=1 "Education Unlimited – Planetary"
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Education Unlimited: Planetary
That new force that sent man orbiting the earth has given him a keen awareness of earth as a whole: a small planet – so small indeed that to encircle it takes but an hour or two, less time than many a farmer needs to ride round his domain – belonging to a solar system in a boundless universe; earth, our spacecraft, with all its interdependent living beings – plants, animals and men bound together by the hazards of a common cosmic voyage through space and time.
This new force has allowed man to view from his celestial observatory with his physical eyes what Narad, the legendary sage of India, saw by psychic vision:
- “...the golden summer-earth
- That lay beneath him like a glowing bowl
- Tilted upon a table of the Gods.” [1]
Man has emerged from his space ship to become a satellite himself, and like Narad upborne by psychic space he swims in galactic space carried by his mother the universe. Thus he becomes at once planetary man and cosmic man; his territory never again will be the prehistoric village, the medieval town, the nation of the 19th century, or the continent of the 20th. The age of the huge jets has been truly the international and intercontinental age; but the coming period does much more than link nations and continents; it embraces and goes beyond them. Man's territory, henceforth, will be the whole planet. Therefore we should educate our children for the planetary age, the 21st century.
The age of nations has grown into the international age. So also the planetary age is becoming interplanetary and interstellar. Cosmic consciousness is no longer viewed as a dream consciousness, but has gained the clarity and precision of mathematical expression. For our children the cosmic explorer will be as natural as the explorer of new continents was for our ancestors. The simple fact of the discovery of America signalled the end of the Middle Ages; the ‘beep beep’ of the first sputnik signals the end of the iron-curtained sky of nations.
See also