Shanta waved good-bye to them from the veranda and a few minutes later they came in sight of the parked jeep.
"The school's on the other side of the village," explained Vijaya as he started the motor. "We have to take the bypass. It goes down and then up again."
Down through terraced fields of rice and maize and sweet potatoes, then on the level, along a contour line, with a muddy little fishpond on the left and an orchard of breadfruit trees on the right, and finally up again through more fields, some green, some golden--and there was the schoolhouse, white and spacious under its towering shade trees.
"And down there," said Mary Sarojini, "are our scarecrows."
Will looked in the direction she was pointing. In the nearest of the terraced fields below them the yellow rice was almost ready to harvest. Two small boys in pink loincloths and a little girl in a blue skirt were taking turns at pulling the strings that set in motion two life-sized marionettes attached to poles at either end of the narrow field. The puppets were of wood, beautifully carved and clothed, not in rags, but in the most splendid draperies. Will looked at them in astonishment.
"Solomon in all his glory," he exclaimed, "was not arrayed like one of these."
But then Solomon, he went on to reflect, was only a king; these gorgeous scarecrows were beings of a higher order. One was a Future Buddha, the other a delightfully gay, East Indian version of God the Father as one sees him in the Sistine Chapel, swooping down over the newly created Adam. With each tug of the string the Future Buddha wagged his head, uncrossed his legs from the lotus posture, danced a brief fandango in the air, then crossed them again and sat motionless for a moment until another jerk of the string once more disturbed his meditations. God the Father, meanwhile, waved his outstretched arm, wagged his forefinger in portentous warning, opened and shut his horsehair-fringed mouth and rolled a pair of eyes which, being made of glass, flashed comminatory fire at any bird that dared to approach the rice. And all the time a brisk wind was fluttering his draperies, which were bright yellow, with a bold design--in brown, white and black--of tigers and monkeys, while the Future Buddha's magnificent robes of red and orange rayon bellied and flapped around him with an Aeolian jingling of dozens of little silver bells.
"Are all your scarecrows like this?" Will asked.
"It was the Old Raja's idea," Vijaya answered. "He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours."
"Make them dance," said Tom Krishna, "make them wiggle." He laughed delightedly.
Vijaya stretched out an enormous hand and patted the child's dark curly head. "That's the spirit!" And turning back to Will, "Quote 'gods' unquote," he said in what was evidently an imitation of the Old Raja's manner, "--their one great merit apart from scaring birds and quote 'sinners' unquote, and occasionally, perhaps, consoling the miserable, consists in this: being raised aloft on poles, they have to be looked up at; and when anyone looks up, even at a god, he can hardly fail to see the sky beyond. And what's the sky? Air and scattered light; but also a symbol of that boundless and (excuse the metaphor) pregnant emptiness out of which everything, the living and the inanimate, the puppet makers and their divine marionettes, emerge into the universe we know--or rather that we think we know."
Mary Sarojini, who had been listening intently, nodded her head. "Father used to say," she volunteered, "that looking up at birds in the sky was even better. Birds aren't words, he used to say. Birds are real. Just as real as the sky." Vijaya brought the car to a standstill. "Have a good time," he said as the children jumped out. "Make them dance and wiggle."
Shouting, Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini ran down to join the little group in the field below the road.
"And now for the more solemn aspects of education." Vijaya turned the jeep into the driveway that led up to the schoolhouse. "I'll leave the car here and walk back to the station. When you've had enough, get someone to drive you home." He turned off the ignition and handed Will the key.
In the school office Mrs. Narayan, the Principal, was talking across her desk to a white-haired man with a long, rather doleful face like the face of a lined and wrinkled bloodhound.
"Mr. Chandra Menon," Vijaya explained when the introductions had been made, "is our Under-Secretary of Education."
"Who is paying us," said the Principal, "one of his periodical visits of inspection."
"And who thoroughly approves of what he sees," the Under-Secretary added with a courteous bow in Mrs. Narayan's direction.
Vijaya excused himself. "I have to get back to my work," he said and moved towards the door.
"Are you specially interested in education?" Mr. Menon enquired.
"Specially ignorant would be more like it," Will answered. "I was merely brought up, never educated. That's why I'd like to have a look at the genuine article."
"Well, you've come to the right place," the Under-Secretary assured him. "New Rothamsted is one of our best schools."
"What's your criterion of a good school?" Will asked.
"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 ev
en 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 the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence--his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn't recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he's working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up? All children are good hypnotic subjects--so good that four out of five of them can be talked into somnambulism. In adults the proportion is reversed. Four out of five of them can never be talked into somnambulism. Out of any hundred children, which are the twenty who will grow up to be suggestible to the pitch of somnambulism?"
"Can you spot them in advance?" Will asked. "And if so, what's the point of spotting them?"
"We can spot them," Mr. Menon answered. "And it's very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in your part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty percent that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies."
"Dangerous?"
"Because these people are the propagandist's predestined victims. In an old-fashioned, prescientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty percent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it's very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they're young. Once they've been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained not to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you'd be well advised to reorganize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence."
"Which is the state of things, I gather, in Pala?"
"Precisely," said Mr. Menon. "And that's why our potential somnambulists don't constitute a danger."
"Then why do you go to the trouble of spotting them in advance?"
"Because, if it's properly used, their gift is so valuable."
"For Destiny Control?" Will questioned, remembering those therapeutic swans and all the things that Susila had said about pressing one's own buttons.
The Under-Secretary shook his head. "Destiny Control doesn't call for anything more than a light trance. Practically everybody's capable of that. The potential somnambulists are the twenty percent who can go into very deep trance. And it's in very deep trance--and only in very deep trance--that a person can be taught how to distort time."
"Can you distort time?" Will enquired.
Mr. Menon shook his head. "Unfortunately I could never go deep enough. Everything I know had to be learned the long, slow way. Mrs. Narayan was more fortunate. Being one of the privileged twenty percent, she could take all kinds of educational short cuts that were completely closed to the rest of us."
"What sort of short cuts?" Will asked, turning to the Principal.
"Short cuts to memorizing," she answered, "short cuts to calculating and thinking and problem solving. One starts by learning how to experience twenty seconds as ten minutes, a minute as half an hour. In deep trance it's really very easy. You listen to the teacher's suggestions and you sit there quietly for a long, long time. Two full hours--you'd be ready to take your oath on it. When you've been brought back, you look at your watch. Your experience of two hours was telescoped into exactly four minutes of clock time."
"How?"
"Nobody knows how," said Mr. Menon. "But all those anecdotes about drowning men seeing the whole of their life unfolding before them in a few seconds are substantially true. The mind and the nervous system--or rather some minds and some nervous systems--happen to be capable of this curious feat; that's all that anybody knows. We discovered the fact about sixty years ago, and since then we've been exploiting it. Exploiting it, among other things, for educational purposes."
"For example," Mrs. Narayan resumed, "here's a mathematical problem. In your normal state it might take you the best part of half an hour to solve. But now you distort time to the point where one minute is subjectively the equivalent of thirty minutes. Then you set to work on your problem. Thirty subjective minutes later it's solved. But thirty subjective minutes are one clock minute. Without the least sense of rush or strain you've been working as fast as one of those extraordinary calculating boys, who turn up from time to time. Future geniuses like Ampere and Gauss, or future idiots like Dase--but all of them, by some built-in trick of time distortion, capable of getting through an hour's hard work in a couple of minutes--sometimes in a matter of seconds. I'm only an average student; but I could go into deep trance, which meant that I could be taught how to telescope my time into a thirtieth of its normal span. Result: I was able to cover far more intellectual ground than I could possibly have covered if I'd had to do all my learning in the ordinary way. You can imagine what happens when somebody with a genius IQ is also capable of time distortion. The results are fantastic!"
"Unfortunately," said Mr. Menon, "they're not very common. In the last two generations we've had precisely two time distorters of real genius, and only five or six runners-up. But what Pala owes to those few is incalculable. So it's no wonder that we keep a sharp lookout for potential somnambulists!"
"Well, you certainly ask plenty of searching questions about your little pupils," Will concluded after a brief silence. "What do you do when you've found the answers?"
"We start educating accordingly," said Mr. Menon. "For example, we ask questions about every child's physique and temperament. When we have the answers, we sort out all the shyest, t
ensest, most overresponsive and introverted children, and assemble them in a single group. Then, little by little, the group is enlarged. First a few children with tendencies towards indiscriminate sociability are introduced. Then one or two little muscle men and muscle women--children with tendencies towards aggressiveness and love of power. It's the best method, we've found, for getting little boys and girls at the three polar extremes to understand and tolerate one another. After a few months of carefully controlled mixing, they're ready to admit that people with a different kind of hereditary makeup have just as good a right to exist as they have."
"And the principle," said Mrs. Narayan, "is explicitly taught as well as progressively applied. In the lower forms we do the teaching in terms of analogies with familiar animals. Cats like to be by themselves. Sheep like being together. Martens are fierce and can't be tamed. Guinea pigs are gentle and friendly. Are you a cat person or a sheep person, a guinea-pig person or a marten person? Talk about it in animal parables, and even very small children can understand the fact of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness."
"And later on," said Mr. Menon, "when they come to read the Gita, we tell them about the link between constitution and religion. Sheep people and guinea-pig people love ritual and public ceremonies and revivalistic emotion; their temperamental preferences can be directed into the Way of Devotion. Cat people like to be alone, and their private broodings can become the Way of Self-Knowledge. Marten people want to do things, and the problem is how to transform their driving aggressiveness into the Way of Disinterested Action."
"And the way to the Way of Disinterested Action is what I was looking at yesterday," said Will. "The way that leads through woodchopping and rock climbing--is that it?"
"Woodchopping and rock climbing," said Mr. Menon, "are special cases. Let's generalize and say that the way to all the Ways leads through the redirection of power."
"What's that?"
"The principle is very simple. You take the power generated by fear or envy or too much noradrenalin, or else by some built-in urge that happens, at the moment, to be out of place--you take it and, instead of using it to do something unpleasant to someone else, instead of repressing it and so doing something unpleasant to yourself, you consciously direct it along a channel where it can do something useful, or, if not useful, at least harmless."