Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
Our Relation to Children
By C. W. Leadbeater
In Oriental Countries
7. That it need not be so is shown not only by the exceptions mentioned above, but by the condition of affairs which we find existing in some oriental lands. I have not yet had the pleasure of visiting Japan, but I hear from those who have been there and have made some study of this question, that there is no country in the world where children are so well and so sensibly treated — where their relations with their elders are so completely satisfactory. Harshness, it is said, is entirely unknown, yet the children in no way presume upon the gentleness of the older people. In India and Ceylon also, on the whole, the relations of children and adults are certainly more rational than they usually are in England, though I have occasionally seen instances of undue severity there which show that those countries have not yet attained quite so high a level as Japan in this respect.
8. No doubt this is partly due to the difference of race. The oriental child usually has not the irrepressible animal spirits and the intense physical activity of his English representative, nor has he his pronounced aversion to mental exertion. Strange and incomprehensible as it would sound to the ears of a British schoolboy, the Indian child is really eager to learn, and is always willing to do any amount of work out of school-hours in order that he may make more rapid progress. It is no injustice to the average English boy to say that he regards play as the most important part of his life, and that he looks upon lessons as distinctly a bore to be avoided as far as possible, or perhaps as a kind of game which he has to play against the teacher. If the latter can force him to learn anything, that counts as a score to the side of authority: but if he can anyhow escape without learning a lesson, then he in turn has scored a point. In the East, such a child as this is the exception and not the rule; the majority of them are really anxious to learn, and co-operate intelligently with their teacher instead of offering him ceaseless though passive resistance.
9. Perhaps if I describe a little incident which I have more than once witnessed in Ceylon, it will help my readers to understand how different the position of children really is in an oriental race. Readers of The Arabian Nights will remember how it constantly happens that when some king or great man is sitting in judgement, a casual passer-by — perhaps a porter or beggar — breaks in and offers his opinion on the matter in hand, and is politely listened to, instead of being summarily arrested or ejected for such a breach of the proprieties.
10. Impossible as this seems to us, it was undoubtedly absolutely true to life, and on a smaller scale the same sort of thing occurs today, as I myself have seen. It came in the course of my work to travel about among the villages of Ceylon, trying to induce their residents to appreciate the advantages of education, and to found schools in which their children could be systematically taught their own religion instead of being left either to the rather haphazard instruction of the monks at the pansalas, or to the proselytizing efforts of the Christian missionaries.
11. When I arrived at a village I called upon the headman, and asked him to convoke the inhabitants to hear what I had to say; and after the address the chief people of the place usually held a sort of council, to decide where and how their school should be built and how they could best set about the work. Such a council was generally held in the verandah of the headman's house or under a great tree close by, with the whole village in attendance around the debaters.
12. More than once on such occasions I have seen a small boy of ten or twelve stand up respectfully before the great people of his little world, and suggest, deferentially, that if the school were erected in the place proposed it would make it exceedingly inconvenient for such and such children to attend; and in every case the small boy was treated precisely as an adult would have been, the local grandees listening courteously and patiently, and allowing their due weight to the juvenile's arguments. What would happen if in England an agricultural labourer's child publicly offered a suggestion to the county magnates gathered in solemn assembly, one hardly dares to imagine; probably that child's suppression would be summary and unpleasant; but as a matter of fact the situation is absolutely unthinkable under our present conditions — more is the pity!
