that I can be upset by the effects of “nothings” on “nothings.” The upset, as such, is experienced in spite of the almost non-existent energy content of that state. Hence, I call our time the era of the “nothings.” I see many trends everywhere which confirm that we are in the process of building a true human, earthian civilization, not mortgaged by the pasts which, likewise, lose their forces by becoming “nothings” at work. In the universes where the energies have had their day, we find “nothings” at the apex of the hierarchy. These have defined their being through their contact with subtler availabilities that are present in other forces in the various temporal layers. As the quantum has to be present at the top of the hierarchy (rather than anywhere else) in order to subordinate by integration, the efficiency of the “nothings” results precisely from their being at the apex of the energy pyramid, capable of triggering any expenditure of energy that is needed to actually perform a job.

The process of integration and subordination itself — which is the way evolution works — makes possible this rise to the apex while keeping at hand the content of the previous objectivations of energy over the billions of years past.

The impasse of the fourth realm is also of our time.

We can account for it, by giving to that realm the duration of evolution from the time instincts were abandoned to the time that energy and its increased efficiency in the form of “nothings” were discovered. We can

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call that realm “the prehuman realm” in which all constellations of behaviors have been tried out within a single form, i.e., that of man.

The fifth realm, the human, earthian, cosmic realm is in the process of becoming. Compatible with all previous realms, the fifth realm does not attempt to make the previous realms disappear, anymore than sequoias made bacillae vanish, or the presence of apes on earth demanded that protozoa disappear. Humans of the fifth realm can be copresent on earth with all prehumans, creating a new world with new attributes, in harmony with all others. At the same time, they are capable of creating domains for the others where they can coexist without danger for the human universe.

All this is implied in being human.

And a lot more, of which nothing has been said here.

C. Gattegno

In preparation for this statement some of the published studies:

1 A trilogy: The Universe of Babies, Of Boys and Girls, The Adolescent and His Will.

2 Three monographs: The Mind Teaches the Brain, Evolution and Memory, Who Cares About Health.

3 Three essays: On Being Freer, On Love, On Death.

4 The Science of Education, in the making, since 1939: Mathematics for K-13 including mathematics films; Reading with Words in Color (for a number of languages); using video and using the computer in education.

5 In French only: de l’intuition; de l’affectivité; du temps; énergie & énergies.

6 A large number of audio tapes of 90-hour seminars, since 1966.

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News Items

1 Report on TESOL (Spain) Convention, April 23-25, 1982, Madrid

Approximately 800 people gathered in Madrid to spend a weekend discussing some of the myriad aspects of teaching English to speakers of other languages. The convention staff, headed by convention chairman Robert Braithwaite, President of York House (Barcelona), invited 56 speakers to give some 80 workshops. Fourteen of them dealt directly or in part with the Silent Way and “the subordination of teaching to learning.” Among them were: “Reflecting on our teaching,” “Are new methods worth it?” and “The ‘good’ teacher” (Charles Blatchford); “Meaning” (Richard French); “Teaching the more common and confusing prepositions in English” and “Getting out of the student’s way” (Tim Hahn); “The problems of the difficult student in class” (Mike McCloskey); “Learning a language can be effortless,” “What does it mean to improve as a teacher of children?” and “What does the teacher have to work on in children if he wants them to learn a language?” (Allen Rozelle); and “Silence” (Irwin Temkin).

All these workshops meant to convey the message that if we want to teach adequately in this world of ours, we must take the learner into account and use his experience and know-how to accelerate learning. This was also the emphasis presented by Charles Blatchford in his keynote address.

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Many convention participants, including perhaps a majority of Spanish teachers of English, were moved by the experiences and seemed impressed by what they saw.

Allen Rozelle

2 For the next fifteen months, although we shall keep the same address and telephone numbers, we shall be located on the 11th floor of this same building.

During ten years we occupied the whole of the 14th floor or 8, 000 sq. ft. During one year only was that space too small for all our staff to have separate rooms; for two or three years it was well occupied, then under used. Our new premises, much smaller, will still give us room to expand if the occasion arises.

We have reduced our teaching activities and will not run language classes in the future unless we do it outside our premises. We shall still run seminars to provide the services needed by the users of our products, but none will be scheduled in advance and advertised as such. They will be ad hoc meetings.

Some of us will remain available as they have been over the last 17 years, for services anywhere on earth. The public can contact the office if they wish to arrange workshops in their communities and neighborhoods, on the Silent Way, on Reading in Color (for English, French, Spanish), on Gattegno Mathematics and education of awareness.

3 Volume XI of this Newsletter is completed with this issue. Since its inception in 1971 it has not paid for itself. If it is meeting real needs of the readers (and we only know that from a handful or two who kindly wrote to us) we are prepared to continue it from September ‘82 to June ‘83. If each of the present subscribers find two others, we can see ourselves as justified in pursuing its publication even if it does not break even. The response to this appeal will be decisive.

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About Caleb Gattegno Caleb Gattegno is the teacher every student dreams of; he doesn’t require his students to memorize anything, he doesn’t shout or at times even say a word, and his students learn at an accelerated rate because they are truly interested. In a world where memorization, recitation, and standardized tests are still the norm, Gattegno was truly ahead of his time.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1911, Gattegno was a scholar of many fields. He held a doctorate of mathematics, a doctorate of arts in psychology, a master of arts in education, and a bachelor of science in physics and chemistry. He held a scientific view of education, and believed illiteracy was a problem that could be solved. He questioned the role of time and algebra in the process of learning to read, and, most importantly, questioned the role of the teacher. The focus in all subjects, he insisted, should always be placed on learning, not on teaching. He called this principle the Subordination of Teaching to Learning.

Gattegno travelled around the world 10 times conducting seminars on his teaching methods, and had himself learned about 40 languages. He wrote more than 120 books during his career, and from 1971 until his death in 1988 he published the Educational Solutions newsletter five times a year. He was survived by his second wife Shakti Gattegno and his four children.

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