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World Order

SUMMER 1973

‘IRFÁN, GNOSIS, OR MYSTICAL KNOWLEDGE

Jalil Mahmoudi

BEING AND BECOMING:

THE ANISA THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT

Michael F. Kalinowski and Daniel C. Jordan

GUIDING THE PROCESS OF BECOMING:

THE ANISA THEORIES OF CURRICULUM AND TEACHING

Donald T. Streets and Daniel C. Jordan

NINE ON THE RICHTER

A Short Story by W. Marissa Heller

MARJORY

O. Z. Whitehead and Marzieh Gail

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence and changes of address should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription: Regular mail USA, $4.50; Domestic student rate, $3.50; Foreign, $5.00. Domestic single copy, $1.25; Foreign single copy, $1.35.

Copyright © 1973, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

IN THIS ISSUE

1 The Answer to Our Ills

Editorial

2 Interchange: Letters to and from the Editor

5 ‘Irfán, Gnosis, or Mystical Knowledge

by Jalil Mahmoudi

17 Being and Becoming: The ANISA Theory

of Development, by Michael F. Kalinowski

and Daniel C. Jordan

29 Guiding the Process of Becoming: The ANISA

Theories of Curriculum and Teaching,

by Donald T. Streets and Daniel C. Jordan

42 Nine on the Richter

by W. Marissa Heller

44 Marjory

by O. Z. Whitehead and Marzieh Gail

48 Summer Porch

a poem by May Miller

49 Malkum Khán: Reformer or What?

a book review by Firuz Kazemzadeh

52 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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The Answer to Our Ills

AMERICA “is passing through a crisis which, in its spiritual, moral, social and political aspects, is of extreme seriousness. . . .”

“The steady and alarming deterioration in the standard of morality as exemplified by the appalling increase of crime, by political corruption in ever widening and ever higher circles, by the loosening of the sacred ties of marriage; by the inordinate craving for pleasure and diversion, and by the marked and progressive slackening of parental control, is no doubt the most arresting and distressing aspect of the decline that has set in, and can be clearly perceived, in the fortunes of the entire nation.”

Those who seek to explain the degradation bring forth ingenious theories and clever suppositions, each of which undoubtedly contains elements of truth. However, the fashionable sages either do not see, or do not dare proclaim, that the crisis of contemporary civilization is in essence a religious crisis.

“Religion [Bahá’u’lláh has written] is the greatest of all means for the establishment of order in the world and for the peaceful contentment of all that dwell therein. The weakening of the pillars of religion hath strengthened the hands of the ignorant and made them bold and arrogant. Verily I say, whatsoever hath lowered the lofty station of religion hath increased the waywardness of the wicked, and the result cannot be but anarchy.”

Commenting on these lines, Shoghi Effendi writes:

“No wonder, therefore, that when, as a result of human perversity, the light of religion is quenched in men’s hearts . . . a deplorable decline in the fortunes of humanity immediately sets in, bringing in its wake all the evils which a wayward soul is capable of revealing. The perversion of human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves under such circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects. Human character is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed, the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of hope is gradually extinguished. . . .

“The recrudescence of religious intolerance, of racial animosity, and of patriotic arrogance; the increasing evidences of selfishness, of suspicion, of fear and of fraud; the spread of terrorism, of lawlessness, of drunkenness and of crime; the unquenchable thirst for, and the feverish pursuit after, earthly vanities, riches and pleasures; the weakening of family solidarity; the laxity in parental control; the lapse into luxurious indulgence; the irresponsible attitude toward marriage and the consequent rising tide of divorce; the degeneracy of art and music, the infection of literature, and the corruption of the press; the extension of the influence and activities of those ‘prophets of decadence’ who advocate companionate marriage, who preach the philosophy of nudism, who call modesty an intellectual fiction, who refuse to regard the procreation of children as the sacred and primary purpose of marriage, who denounce religion as an opiate of the people, who would, if given free rein, lead back the human race to barbarism, chaos, and ultimate extinction—these appear as the outstanding characteristics of a decadent society, a society that must either be reborn or perish.”

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

IN SOME WAYS every issue of WORLD ORDER is a special offering to our readers, but from time to time we find ourselves participating in what we consider an important publishing event—something to which we and our readers can look back with special fondness and affection and pride. Such, for example, was the Winter 1969-70 issue devoted to peace; the “Portfolio of Recent American Poems,” selected and introduced by Robert Hayden (Spring 1971), many of which have found their way into anthologies and collections of poems; the Fall 1970 issue devoted to education in honor of United Nations International Education Year; and, more recently, the Fall 1971 issue commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—an endeavor which spilled over into subsequent issues and promises even yet to provide the heart of an anthology of articles on the beloved Master.

Once again it is education which claims our attention and evokes our pride. Education —that much discussed, much maligned process—is often seen in pragmatic, utilitarian terms as the acquisition of skills to obtain a job. If such is the end of education, our schools, of whatever variety, might well be said to be fulfilling their aims.

But if education is redefined as the actualization of human potential, one must look beyond the utilitarian, the practical, the pragmatic, to a vision of the ultimate end of education—spiritual knowledge of God. Material pursuits and developments, however necessary, are not the purpose of man’s life, for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written: “Bahá’u’lláh has announced that no matter how far the world of humanity may advance in material civilization, it is nevertheless in need of spiritual virtues and the bounties of God. . . . Material development may be likened to the glass of a lamp whereas divine virtues and spiritual susceptibilities are the light within the glass.”

In this issue of WORLD ORDER we share with our readers three articles which address themselves to various aspects of education defined as the actualization of human potential. Two are part of a series of articles discussing the ANISA Comprehensive Early Education Model, being developed at the Center for the Study of Human Potential at the School of Education of the University of Massachusetts. In our Fall 1968 Interchange, when ANISA (American National Institute for Social Advancement) was being organized “to acquire or build facilities and implement programs designed to foster the expression of human potential in persons of all ages, but with particular emphasis on infants and children in those areas of the nation where no other agency is working successfully to counteract the effects of deprivation,” WORLD ORDER greeted ANISA and expressed the hope that the sapling would grow into a mighty tree.

In our Spring 1972 issue we published the first in a series—an overview of the purpose and hopes of the ANISA Model. Written by Daniel C. Jordan and Donald T. Streets, it was entitled “The ANISA Model: A New Educational System for Developing [Page 3] Human Potential.” The article created a great deal of interest in educational circles and prompted a large number of letters and requests for reprints and information. It was followed, in Fall 1972, with an elaboration of the philosophical basis of the Model—Daniel C. Jordan’s and Raymond P. Shepard’s “The Philosophy of the ANISA Model.” In Spring 1973 we published S. P. Raman’s “Nutrition and Educational Planning.” Now we present two additional articles in the series. In “Being and Becoming” Michael F. Kalinowski and Daniel C. Jordan address themselves to the ANISA theory of development. In “Guiding the Process of Becoming” Donald T. Streets and Daniel C. Jordan discuss how the ANISA theory of development translates into teaching practice and curriculum. It may be that “this new direction,” as the authors speculate, “may take a hundred years to implement fully and refine,” yet the sapling greeted in 1968 does seem to be flourishing, and WORLD ORDER is happy to have participated in this significant contribution to the literature of education.

Jalil Mahmoudi’s article is not a part of the ANISA series, yet it too addresses itself to the actualization of human potential. Whereas the ANISA articles speak to the early stages of man’s development, Dr. Mahmoudi takes WORLD ORDER readers, for the first time, into the realm of Súfí mysticism and spreads before their eyes a vision of the final stages of man’s actualization of his potential—his quest for an immediate vision of God, for mystical knowledge, “Gnosis,” or “‘Irfán.”

WORLD ORDER is pleased to offer its readers another first in this issue—its first short story. M. Wendy Heller, in submitting her manuscript in December 1972, wrote, “‘Nine on the Richter’ is an allegory inspired by the current furor over earthquakes here in San Francisco. It is certainly very disquieting to live here. Managua is still in flames at this writing. And January 4 is not here yet. But, of course, Salomy’s Great Earthquake has already come, and all these minor devastations are just aftershocks.” As the Editors launch this story, we can only hope that it will be the first in a long line of short stories appearing in WORLD ORDER.

The faithful reader, who, by her objections to the Fall 1972 issue, provoked our long Interchange on the purpose and policy of the magazine in the Spring 1973 issue has written once again. Before the Spring issue was in the mail she addressed to the Editors the following lines, for which we are very grateful:

I am sorry I voiced some reservation about the Fall 1972 issue of WORLD ORDER magazine. I take it all back. For this issue—Winter 1972-73—is wonderful in every respect. I read it from cover to cover. Every article is informative and inspiring for Bahá’ís as well as non-Bahá’ís and beautifully put together.

My best wishes for your success!

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‘Irfán, Gnosis, or Mystical Knowledge

BY JALIL MAHMOUDI

SEVERAL YEARS AGO in southern Írán I witnessed a locust invasion. Swarms of insects several miles in dimension, which had originated in Africa, crossed the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf and entered Írán. Locusts of this variety—the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria)—eat every green leaf and plant in their path and are a great disaster for agriculture. Their most peculiar characteristic, to the eye of the average spectator, is their staying together when they are young and swarming together when they have grown wings. They travel in the same direction and land together in the same spot. After various lengths of stay the insects again fly away, all at the same time and again in the same direction. No one knows who directs them or how they know where or when to move.

Another interesting characteristic of these insects is their amazing cooperation and self-sacrifice. For example, when they are still wingless and have to cross a stream of water, a few of them form a bridge by attaching themselves to one another head to tail. This enables the rest to cross the water over the living bridge.

These insects have no family system, because they lay their eggs and move on; the eggs hatch later to begin life on their own. Also, they do not receive any type of education or socialization, so whatever they do must be instinctive. In other words their knowledge, action, and migration are all controlled by instincts—innate, inherited knowledge. This is virtually true with all insects, birds, and animals—but not with human beings.

It is generally assumed that human beings are endowed with very few instincts. In the absence of such innate, inherited knowledge and skill, man is endowed with other blessings which include:

1. Overlapping generations, where earlier ones can teach and socialize later ones (which is very limited in the animal kingdom);

2. Ability to learn (which is supreme in the human kingdom);

3. Ability to speak and communicate correctly and abstractly;

4. A social life which makes the process of socialization possible;

5. Ability to think and to make decisions (free will).

As a result man, in the absence of instinct, has to learn how to live and to solve the problems of his life. The sum total of all these learned and shared things is referred to as culture. Very briefly, culture consists of all that we know, all that we do, and all that we have. The two latter aspects or components of culture, namely, deeds (or norms) and possessions (or material things), depend primarily on the first, which is knowledge (or ideas). Knowledge therefore is the foundation of man’s culture and way of life.

In order to explain the various types of knowledge we must examine the various elements of the human being. There are three major elements—the body, the mind (or soul), and the spirit.

The human body is a composition of material elements and forms the biological core. The human mind (or soul) is man’s intelligence. It is the intermediary between the body and spirit. The human mind may be thought of as the tool through which the qualities of the spirit shine forth. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says “the mind is the power of human spirit. Spirit is the lamp, mind is the light which shines from the lamp. . . . Mind is the perfection of the [Page 6] spirit, and is its essential quality, as the sun’s rays are the essential necessity of the sun.”

The human spirit is the most important element which distinguishes man from the rest of the animals. It is what many philosophers refer to as the “rational soul.” It is the source of enlightenment and understanding. It is the human spirit, according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, that “as far as human ability permits discovers the realities of things and becomes cognisant of their peculiarities and effects, and of the qualities and properties of beings.” Thus, what is peculiar to man is his spirit. This spiritual aspect of man by its nature belongs to a realm set apart from man’s material side.

CONSIDERING THESE three aspects of man, man’s knowledge may be divided into three areas—empirical, philosophical, and spiritual. The empirical or positivistic knowledge is based on experimentation through human senses. This material knowledge brings about progress in science, art, and the humanities in civilization.

Philosophical or metaphysical knowledge is reason and logic based on intelligence and the power of man’s rational soul. This knowledge satisfies human needs at the intellectual level.

Spiritual or theological knowledge, also referred to as “the knowledge of God,” in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s words “is the cause of spiritual progress and attraction, and through it the perception of truth, the exaltation of humanity, divine civilisation, rightness of morals and illumination, are obtained.”

Religions are frequently considered the source of all spiritual knowledge. The Manifestations of God and the Founders of religions are thought to be the divine Teachers. To attain spiritual knowledge, various methods have been suggested over the course of history. The two major areas of thought are the schools of “intellectualism,” which is almost the same as what is referred to as philosophical, and the other one is that of “religious mysticism” or “Gnosticism.” One of the major goals of religion is for its adherents to attain this mystic or spiritual knowledge. The terminology used to denote this knowledge is “‘Irfán,” in Arabic, which is the equivalent of the word “Gnosis,” in Greek. My purpose here is to study this particular form of knowledge.

‘Irfán, from the roor ‘rf, is an Arabic word which, according to the dictionary, means to know; to recognize; to perceive; to be cognizant; to be aware; to be acquainted; to discover; to experience; to find out; to understand; to distinguish; to differentiate; etc.

Gnosis, of Greek origin, according to the dictionary means immediate knowledge of spiritual truth, especially such knowledge as professed by the ancient Gnostics and held to be attainable through faith alone; the act or process of cognition or knowing.

In almost all theistic religions this type of knowledge, or ‘Irfán, has been more or less emphasized. It deals mainly with the spiritual or mystical aspect of religion where it has a broader meaning and a deeper effect on man’s spiritual nature. It is knowledge of a divine nature dealing with a realm “beyond” the earthly, the mundane. It is on a higher plane referred to as the sphere of the “sacred” or “holy.”

The sacred, by its nature, is entirely different from that which is worldly and utilitarian. Accordingly, knowledge in this realm is vastly different from the everyday knowledge that concerns itself with material, mundane things. This type of knowledge, like the “sacred” itself, is neither utilitarian nor empirical and therefore altogether different from the ordinary usage and meaning of the word. To clarify this matter the “sacred” should be defined and explained.

Some of the major figures in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and sociology of religion—including Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Max Weber, and others— have classified the contents of human life and [Page 7] its experience into two categories. Durkheim refers to this dichotomy as “the profane” and “the sacred.” The profane refers to man’s earthly life and the routine experiences based on utilitarian needs and mundane purposes. The knowledge obtained in this sphere of life is referred to as “empirical,” or to use Pareto’s terminology, “logico-experimental,” and it serves to solve empirical problems and attain empirical goals.

The sphere of the “sacred” or “holy” is altogether in a different realm. The “sacred” deals with problems beyond the reach of empirical knowledge obtained through the so-called scientific methods and based on the experience of the senses. It involves those areas of human life which represent the spiritual aspect of religion, or the religious experience.

“Religion as an attitude toward the sacred,” Thomas F. O’Dea says, “has no end or purpose extrinsic to itself. The attitude elicited by the symbols which represent the sacred is one of intense respect.” Durkheim in trying to define religion says:

One idea which generally passes as characteristic of all that is religious, is that of the supernatural. By this is understood all sorts of things which surpass the limits of our knowledge; the supernatural is the world of the mysterious, of the unknowable, of the un-understandable. Thus religion would be a sort of speculation upon all that which evades science or distinct thought in general. “Religions diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas,” said Spencer, “are perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that the existence of the world, with all it contains and all which surrounds it, is a mystery calling for an explanation”; he thus makes them consist essentially in “the belief in the omnipresence of something which is inscrutable.” In the same manner, Max Müller sees in religion “a struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing after the Infinite.”

Durkheim in treating the subject of religion asserts, “C’est de la vie sérieuse.” He attributes the following characteristics to the sacred aspect of religion:

1. It is superior to the profane in dignity and expresses a superior seriousness.

2. Its symbols represent an intense respect.

3. It involves power and/or force.

4. It is characterized by ambiguity.

5. It is non-utilitarian.

6. It is non-empirical.

7. It does not involve knowledge.

8. It is supportive.

9. It is strength giving and sustaining.

10. It is demanding.

Rudolf Otto says: “Holiness—‘the holy’— is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion.” Otto has coined the word “numinous” from the Latin “numen” to denote “holy.” He asserts that the holy is “the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum.” “Mysterium” he uses to denote “that which is hidden and esoteric, that which is beyond conception of understanding, extraordinary and unfamiliar.” “Tremendum” denotes the “awe and the ‘natural’ emotion of fear.” “Fascinosum” denotes not only the elements of “daunting” and “awefulness” but also the majesty which is at the same time “uniquely attractive and fascinating.” Thus “the [Page 8] holy” or “numinous” according to Otto is beyond rational knowledge. In short, he believes that the holy is:

1. The real innermost core of all religion;

2. An element of “awe” or “awefulness”;

3. A living force;

4. An irreducible category of experience;

5. A specific feeling response;

6. A mystery and above all cultures;

7. Hidden and esoteric;

8. Wholly other and beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar;

9. Might, and absolute power;

10. The element of majesty or absolute overpowering.

A very close relationship can be observed in the treatment of the “sacred” by Durkheim and of the “holy” by Otto, with the notion of “charisma” introduced by Max Weber.

As mentioned before, the “sacred” belongs to the sphere of religion, and religions are founded by Prophets who are considered not ordinary persons but charismatic figures. In the treatment of charisma we can see this notion of “extraordinary” and “unusual.” Weber defines charisma as

a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.

Here, also, are some of the expressions used by Weber as aspects of “charisma,” which denote in O’Dea’s words, “a definite breaking point in the world of everydayness”:

1. Out-of-the-ordinary;

2. A source of social change;

3. A source or element of authority;

4. Voluntarily respected, accepted, and followed;

5. Specifically foreign to economic considerations;

6. Alien to the established institutions of society;

7. Total or partial abnegator of the Old Orders—“It is written . . . , but I say unto you . . .”;

8. Unusual;

9. Spontaneous;

10. Creative.

The last three characteristics of charisma— “unusual,” “spontaneous,” and “creative” described by Weber—are probably the most important aspects of the “sacred.” They are practically the same attributes which most theologians attribute to God. O’Dea, for example, has written that

these three characteristics coincide remarkably with the attributes which theologians in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions have attributed to God. God is seen as radically different from his creation—“wholly other,” to use Otto’s term. He is seen as “the living God” in the terms of biblical theology, and in theologies affected by Aristotelian concepts as “Pure Act” (Actus Purus) in whom there is nothing unrealized, who has neither past nor future, but whose life is an eternal present, an infinite “now.” And he is the creator of all other beings.

IN THIS rather lengthy but precise examination of the notions of the “holy,” the “sacred,” and the “charismatic,” we can see the importance of that which is referred to as “feeling” or the “religious experience.”

‘Irfán, in one of its major aspects in the sphere of the sacred, is referred to as “religious experience.” It is understanding beyond the realm of so-called rational knowledge. It is to find, or at least to endeavor to find, the pathway leading to the sacred or the transcendent world and to understand or try to understand it. This type of knowledge closest to the deeper meaning of ‘Irfán is, in O’Dea’s words, “a [Page 9] transforming experience of inner illumination.”

As mentioned before what we are actually speaking of are the attributes of God. In most of the profound schools of mysticism and theology, God is a paradox. Is there such a thing as God? Yes, there is such a . . . as God (an Essence). Is there not such a thing as God? True, God is not a thing nor what we think He is.

It is believed that a God conceived by imagination is not any different from a God carved of stone. Each is created by man and therefore man’s creature and not his “Creator.” Thus it is concluded that God is an unknown and unknowable “Essence.”

Further questions arise. Is God static? Yes, God is static in that He does not ascend nor descend. He is all the time on His Throne of Grandeur sanctified from all human attributes.

Is God dynamic? Yes, He is dynamic in that He reaches us through His Manifestations Who appear on earth and bring us guidance. The mere fact of the existence of such a thing as “dynamic” represents the existence of a source out of which all “dynamics” spring forth. Human finite ability of reasoning and rationality is confined to its own sphere of existence and unable to grasp the mysteries which man has no senses to feel and no means to grasp, except through his mystical aspect, which is as real as the manifest sense perceptions for those who have experienced them. Therefore, it is logical to assume that there are ways to feel and/or understand the mystical aspects of existence which reasoning or empirical knowledge, as yet, has not been able to unravel and understand.

Otto believes that the understanding of the “holy” or “numinous” requires a “creative consciousness” which he defines as “the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.” Otto invites the reader to

direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no further; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings. We do not blame such an one, when he tries for himself to advance as far as he can with the help of such principles of explanation as he knows, interpreting “Aesthetics” in terms of sensuous pleasure, and “Religion” as a function of the gregarious instinct and social standards, or as something more primitive still. But the artist, who for his part has an intimate personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic experience, will decline his theories with thanks, and the religious man will reject them even more uncompromisingly.

This quest to know God and the sphere of His Holiness probably began when homo (man) became sapiens (wise). The mythology and legends of old are full of this quest. So it is also with the burning desire of man to know his own soul or himself. This is “a consciousness” which Evelyn Underhill says “absorbs or eclipses all other centers of interest.” She further claims:

It is said that St. Francis of Assisi, praying in the house of Bernard of Quintavalle, was heard to say again and again: “My God! my God! what art Thou? and what am I?” Though the words come from St. Augustine, they well represent his mental attitude. This was the only question which he thought worth asking; and it is the question which every mystic asks at the beginning and sometimes answers at the end of his quest.

[Page 10] A knowledge designed to answer questions of this nature is referred to as “mystical knowledge,” of which Max Weber says:

The unique character of mystical knowledge consists in the fact that, although it becomes more incommunicable the more strongly it is characterized by idiosyncratic content, it is nevertheless, recognized as knowledge. For mystical knowledge is not new knowledge of any facts or doctrines, but rather the perception of an overall meaning in the world. This usage of “knowledge” is intended wherever the term occurs in the numerous formulations of mystics; it denotes a practical form of knowledge. Such gnosis is basically a “possession” of something from which there may be derived a new practical orientation to the world, and under certain circumstances even new and communicable items of knowledge. But even these items will constitute knowledge of values and nonvalues within the world.

For a rational man with intellect and depth in reasoning it is probably much easier to see the many problems and questions whose answers cannot be found in the realm of reasoning and intellectualism. Empirical knowledge and science have already answered many of our material questions, but there are still many which remain in the realm of mystery. It is the answer to this type of question which may be found in the mystical or spiritual aspect of religion.

MYSTICAL or Divine Knowledge is an experience. Not every experience can be put into words, and there are many situations, conditions, and qualities which are simply unexplainable. How can you explain the taste of a mango to somebody who has never seen nor tasted one? How can you describe a rainbow and its beautiful colors to someone who was born blind? Howard Colby Ives says:

What is that mystery underlying human life which gives to events and to persons the power of mutation, of transformation? If one had never before seen a seed, nor heard of its latent life, how difficult to believe that only the cold earth, the warm sun, the descending showers and the gardener’s care were needed to cause its miraculous transformation into the growing form, the budding beauty, the intoxicating fragrance of the rose!

Or who can understand the reason why a chance perusal of a book, the presence of a friend or the meeting with a stranger often alters a determined course of action, profoundly affects our attitude toward life, and, not seldom, so nearly reaches the roots of being and the springs of action that never after is life quite the same?

Of course, there were and are those who believe they can reach the state of “knowing” and/or “recognition” of the realm of the “sacred” through the so-called intellectual rationalism. This school of thought is based on the old philosophy of Greece. Two of the major proponents of this school in the Islamic dispensation were the giants Ibn Siná (Avecinna), 980-1037, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), 1126-1198. Ibn Siná tried “to reformulate the purely rational and intellectual tradition of Helenism, to which he was an eminent heir, for and, to an extent, within the religious system of Islam.”

On the opposite side were the Súfís, or the followers of the schools of mysticism and Gnosticism in Islám. The giants in this group include such figures as Saná’í, ‘Aṭṭár, Rúmí, Ghazálí, and scores of others, who, while they may have had slight differences in their mystic thoughts, were all treading the path of mysticism and religious experience to attain the state of ‘Irfán, or true understanding. The controversy between Islamic philosophers who [Page 11] relied upon human reason to explain metaphysical problems rationally and the Súfí-mystics who followed the path of faith and intuition is an historical fact. Each school believed it could attain its goal through its particular philosophy. An interesting story of an encounter between Ibn Siná and his contemporary Shaykh Abú Sa’íd Abi’l Khayr, who was a Súfí-mystic, sheds some light on the matter.

A debate was apparently suggested by the followers of Ibn Siná and Shaykh Abú Sa’íd in an attempt to justify the position of one versus the other—that of philosophy based on reason versus mysticism based on faith.

After a three-day session, Abú Sa’íd’s disciples hastened to Ibn Siná and asked, “How did you find our master?” Ibn Siná replied, “Whatever I know he sees.” Abú Sa’íd’s response to the same question, posed by Ibn Siná’s disciples, was “Whatever we see he knows.” The Súfí master then reportedly went on to add, “Wherever we glided with ease on the wings of faith we could see your master stumbling to the peak of the mount with the cane of reason.”

The Bahá’í Approach

BAHÁ’U’LLÁH says:

Man is the supreme Talisman. Lack of a proper education hath, however, deprived him of that which he doth inherently possess. Through a word proceeding out of the mouth of God he was called into being, by one word more he was guided to recognize the Source of his education; by yet another word his station and destiny were safeguarded. The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom. If any man were to meditate on that which the Scriptures, sent down from the heaven of God’s holy Will, have revealed, he will readily recognize that their purpose is that all men shall be regarded as one soul, so that the seal bearing the words “The Kingdom shall be God’s” may be stamped on every heart, and the light of Divine bounty, of grace, and mercy may envelop all mankind.

One of the meanings of “Talisman” is something producing extraordinary, mysterious, magical, or miraculous effects. The “supreme Talisman” appears to refer to the potentialities, capacities, and abilities of man. These potentialities are the gift of God to man. If the potential is developed through education and used in the proper way, this is man’s expression of gratitude to God, which is considered worship. So actually what man does in developing his God-given abilities is his gift to God.

The foundation of man’s creation, according to Bahá’u’lláh, is based on knowing and loving God. Knowing and loving God in its broadest meaning is knowledge and love in its greatest sense. Does man have the ability and capacity to attain divine knowledge? Bahá’u’lláh’s answer to this question is in the affirmative, for He has written:

Having created the world and all that liveth and moveth therein, He, through the direct operation of His unconstrained and sovereign Will, chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him—a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation.

He further asserts that:

Upon the inmost reality of each and every created thing He hath shed the light of one [Page 12] of His names, and made it a recipient of the glory of one of His attributes. Upon the reality of man, however, He hath focused the radiance of all of His names and attributes, and made it a mirror of His own Self. Alone of all created things man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty.

The latent, potential existence and capacity need, however, to be developed in order to show forth their actuality and become realized, for Bahá’u’lláh tells us:

These energies with which the Day Star of Divine bounty and Source of heavenly guidance hath endowed the reality of man lie, however, latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. The radiance of these energies may be obscured by worldly desires even as the light of the sun can be concealed beneath the dust and dross which cover the mirror. Neither the candle nor the lamp can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it ever be possible for the mirror to free itself from its dross. It is clear and evident that until a fire is kindled the lamp will never be ignited, and unless the dross is blotted out from the face of the mirror it can never represent the image of the sun nor reflect its light and glory.

The removal of dross from the face of the mirror, to which Bahá’u’lláh refers, is beautifully demonstrated in a parable from Jalalu’d Dín-i-Rúmí, one of the great Islamic mystic poets. In his mystic masterwork, the Mathnaví, Rúmí speaks of two groups of artists, the Greeks and the Chinese. The Greeks in this story represent the mystics and the Chinese the theologians or rational philosophers. Each group claimed to be superior to the other. The king, hearing their claim, put them to the test. He ordered a large hall partitioned down the middle by a wall. He commanded one group to paint one end of the hall and the other group the other.

The Chinese asked for a hundred colors, which were furnished by the king. The Greeks asked for nothing. They said all they needed to do was “to get rid of the rust.” So while the Chinese were using the one hundred colors in their painting, the Greeks shut their door and set to polishing the walls by smoothing and removing all the soil and tarnish.

The Chinese completed their work and reported to the king. “How about the Greeks?” the king asked. Their answer was, “Ours is ready too.” The king came to see the paintings of the Chinese—excellent masterpieces without doubt. The king admired them and ordered the intervening partition removed. At first glance the king thought the Greeks had copied the Chinese, which they were not allowed to do. It did not take him long to realize that their work was but a reflection of the Chinese work, which showed up more beautifully upon the clean, polished walls of the Greeks who had only removed the rust from the walls and made it a mirror-like surface. Rúmí’s conclusion of this parable as translated by A. J. Arberry is as follows:

The Greeks, my father, are the Sufis; without repetition and books and learning, yet they have scoured their breasts clean of greed and covetousness, avarice and malice. The purity of the mirror without doubt is the heart, which receives images innumerable. The reflection of every image, whether numbered or without number, shines forth for ever from the heart alone, and for ever every new image that enters upon the heart shows forth within it free of all imperfection. They who have burnished their hearts have escaped from scent and colour; every moment, instantly, they behold Beauty.

Now a few words to clarify the notion of “Knowledge.” There are many different types of knowledge in various degrees of existence and different aspects of human life. Fundamentally, however, according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “there are two kinds of knowledge: the knowledge of the essence of a thing, and the knowledge [Page 13] of its qualities. The essence of a thing is known through its qualities, otherwise it is unknown and hidden.” He further refines this thought and asserts that “As our knowledge of things, even of created and limited things, is knowledge of their qualities and not of their essence, how is it possible to comprehend in its essence the Divine Reality, which is unlimited?”

Bahá’ís believe that God is an unknown and unknowable essence and, in Bahá’u’lláh’s words, “Immeasurably exalted in His Essence above the descriptions of His creatures. He, alone, occupieth the Seat of transcendent majesty, of supreme and inaccessible glory. The birds of men’s hearts, however high they soar, can never hope to attain the heights of His unknowable Essence.” Therefore it is only through His manifestations that we may know Him. Actually to know the manifestation of God is to know God. This kind of “knowledge,” “recognition,” or “understanding” in the Arabic language, is referred to as “‘Irfán.”

The word ‘Irfán appears in the first sentence of the original text of two of the most important books revealed by Bahá’u’lláh, the Kitáb-i-Íqán and the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. In the Kitáb-i-Íqán Shoghi Effendi translates ‘Irfán as “true understanding,” and in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas as “recognition.” Both translations are correct.

The “Kitáb-i-Íqán”

IN THE BEGINNING of the Kitáb-i-Íqán (The Book of Certitude) Bahá’u’lláh says:

No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth. Sanctify your souls, O ye peoples of the world, that haply ye may attain that station which God hath destined for you and enter thus the tabernacle which, according to the dispensations of Providence, hath been raised in the firmament of the Bayán.

To acquire a knowledge of this kind and to “attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding” a prerequisite is necessary, which is a burning desire to seek in order to kindle the fire of love. This fire must burn the veils of “self” and purify and cleanse the spirit to enable the seeker to see the truth with the eye of his heart. Bahá’u’lláh hastens to explain “detachment” in a paragraph following the above quoted passage:

The essence of these words is this: they that tread the path of faith, they that thirst for the wine of certitude, must cleanse themselves of all that is earthly—their ears from idle talk, their minds from vain imaginings, their hearts from worldly affections, their eyes from that which perisheth. They should put their trust in God, and, holding fast unto Him, follow in His way. Then will they be made worthy of the effulgent glories of the sun of divine knowledge and understanding, and become the recipients of a grace that is infinite and unseen, inasmuch as man can never hope to attain unto the knowledge of the All-Glorious, can never quaff from the stream of divine knowledge and wisdom, can never enter the abode of immortality, nor partake of the cup of divine nearness and favour, unless and until he ceases to regard the words and deeds of mortal men as a standard for the true understanding and recognition of God and His Prophets.

Needless to say, not only can the words and deeds of men not be the standard for attaining divine Knowledge, but even the human methods used to acquire knowledge of [Page 14] reality are liable to error. Moreover, “true understanding and recognition of God and His Prophets” need a pure and shining heart, the light of which has not been obscured by clouds of prejudice and superstition and defiled by materialistic greeds and carnal desires.

The “Kitáb-i-Aqdas”

THE Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Bahá’u’lláh’s Most Holy Book, begins with these words:

The first duty prescribed by God for His servants is the recognition of Him Who is the Day Spring of His Revelation and the Fountain of His laws, Who representeth the Godhead in both the Kingdom of His Cause and the world of creation. Whoso achieveth this duty hath attained unto all good; and whoso is deprived thereof, hath gone astray, though he be the author of every righteous deed. It behooveth every one who reacheth this most sublime station, this summit of transcendent glory, to observe every ordinance of Him Who is the Desire of the World. These twin duties are inseparable. Neither is acceptable without the other. Thus hath it been decreed by Him Who is the Source of Divine inspiration.

Besides its spiritual and mystical meanings, a commandment of this magnitude has many aspects and ramifications worthy of close attention. To fathom the depth of a statement of this nature with its divine connotation is beyond our ability. As far as the limited understanding of this writer can comprehend, however, some of its theological and sociological aspects are as follows:

From the theological point of view, the duty of “recognition” of the Manifestation of God is prescribed to all. There is no distinction. Every person is made responsible for recognizing Him, individually and independently. It implies a challenge of independent and unfettered search for truth which introduces a sense of meaning into the spiritual life of every human being. It also advocates a sense of purpose and implies a sense of justice and freedom. Justice in its deeper meaning has been repeatedly and emphatically mentioned by Bahá’u’lláh as one of the most important aspects of His dispensation; He speaks of it in the following words:

O Son of Spirit!

The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behooveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.

Thus to “see with thine own eyes” and to “know of thine own knowledge” bring about an unprecedented freedom in the area of religion which connects all human beings with the Manifestation and with God without an intermediary, such as clergy or priest. Freedom of this nature is the freedom of using all God-given faculties, talents, and abilities—and includes the freedom of thought. Thus a freedom to think and to choose brings an unprecented dignity which includes the spiritual freedom of man from man.

From the sociological point of view, the command is to know the charismatic Figure Who claims His charisma comes from the highest possible source (God) and to comply with the norms and values promulgated by Him, these being considered sacred norms and values. Another sociological ramification of this commandment is the abolition of religious aristocracy which existed in most, if not all, religions of the past. It is the religious stratification (clergy-laity) based on religious knowledge of which Max Weber says:

In a church organized as an institution, it works out in practice that the requirement [Page 15] of fides explicita is limited to priests, preachers, and theologians, all of whom have been trained in dogmatics. Such an aristocracy of those trained and knowledgeable in dogmatics arises within every religion that has been systematized into a theology. These persons presently claim, in different degrees and with varying measures of success, that they are the real carriers of the religion. The view that the priest must demonstrate his capacity to understand more and believe more than is possible for the average human mind is still widely diffused today, particularly among the peasantry. This is only one of the forms in which there comes to expression in religion the class qualification resulting from special education that is found in every type of bureaucracy. . . .

This has been true in all religions of the past, including Islám, which is the latest before the Bahá’í Dispensation. Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the famous Muslim savant, divided members of society into three strata—the philosophers, the theologians, and the common people.

Considering the situation of the world and the illiteracy of the masses in the past, particularly “among the peasantry” to which Weber refers, an aristocracy based on religious knowledge was probably unavoidable. With regard to the ability of the people of the world to understand the Words of God, Bahá’u’lláh, however, asserts that

The understanding of His words and the comprehension of the utterances of the Birds of Heaven are in no wise dependent upon human learning. They depend solely upon purity of heart, chastity of soul, and freedom of spirit. This is evidenced by those who, today though without a single letter of the accepted standards of learning, are occupying the loftiest seats of knowledge; and the garden of their hearts is adorned, through the showers of divine grace, with the roses of wisdom and the tulips of understanding. Well is it with the sincere in heart for their share of the light of a mighty Day!

Thus we may conclude that to attain every type of knowledge one must have a proper education. Attaining the spiritual knowledge, which we referred to as “‘Irfán,” “Gnosis,“ or “mystical knowledge,” of the Manifestation of God and His words, one must have “purity of heart, chastity of soul, and freedom of spirit.”

May the following prayer of Bahá’u’lláh help us all attain this goal:

I ask Thee, O Ruler of Existence and King of Creation, to transmute the brass of existence into gold by the elixir of Thy Revelation and Wisdom; then reveal unto men by a comprehensive Book that which will enrich them by Thy Riches.

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Being and Becoming: The ANISA Theory of Development

BY MICHAEL F. KALINOWSKI AND DANIEL C. JORDAN

MAN REPRESENTS the highest expression of the organization of matter in the universe. And as part of the universe, he is describable by the same properties as other forms, but with one important exception—namely, human consciousness. Julian Huxley affirms that man is “the only repository of cosmic self-awareness in the universe,” and that makes him “managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution.”

In order to accommodate theoretically the mystery of life, let alone the phenomenon of consciousness as its most highly evolved attribute, most biologists have adopted “an ‘organismic’ position which holds that while organisms are one with nature in being composed of matter, there is ‘something more’ which is yet not disjunctive with matter.” Thus, if education is to address the problem of fostering the development of the child, it must deal with that “something more.” It must impart to each child the knowledge that it is his nature to be within the world and yet to transcend it; that of all things, man is the vehicle of the evolution of the universe and the highest expression of dynamic unity in all existence—an expression which constitutes the process of his becoming.

But how can our schools be reconstituted to facilitate and support that process? To provide each child with the experience and knowledge that will ultimately enable him to direct the process of his own becoming and to cope with the tests and difficulties he must face as he strives to transcend himself and change his world, we need a mise-en-scène, a guide, a theory that explains the nature of becoming, a theory of development. Without such a theory, there is little hope that our own advancement can be deliberately directed with any consistency and predictability.

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The ANISA Model is a blueprint for a new comprehensive educational system. It is based on a philosophy that defines man as a spiritual being and a coherent body of theory concerning development, curriculum, teaching, and administration consistent with the philosophy. The New England Program in Teacher Education, Durham, New Hampshire, has provided $242,000 toward the development of the Model currently being undertaken at the Center for the Study of Human Potential, School of Education, University of Massachusetts, at Amherst.

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[Page 18] Education today lacks that theory. Although child psychology possesses a vast body of information, the field is relatively deficient in explanatory theory. As Paul Henry Mussen, John Janeway Conger, and Jerome Kagan lament:

There is no single comprehensive theory encompassing the vast body of accumulated data in the field of developmental psychology. A complete theory would have to include explanatory concepts accounting for the origins, as well as the mechanisms of development and change, of all aspects of psychological functioning—motor, cognitive, emotional, and social. It may be impossible to construct such an ideal theory; certainly no one has accomplished it yet.

That no one has accomplished it yet is perhaps understandable; that so few have even attempted it is lamentable.

Of the few theoretical attempts that have been made, most have assumed a final state or culmination in development. Such closed-system models do not adequately explain the dynamic process of development because they give no satisfactory explanation of novelty or creativity. We believe this to be a serious weakness because it fails to account for one of the most fundamental characteristics of development, its very open-endedness. Furthermore, most of the descriptions of human life developed to date seem to leave almost no room for the kind of self-determination that can transcend the programming of family, culture, and tradition. In other words the possibility of what Whitehead calls the “creative advance into novelty” has been ignored. The phenomenon of transcendence has been disregarded.

For a theory of development to be useful, it must explain the phenomenon of transcendence and be applicable to all men; it must be able to

identify the sequential steps between two levels of maturity, to explain how one is transformed into the other, to discover the variables that effect the transformation, the factors that either facilitate or retard its occurrence, and the uniformities and differences by which it is characterized.

To be comprehensive, it must arise from a philosophy that incorporates a view of man full enough and rich enough to account for and illumine the concrete experience we have of our own transformation over time as we interact with the environment. The ANISA theory of development is derived from just such a philosophy.

ANISA Definition of Development

WE CONSIDER “development” synonymous with the process of becoming—the process of translating potentiality into actuality. It is comprised of any changes which have a continuous direction and which culminate in phases that are qualitatively new.

One of the main philosophical principles underlying the ANISA Model is that [Page 19] “existence” cannot be dissociated from “process.” The notions of process and existence presuppose each other. As soon as the notion of process is admitted as basic to an understanding of existence, the idea of potentiality becomes indispensable. Alfred N. Whitehead has written that

If the universe be interpreted in terms of static actuality, then potentiality vanishes. Everything is just what it is. Succession is mere appearance, rising from the limitation of perception. But if we start with process as fundamental, then the actualities of the present are deriving their characters from the process, and are bestowing their characters upon the future. Immediacy is the realization of the potentialities of the past, and is the storehouse of the potentialities of the future.

There are two basic classes of potentiality, biological and psychological; the character of the actualities of both are derived from biological and psychological processes respectively. A process refers to the ordered expression of a potentiality. Much remains to be discovered about the precise nature of that ordered expression. E. S. Gollin has thus defined the primary task of developmental research as providing

observations which will be useful in clarifying the character and properties of central processes and in establishing their role in the determination of functional relationships throughout development. (Emphasis added)

There are, no doubt, an infinite number of potentialities, each one of which may become actualized (i.e., translated into a power of the organism) through a process. We have no way of determining them all. Instead we must identify those processes which are central—those which have the greatest importance for the subsequent life of the individual. The importance of a process is defined by two criteria: (1) the degree to which it engenders effectance (i.e., the degree of control over the environment it brings to the organism), and (2) the extent to which it is fundamental to other processes (i.e., the extent to which it creates or extends potentiality).

Processes themselves are initiated and maintained through interaction with the environment. This point of view is a central thesis in behavior genetics and brings a fresh perspective to the controversy over whether the underlying growth of organisms is due to external (environmental) or internal (genetic) causes. The dichotomy between heredity and environmental influences is not a useful or realistic distinction. It is more productive to understand how the expression of genetic endowment presupposes environmental influences and why the nature of environmental pressures [Page 20] cannot be understood apart from the genetic predisposition of the organism and the modification of the environment due to the organism’s presence within it.

This reinterpretation has major implications for the study of development, shifting the focus of inquiry away from the study of innate vs. acquired characteristics as separate elements and concentrating rather upon the nature of the interaction between the organism and its environment. The quality of the interaction determines, in large part, the quality of the expression and therefore has extensive implications for the definition of teaching and a curriculum rationale. If the basic proposition in the ANISA theory of development is the definition of development as the processes of translating potentiality into actuality—processes which are sustained by interacting with the environment—the theory must define the nature of potentiality and actuality, explain the meaning of environment, and disclose the essentials of interaction. We thus proceed by classification of the phenomena under consideration and definition of the key terms used to explain relationships among them.

Classification of Potentialities

AS NOTED ABOVE, we have established two basic categories of potentialities— biological and psychological. The ANISA theory of development fixes nutrition as the primary element in actualizing biological potentialities and identifies learning as the main factor in the actualization of psychological potentialities.

The assimilation of nutrients and oxygen from the external environment is the basic form of interaction that sustains the processes underlying the release of biological potentialities. If the interaction and the environments are right and if there are no genetic deficiencies, the biological integrity of the organism will be safeguarded. Without that integrity psychological potentialities cannot be developed fully. The implications for education should be fairly obvious.

The psychological potentialities of man have been organized into five categories: psychomotor, perceptual, cognitive, affective, and volitional. We have identified what we believe to be the central processes that underlie learning competence in each category and are the means through which these potentialities become actualized. The ANISA Model is functionally defined by specifications which have been written on each process. These specifications form the basis of the process aspect of the curriculum and are the foundation for the ANISA competency-based teacher preparation program.

We believe the quality of any educational system of the future will be determined by the extent to which it can help children translate potentiality into actuality—a process Whitehead describes as “concrescence.” Concrescence not only includes everything normally conveyed by the word development but goes beyond it to encompass [Page 21] man’s unique ability to go beyond himself—the ability to accumulate the past and bring it to bear on the present while structuring the future, thereby moving perpetually beyond any present state of being. Learning is the means of that “moving beyond”— the “creative advance into novelty.”

Without learning competence it will become increasingly difficult to cope with the rapidity of social change. Without learning competence “future shock” will become a more pervasive, destructive force. Without learning competence, we will not only lose control over evolution but will likely atrophy and regress ourselves.

Any educational system staffed with teachers who do not have a clear understanding of the nature of learning competence and its power in facilitating the release of potentialities is not assuming responsibility for preparing its students to shape their own destinies and manage the future wisely.

Classification of Environments

DEVELOPMENT never occurs in a vacuum. It is always the result of an organism’s interaction with an environment. Since the nature of the interaction is determined not only by the organism but also by the kind of environment, it is necessary to gain some conceptual clarity about the nature of the environment. We have thus established four classifications of environments:

A. The Physical Environment. This includes everything except human beings. It can be broken down into three sub-categories: mineral, vegetable, and animal.

B. The Human Environment. This includes all human beings.

C. The Unknowns. The ability to know when we do not know is a natural phenomenon associated with consciousness. Ordinarily we feel compelled to find out how we are related to unknowns; we have curiosity built into us.

These three categories—the physical environment, the human environment, and the unknowns—are hierarchically conceived. The human environment contains physical matter; and both the physical and human environments have unknown aspects to them. There is, though, a fourth environment.

D. The Self. The physical, the human, and the unknown environments are all represented in the self. The body is composed of physical elements; the self we are discussing is a human self, and the unknowns in a Self include its as yet unexpressed potentialities, its future, and the phenomenon of its own personal mortality. The self is a special case of the human environment, special because for a particular person it becomes the most constant aspect of his total environment. It can never be abandoned or left behind. Though constantly present, it also is changing. Whitehead reminds us that process and a Self require each other; in separation all meaning evaporates and neither can be understood. The forms of process derive their character from the individuals involved and the environments in which they exist; the characters of the individuals can only be understood in terms of the process in which they are implicated.

As the self interacts with the environment, its potentialities (expressed through the processes) are actualized—that is, they become powers. Because development is ordered, these powers are not expressed in random fashion; they are structured. And as they are structured, factual information (which, for the most part, is the culture being transmitted to the next generation) is fused and structured with them to form the [Page 22] attitudes and values which constitute the character and personality of the human being. The norms of a culture appear in the values (structuring) of personalities that make up the society in which the culture inheres. Thus there is a definite, though not complete, congruence or isomorphism between personality and culture. When there is a very high degree of congruence, both personalities and the society they comprise will be very stable. There will be a low toleration for innovation, and change or creativity will be practically nonexistent. When there is little congruence, both society and the personalities comprising it will be highly unstable. In extreme cases personal identities crumble, and the social system collapses. Thus novelty by itself is devastating. Potentialities must be ordered as they are actualized; otherwise the power they represent becomes suppressive of further potential. Powers without structures are like rivers without banks; they are destructive.

The basic requirement for releasing the potentialities of individuals and societies at an optimum rate is therefore maintenance of a balance between order and change. Whitehead has explained that

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid

order. . . .

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

The optimal structuring of personality thus reflects the balance between order and change. The structuring occurs in relationship to the various environments with which the self is interacting, including its own self. Thus different value systems reflecting these environments emerge. We can therefore have an effect on the structuring and its rate by arranging the environment in particular ways.

In summary, the development of a Self—the structuring of process fused with content, the formation of values—is the fundamental expression of creativity inherent in all human beings. The quality of this integrated structuring determines personal effectance—its mastery in relating to the environment and thus the capacity for self-transcendence and continuing development.

The Rhythm of Development

THE PROCESS of becoming presupposes movement. That movement has a rhythm. The essence of rhythm is pattern and timing. We will deal with pattern first.

Pattern. In development, pattern is reflected in sequence. Because development is an orderly process and because we conceive it to be any change which has a continuous direction and which culminates in a phase that is qualitatively new, we define a developmental sequence as the order of those changes in an organism that yield relatively permanent but novel increments not only in its structure but in its modes of funCtioning as well. These changes involve passage through successive stages, each of which presupposes its antecedent and is in turn a prerequisite to its successor. A developmental sequence is said to be invariant if the order of passage through its successive stages is universally constant. A stage is a section of a developmental [Page 23] sequence circumscribing a basic unit of change in an organism. In the actualization of both biological and psychological potentialities, a stage—the basic unit of change— consists of differentiation and integration. In psychological expressions, a sub-stage, generalization, is added. The most obvious example of this on the biological level is the differentiation of cells and their integration into particular organs, bones, or tissues.

In our efforts to define these sub-stages on the psychological level, we reviewed the major theories of learning and development and found the processes of differentiation, integration, and generalization common to and implicit in all of them. These then became the attributes of a single stage in the expression of psychological potentialities; and the conscious ability to differentiate, integrate, and generalize aspects of experience became the criterion for judging learning competence.

Differentiation is the ability to break down experience, whether internal or external, into separate contrastable elements. Integration is the ability to combine those elements in a new way thereby providing new information, new feelings, new skills, and new perceptions which may or may not become expressed immediately in some form of overt behavior. Generalization is the ability to utilize that recombination in other situations. Through these processes potentiality is translated into actuality, and another stage is negotiated. Control over them constitutes learning competence.

The processes of differentiation, integration, and generalization are neither random nor haphazard. The orderly process of development is guided by conscious or unconscious intention or subjective aim, which determines what becomes abstracted, and how the abstracted or differentiated elements are then integrated and generalized. In other words, purpose inheres in subjective aim and has effects on the material world as well as on the structuring of personality.

The changes that occur in the growing human being can only be comprehended in their entirety if development is regarded as a continuum, sequence being the general hierarchical pattern in which this creative advance into novelty is accomplished. The development of a human being depends on a combination of a genetically determined series of stages, which he has in common with his biological ancestors, and processes of learning that provide the means by which new stages with new properties can be developed over a single lifetime.

Completing one stage prepares the organism for the next stage in the sequence. Higher units acquire new properties in the same sense as the combination of hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions leads to a new substance, water, with new properties that were not manifest in either of the separate constituents. It is a basic characteristic of the hierarchy that each higher level is related to the next lower level by what Michael Polanyi calls boundary conditions. The higher level can gain control over the lower level only by controlling the operations which are left open, not completely determined, by the operations at the lower level. A higher level therefore can only come into existence through a process not manifest at a lower level. Polyani refers to the hierarchical structure of creation, rising from inanimate to the living and on to [Page 24] the subsequent layers of each biotic level, as the process of emergence which has culminated in the reality of man. In Whitehead’s terms, the already realized data of the antecedent world forms the basis of the occasion of immediate experience which, when fused with subjective aim or purpose, enables one to transcend that “boundary” and attain a higher level of organizational complexity. In other words, aspiration, ideals, hopes, or sense of purpose cannot be dismissed from a science of man and are essential to any theory of human development.

Timing. The ANISA theory of development emphasizes the importance of timing— the other major aspect of the rhythm of becoming. Though each child actualizes potential within a general pattern shared by all children, regardless of whether he lives on Lake Atitlan in the highlands of northwest Guatemala, near the Ravine of Pirre in the mountainous northeast corner of Uganda, or within walking distance of Harvard Square in Cambridge, he does so according to his own unique timetable and in his own unique style.

The dimension of time is an intrinsic property of process; it is a crucial factor in releasing potentialities at an optimum rate. The idea is not new. Plato, Quintilian, Plutarch, Pestalozzi, Huarte, Fenelon, Watts, Fordyce, Vives, Comenius, Rousseau, Montessori, and Neill, to name but a few, were aware that timing played a role; and each contributed to the understanding of the importance of that role.

Gradually evidence that there are different categories of timing in the expression of both biological and psychological potentialities has accumulated. A sensitive period is a limited period during which an organism is particularly amenable to certain experiences that will usually bring about significant and lasting changes in tissue growth physiological functioning, and/or psychological functioning. Maria Montessori claims to be the first to “discover the sensitive periods of infancy and make use of them from the standpoint of education,” and attributes her interest to the Dutch biologist Hugo deVries.

With the advent of experimental embryology, Dareste, at the turn of the century, and Stockard, some thirty years later, suggested that, if the susceptibility to a particular developmental modifier is limited only to the sensitive period and if the presence or absence of that modifier during the sensitive period results in permanent damage or change, the sensitive period should be designated a critical period.

The existence of sensitive and critical periods in biological development is well established. For example, the effects of the tranquilizer Thalidomide and the disease rubella on unborn children at specific times are now well known.

Another kind of sensitive period is reflected in growth spurts. The growth spurt associated with adolescence is apparent to all of us. What is not so well known is the clearly established relationship between the rhythm of growth in stature, skeletal maturation, and the development of the reproductive system. In normal girls, for instance, the menarche generally occurs during the period immediately following the year of maximum incremental growth in height. These periods are associated with a variety of psychological phenomena and therefore have many educational implications.

[Page 25] Other forms of sensitive periods can be identified within different “biological rhythms.” Such rhythms underlie most of what we assume to be constant in ourselves. We are usually unaware that our body temperature, blood pressure, pulse and respiration rates, blood sugar, hemoglobin, and amino acid levels are changing in a circadian rhythm. Adrenal hormones in our blood and concentrations of essential biochemicals throughout our nervous system fluctuate periodically. Smoothness of function seems to depend upon a high degree of integration among these “circadian production lines.” Inside we know we are different from one hour of the day to the next. Our strength varies, depending upon biological time of day; our capacity to perform well on tests, for instance, varies as do many other psychological capacities. We also have various monthly, seasonal, and annual cycles.

The appearance of sensitive and critical periods in psychological development, while indicated, has not yet been fully documented. It must be kept in mind that, while these periods in biological development may appear in all children at roughly the same age, in psychological development these periods appear at times generally unique to the individual. For the most part modern researchers and theorists are very cautious about ascribing criticality in the sense of “now-or-never” to any given developmental phase or period. Clearly more research must be done.

One special kind of sensitive period occurs with the consolidation of learning at any given level. As noted earlier, with central processes there is an extension of potentiality the moment a generalization has occurred. If the process of actualizing the newly created potentialities is not initiated shortly thereafter, that sensitive period is missed, the development of the next phase is delayed, and a deceleration in the rate potentialities are released occurs. As the growing organism matures, this type of sensitive period, which we call an acquired or transitional sensitive period, becomes more important from an educational point of view.

The research of Lawrence Kohlberg and others suggests that those who have failed to develop for a period of time are more likely to become locked in or fixed at the level at which they have stopped. Accordingly, one of the aims of the ANISA Model is to stimulate transition to the next stage of development before a child gets locked in at his present stage. The child can learn for himself how to identify these sensitive periods by developing an inner awareness of the state of his own consolidation of learning which enables him to prepare for the next stage. This means knowing when mere repetition of a generalization has become stifling and when it is time to introduce variation by re-differentiating, re-integrating, and generalizing on another level.

Thus timing and all of its manifestations in the organism’s interaction with its environments is an important factor in the actualization of both biological and psychological potentialities.

Educational Implications

THE IMPLICATIONS for education that ANISA’S theory of development portends are vast and varied. From the theory of development, we have derived two educational sub-theories: a theory of pedagogy and a theory of curriculum. These theories are [Page 26] crucial to the ANISA Model and are not independent of the theory of development. Indeed their coherence and efficacy depend on their congruence with the theory of development. Together they constitute the basis for extensive but orderly changes in education.

Development has no terminal point; one is in the words of Whitehead, “an incompletion in process of production.” We therefore hold that education can have no terminal point. One can continue to develop and advance from the point of conception; and once one becomes a competent learner, the world becomes a beautiful playground and an exciting laboratory for life.

Because each human being has an unlimited number of potentialities, no one can ever be regarded as uneducable. Comprehending how the actualization of potentiality creates further potentialities alters perceptions and feelings about all children and enables one to approach teaching much differently. Furthermore it challenges the notion of “fixed intelligence” as an outmoded concept that must give away to a more dynamic and comprehensive theory of intelligence. Schools modeled on the ANISA theory of development will have teachers who can arrange environments and guide interaction with them so that children will become competent learners. And because the theory explains the ways children are similar and the ways they are unique, true individualization of instruction—the matching of particular learning experiences to a child’s specific developmental level—can be accomplished. Thus the ability to equalize educational opportunity is finally at hand.

The symbolic meaning of ANISA—“The Tree of Life”—with its connotation of perpetual fruition and beauty is reflected in the theory of development. Each child is a precious sapling in the process of progressively manifesting his beauty—the fruits of his efforts at self-actualization—in association with his peers and teachers. But only those who have seen the forest and come away with a deep appreciation of the oneness of the trees, coupled with an abiding respect for the uniqueness of each tree, will be commissioned to teach in an ANISA school. For only then will they be empowered to impart that vision with a method that will ensure the creative advance of our children.

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Guiding the Process of Becoming

The ANISA Theories of Curriculum and Teaching

BY DONALD T. STREETS AND DANIEL C. JORDAN

THE FIELD of “curriculum is moribund.” This was the expression one leading educator chose to describe the confusion and frustration educators, theorists, researchers, and national commissions have experienced in attempting to define curriculum, formulate theory about curriculum development, and design various curricula. Needless to say, their efforts have been less than startling, and their best attempts have resulted only in proposals of a variety of experimental approaches and discussions of a number of basic issues related to the definition of a theory of curriculum rather than in the actual formulation of one.

Disciplines outside of education (e.g., systems analysis, decision theory) have also been drawn upon in the hope of gaining new perspectives on the development of a theory of curriculum. Yet such attempts have only demonstrated that borrowing from other disciplines models whose legitimacies are derived from data not pertinent to education is unwarranted. Such efforts, however, have not been entirely futile; for they have, by the process of elimination, laid to rest many unproductive approaches to the development of curriculum design, revealing the one remaining viable approach to the problem—namely, that curriculum design can hardly be considered apart from the development of a curriculum theory which in turn must be grounded in the knowledge of human development. This presents a dilemma because, as experts speculate, developing such a theory will take perhaps as long as fifty to one hundred years, while the pressures for curriculum revision are intense and immediate. In the meantime, pragmatic theorists such as Joseph J. Schwab, Arno Bellack, Daniel Tanner, George A. Beauchamp, Jerome S. Bruner, and Arthur W. Foshay suggest a variety of interim procedures to handle the immediate needs. In spite of the pessimism with which these writers speak of the likelihood of a comprehensive theory of curriculum being developed soon, some have suggested what such a theory should be able to do:

When a comprehensive curriculum theory is built, it will have to take into account not only the learning methods and teaching methods (‘strategies of instruction’ and the like), but also the knowledge to be learned, the nature of the student who will learn it, and the nature of the societal responsibility shared by teacher and student. For if education is a moral affair before it is a technical affair, then the grounds for moral behavior have to be incorporated in one’s theory of educational action.

We have made certain that, as a minimum, the above conditions for developing a comprehensive curriculum theory have been met in the ANISA Model. Based on a [Page 30] philosophy which views man as the pinnacle of creation—a spiritual being endowed with an infinitude of potentialities capable of endless expression, the Model defines development as the process of translating those potentialities into actuality and designates interaction with the environment as the means by which the process is sustained. Its theory of development provides a conceptual scheme that enables one to integrate a vast amount of research data on how human beings grow and develop. The ANISA theories of curriculum and pedagogy are logical derivatives of this theory of development.

Curriculum, as we define it, is comprised of two interrelated sets of educational goals and what children do, usually with the help of peers and adults, to achieve those goals. One set of goals concerns information (content) to be learned. Culture is the source of the information, the organization of which rests on the classification of environments, and includes three basic symbol systems (mathematics, language, and art) used to convey that information. The other set of goals concerns process and rests on a classification of the potentialities of the human organism and the means by which those potentialities become actualized. Achieving the two sets of goals (content and process) results in the emergence of a personal identity—a Self, which, through gaining mastery over its environment and over the process of its own becoming, can take charge of its own destiny, the overriding purpose of the ANISA Model.

These goals cannot be fully achieved without the assistance of teachers. But what is teaching? If the individual’s potentialities are actualized through interaction with his environment, it follows logically that teaching is arranging environments and guiding the child’s interaction with them to achieve educational goals. Assisting the child to gain competence as a learner (process goals) while assimilating information about the environment (content goals) is the hallmark of good teaching. Process cannot exist without content. As the potentialities of the child become actualized, process and content are structured to form his identity—the Self.

Classification of Potentialities and the Process Curriculum

AFTER EXAMINING the wide array of talents and abilities human beings possess, five basic categories of potentialities become evident: psychomotor, perceptual, cognitive, affective, and volitional. We have tentatively identified processes that underlie the development of learning competence in each area. Learning competence—knowing how to learn—is the ability to differentiate aspects of experience, whether internal or external, integrate them into a new whole, and generalize the whole to different situations. Differentiation, integration, and generalization thus comprise the common denominator of all types of learning reflected in the different categories of potentialities. [Page 31] Specifications on each of the basic processes in these five categories have been developed and constitute the process curriculum. Each specification contains the following: a definition of a particular process; its theoretical and empirical justification supported by a review of the pertinent research literature; an expression of the process in terms of an educational objective; an explanation of the kinds of experiences (interactions with particular environments) a child must have at given developmental levels in order to achieve the objective; and a statement on how the experiences can be evaluated so that we can be certain that what we are doing is taking us where we want to go. Thus the specifications of the ANISA Model form the foundation of our competency-based teacher preparation program; they also insure the replicability of the Model and facilitate cost-effectiveness determination. Mastery of the central processes in each category constitutes learning competence for that area. Thus, for example, psychomotor competence is learning competence in that area; and on it depends the development of psychomotor potentialities. The following are summaries of processes pertinent to the attainment of learning competence in each area.

Psychomotor Potentialities. Psychomotor competence refers to the capacity to coordinate, control, and direct the movement and position of voluntary muscles. As the child gains control of his muscles through the repeated experience of differentiating (generalizing) all his muscles and their possible movement patterns, and adapting the patterns to different situations, an internal organization called the motor-base develops.

In essence, the motor-base is a positional and functional awareness of the parts of the body and its use as a reference point in time and space. Specific processes that contribute to the development of the motor-base are balance and posture and their subprocesses (laterality, verticality, and directionality), locomotion, manipulation, receipt, contact, and propulsion. While achieving psychomotor competence is the main task of the young child, perceptual, cognitive, volitional, and affective powers are also developing and becoming integrated with each other and with the motor-base.

Perceptual Potentialities. Perceptual competence refers to the ability to differentiate sensory information and to integrate that information into generalizable patterns which constitute interpretations of reality that enable one to make meaningful decisions and to act on them. Past experience, present needs, and aspirations or intentions which concern the future strongly influence one’s organization and interpretation of stimuli. Through perception the organism is kept in touch with the actual world. A perceptual-base is developed as perceptual competence is gained, just as a motor-base is developed as psychomotor competence is achieved. The perceptual-base functions as a set of rules which generates and directs the basic processes of differentiation, integration, and generalization as they relate to perception. Processes in this area include those associated with sight, hearing, smell, taste, the cutaneous senses (touch or pressure, cold, hot, and pain) and the vestibular senses (which inform us of motion and enable us to maintain equilibrium). Both vision and hearing have been defined by a large number of processes, mastery of which make up most of the important educational objectives of the perceptual area of the process curriculum.

Cognitive Potentialities. Cognition, generally associated with perception, frequently [Page 32] accompanied by muscular reactions and emotions, and usually guided by intention or purpose, is comprised of the elements which constitute thinking, an area of human functioning that still requires a great deal of clarification. Thinking develops as the child 1nteracts with the environment just as all other potentialities do. Piaget describes this process as one in which the subject must act upon and transform objects in the environment. He says the individual must “displace, connect, combine, take apart, and reassemble them.” “Displace” and “take apart” are examples of differentiation; “connect,” and “combine” and “reassemble,” of integration and generalization.

Through the process of differentiation, integration, and generalization, internal structures develop which form the basis of cognitive competence. Among the more important cognitive processes are analysis, synthesis, classification, seriation, number relations, deductive and inductive inference, interpolation, extrapolation, analogy, and conservation. Some are developmental predecessors of others and are composed of differentiative and integrative functions operating in different ways at different levels. This by no means exhausts the list. We have identified approximately thirty others on which specifications are being developed.

Affective Potentialities. Affective competence is the ability to organize one’s emotions and feelings in a way that supports and facilitates the release of further potentiality. Emotions are associated with all other processes; and if they are not organized well, all other areas are affected. How one feels about things is for the most part learned but rarely taught in any deliberate or conscious way. The organization of emotional behavior requires one to differentiate emotions and integrate them with reference to individuals, objects, and events or ideals and then generalize them in ways that provide a basic stability to life. Teachers can assist children to achieve affective competence through the example they set, by the relationship they establish with their students, and through providing children with consistent feedback on their behavior. While the goal of detailing a comprehensive theory of emotional development is yet to be accomplished, a large number of processes which contribute to gaining affective competence have been identified. They include inhibiting, coping with, managing, and facilitating emotions in terms of a sense of purpose or subjective aim. For example, coping with sadness or disappointment, managing anxiety, inhibiting a destructive impulse, or facilitating expressions of joy and gladness are all manifestations of affective competence.

Volitional Potentialities. Though there is a theoretical vacuum created by psychologists’ rejection of volition, or will, as a meaningful aspect of human functioning, recent literature in psychology is attempting to correct this error. The vacuum was for the most part a consequence of a mechanistic view of man as a creature whose behavior is determined by external stimuli rather than by intention or some intrinsic determinant. And yet the vast number of changes which occur within the organism between stimulus and response and which provide the meaning that defines the relationship between the two make this position untenable. It is virtually impossible to make sense out of anyone’s behavior without ascertaining his intention.

The philosophical basis of the ANISA Model identifies purpose in the life of man as an element of behavioral causality, just as physical forces or genetic inheritance are also part of causality; subjective aim or purpose is thus recognized as a critical element in the translation of all potentialities into actuality. Subjective aim guides and directs [Page 33] concrescence—the process of becoming—and provides criteria for making choices among a variety of possibilities. When subjective aim becomes conscious, we have clear intentions, and the volitional capacity is activated. Volitional competence rests on the ability to form ultimate aims, differentiate them into operable goals, and integrate them into a perpetual flow of intentional behavior directed toward achieving those goals. Some of the processes which relate to the development of volition are attention, goal-setting, self-arousal, perseverance, effecting closure, and fantasizing a state of goal attainment. While a great deal of research is still needed to understand fully the dynamics of volition, the above processes provide a rich beginning-that will enable educators to address this area of human functioning.

Classification of Environments and the Content Curriculum

JUST AS INDIVIDUALS can accumulate and store information about their experiences, societies incarnate ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. The totality of those ways we call culture. Thus one does not have to start from the beginning to discover things about the universe, for countless discoveries are recorded and maintained as part of the culture to which one belongs. The information a culture represents is the basic source of any given content curriculum. In the ANISA Model this information is organized around the classification of environments: the physical environment— which includes everything except human beings (mineral, vegetable, and animal); the human environment—which includes all the human beings one comes in contact with; the environment of unknowns and unknowables—the ultimate mysteries in the cosmos of which consciousness enables us to be aware, even if we do not know what constitutes them; and the Self—a reflection of the above three environments in a particular human being.

There are three interrelated symbol systems which mediate the assimilation of the content curriculum and mastery of the process curriculum, one for each of the first three environments listed: mathematics for the physical environment; language for the human environment; and art for the environment of the unknowns. Since the self as environment reflects the other three, all of the symbol systems are used to assimilate information about one’s own self and to manage the overall process of self-actualization.

The focus of curriculum activities over the years has been on content rather than process. Consequently the organization of content as information has been worked out fairly well, and much of it is congruent with the structure of the ANISA Model’s content curriculum. Information bears interpretation, and interpretation proceeds from knowing what assumptions one is making about the nature of man and the world around him. Although the ANISA content curriculum relies on information stored by a culture, it brings to bear on that information a broad and comprehensive philosophical perspective that has implications for how it is used in living one’s life.

The organization of the content curriculum depends on the classification of environments and may be briefly summarized as follows:

For the physical environment it includes mathematics, natural sciences, natural history, and technology; for the human environment, language and communications (reading, writing, and speaking), social sciences, human relations, and ethics; for the unknown environment, art, aesthetics, philosophy, and religion; and for the Self, all of the above as they relate to the information accumulated about the Self. This information is organized around the categories of potentialities and includes body-awareness, [Page 34] self-perception, self-concept, self-esteem, self-determination, physical health, the social-self, and the ideal-self.

The organization of the above is, of course, incomplete. All of the applied fields, such as law, engineering, or medicine, are not listed but nonetheless fit into the scheme. One of the basic new emphases in this organization is the education of the Self.

Because the environments are hierarchically arranged, the informational content of any one environment is related in particular ways to the others. Medicine, for instance, is the application of the natural sciences to the human organism and is incomplete without their integration with what is known about the particularly human or non-physical aspects of the organism (such as the role of perception or emotion in healing) and the part played by faith. The arts and aesthetic and religious experience will have a bearing on both physical and mental health. Therapy heavily implicates learning.

The traditional curriculum, which is basically content-oriented, is organized vertically so that there is no transfer of knowledge horizontally among disciplines. In other words, a student generally proceeds from arithmetic, to geometry, to algebra, to trigonometry, to calculus, but not from arithmetic, to music, to physics, to social studies. Biologists often see no connection between their work and music; musicians, too, are frequently unaware of the relationship between their art and social studies, physical sciences, or mathematics. The ANISA Model provides for horizontal integration through its emphasis on process. If teachers teach their own specialty from a process point of view, horizontal integration takes place. For example, a biologist utilizing the cognitive process of classification in disseminating the information of his discipline can do it in a way that makes the student aware of both content and the process. When the student is subsequently engaged in a study of music and classification is required to organize information about music, classification as a process can be emphasized. In this way a good deal of what is learned in biology is transferable to music. Transferability of knowledge is a basic element of effectance or competence.

Fusion of Content with Process: The Formation of Attitudes and Values

THE CHILD DEVELOPS through interaction with his total environment—a process which enables potentialities to become actualized, thereby becoming the basic powers of the organism. These powers are not expressed in random fashion; they are structured. As they become structured, factual information is integrated with them to form the attitudes and values which collectively constitute character and personality. The structuring takes place in relation to the various environments with which the child is interacting and results in the formation of value systems which reflect those respective environments. For example, as a child interacts with the physical environment, potentialities (psychomotor, perceptual, cognitive, affective, and volitional) are collectively released (process) and blended with selected information (content) about that environment to form material attitudes and values on which technological competence [Page 35] rests. If such values put one in close touch with material reality, the person will be highly competent technologically.

Interaction with the human environment, in similar fashion, translates those same basic potentialities into structured powers which collectively and interrelatedly combine with information about mankind to form social attitudes and values on which a person’s moral competence rests.

As one attempts to interact with the ultimate unknowns and to structure them, he forms ideals. This kind of interaction leads to the formation of religious attitudes and values on which spiritual competence rests. To structure an unknown requires an act of faith and is therefore religious in that sense.

As the Self interacts with its own self within the context of the other environments, all the other values become integrated. This integration constitutes the structural and functional reality of personal identity—the fundamental expression of creativity inherent in all human beings. Personal effectance is determined by the quality of this integrated structuring. If the quality is good, the person will be both confident and competent to deal with his environment; and his capacity for self-transformation and continual development will be insured. In other words, personal effectance is “self-competence” —a combination of technological competence, psychological competence, moral competence, and spiritual competence.

Furthermore, since the self includes parts of the physical and human environments, all of which include unknowns, the attainment of spiritual competence subsumes all other competencies. An individual’s future, as well as his potentialities at any given time, are unknowns. With faith he can structure these unknowns by creating a self-ideal which serves as a standard that enables him to pursue a destiny consistent with it. If one cannot do this, all other potentialities are suppressed, because the absence of an ideal-self (which also reflects the combined ideals derived from interaction with the unknowns inherent in each of the other environments) means that there are no criteria by which the Self can make decisions about its own future. Without a sense of future, decisions will be made in terms of what brings immediate pleasure and what enables one to avoid pain or discomfort. Since facing unknowns always produces some degree of discomfort and anxiety, one is likely to avoid experiences which entail facing unknowns; and yet those are precisely the experiences that hold the greatest promise of facilitating self-actualization.

The explanation of personal identity in terms of value formation is the basic proposition of the ANISA Model’s comprehensive value theory. To explain values solely in terms of affective considerations or by excluding content or information from that definition, as has been done by many value theorists and philosophers, is untenable. [Page 36] All categories of potentialities and information are involved in the formation of values. Recognizing this, we have been compelled to define values as relatively enduring organizations of actualized potentialities (psychomotor, perceptual, cognitive, affective, and volitional) blended with information about the environment which orient and predispose one to respond in a particular way to some aspect of the envimnment. Values always include an evaluative or judgmental element which has implications for action. All the values become integrated around fundamental aims, purposes, or ultimate concerns to form the total value system. Attitudes are values in their differentiated forms; values are integrations of attitudes. The individual’s character, his identity, is represented by the total value system—the integration of all his values. Education broadly defined thus means the process of value formation or character formation.

If there are serious problems with the integration of values, either because errors or falsehoods have been incorporated into them or because some processes have never been mastered, the person will lack effectance. He will have difficulty in relating to all environments including his own self. At some point the pathology will increase to the point of his becoming dysfunctional. Therapy or rehabilitation will then be required. The ANISA Model thus provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the nature of therapy and rehabilitation. It also forms the basis for understanding how education conceived in ANISA terms can help prevent mental illness and criminality—the two basic expressions of personal dysfunctioning.

The ANISA Theory of Teaching

IF “curriculum is moribund,” pedagogy will be ailing. The ANISA theory of development may restore health to both. According to the theory, development is sustained by the organism’s interaction with the environment. Thus it follows that teaching will take its definition from this premise. Teaching, therefore, means arranging environments and guiding interactions with them to achieve the goals specified by the theory of curriculum. The theory of pedagogy classifies arrangements and interactions in terms of those goals. Since the main goal is the development or achievement of learning competence, and since learning competence means the ability to differentiate, integrate, and generalize aspects of experience, environmental arrangements and interactions with them can be classified in terms of the particular aspect of learning competence they facilitate.

Some arrangements and some interactions may facilitate differentiation, while others may foster integration or generalization, or do all three. Furthermore, since children are differentiating, integrating, and generalizing on different developmental levels, the teacher must be able to make this kind of assessment before arranging the environments and guiding interaction. When the teacher can draw upon developmental theory to ascertain the child’s level of functioning, his approach is more inclined to be diagnostic and prescriptive. In those instances where sufficient knowledge for making such a diagnosis is unavailable, the ANISA teacher will have to be speculative and experimental. In both cases improvisation will figure prominently, for both a prescription and an experiment will require elements of spontaneity in utilizing whatever is at hand to achieve a particular objective. Through such approaches an increasing amount [Page 37] of knowledge will accumulate about the child’s developmental level with regard to given processes and content, thereby enabling the teacher to become progressively more prescriptive when needed. Furthermore, as the child grows and develops, he will come to take a more active role in diagnosing his own needs and prescribing the arrangement of his own environments and his own interactions with them. He then becomes a teacher of his own Self—an independent learner.

Arranging Environments: Creating Opportunities for Differentiating, Integrating, and Generalizing on Different Developmental Levels

AN ANALYSIS of the environment is necessary to determine the kinds of adjustments needed to guarantee that the children will have opportunities for differentiating, integrating, and generalizing experience appropriate to their developmental levels. There are several factors important for the analysis and arrangement of environments:

Identification of Deficiencies. Particular educational objectives pertinent to given developmental levels will require the presence of certain things in the environment. Suppose, for example, that the educational objective selected for a group of two or three year olds is strengthening the cognitive process of inductive inference while introducing Archimedes’ principle concerning buoyancy as content. Archimedes’ principle (on the level being considered here) states that a floating body sinks until it displaces its weight in water. A water table and an object light enough to float, but whose weight can be altered, are minimum requirements for the experience. We may use a bottle cap as the floating object and alter its weight by pouring water into it. Observation relating weight increases (because of pouring water into the cap) to sinking levels can thus be made. But children between two and three years of age are percept-bound; they cannot hold in memory a prior event (floating bottle cap with no water in it) and compare it with a subsequent event (the same bottle cap, half sunk, with some water in it). To make the comparison, children must be able to see both at once; thus, the two situations must exist simultaneously. One bottle cap is therefore not enough; it represents a deficiency that needs remedying. At least two caps are needed (and three or four are preferable) if the differentiation (in weights) is to be grasped, the different weights matched with different sinking levels (a form of integration) , and the inference made. The process (inference) and the content (an unsophisticated version of Archimedes’ principle) become consolidated as the child generalizes the content and the process to floating objects other than bottle caps. A teacher who knows nothing about developmental levels is not able to remedy environmental deficiencies or guide the child’s interaction with the environment to achieve particular educational objectives. This example features only a small number of important developmental considerations and their implications for teaching; the learning experience exemplified is far more complex than this simple portrayal conveys and entails a variety of Other perceptual, psychomotor, cognitive, affective, and volitional elements.

Lighting, Temperature, Sound, and Ventilation. When appropriate levels of lighting, temperature, sound, and ventilation are established, the individual is free to concentrate on learning. An inappropriate level of any one of them may prove distracting. Learning depends upon attention, and certain elements in the environment may distract it. Environmental changes to facilitate attention will include insulating children from various visual and auditory distractions.

Introduction of Novelty. It is very easy for children to become accustomed to an [Page 38] environment, including rich and complex environments. Since changes in the environment help to maintain high levels of curiosity, a moderately rich environment which is changing continually is important. Therefore all materials and equipment should not be displayed at all times but judiciously rotated so that there is provision for novelty introduced on a continuous basis.

Appropriate Social Grouping. Human beings constitute the most important part of any learning environment. In some instances educational objectives are better met through certain kinds of group interaction while in others working alone may be preferable. Teachers need to know how to arrange the human environment effectively in terms of the educational objective, with particular regard for the appropriate level of social grouping, including the variables of age, sex, and size of group.

Guiding Interaction with the Environment

GUIDANCE IS NEEDED to help the child interact with and attend to the parts of the environment that help him differentiate, integrate, and generalize aspects of experience in ways which will strengthen his competence as a learner in any category of potentiality (psychomotor, perceptual, cognitive, etc.). Several modes of interaction are possible, and the teacher needs to know how to assess a given situation and determine which mode is likely to be the most appropriate. There are several ways of looking at guiding interaction with the environment:

Active or Passive Interaction. Interaction may be passive or active. A teacher needs to determine which mode is preferable for the achievement of a given educational objective and then to encourage the child to interact in that way. The younger the child the more important it is for the interaction to be active rather than passive since learning is facilitated by acting upon environments rather than by passively observing them. Knowing how to turn passive learning experiences into active ones is therefore an important skill.

Activity-Generates-Goal Versus Goal-Generates-Activity Orientation to a Given Experience. Educational objectives can be achieved in one of two ways: (a) the teacher may have an objective in mind and then proceed to prepare environments and guide the child’s interaction with them so a particular objective can be achieved, or (b) the teacher may come upon a given activity (already initiated and being sustained by one or more children) which will suggest a number of possible educational objectives that pertain to some process and some appropriately related content. The teacher can then intervene by introducing something new into the environment as needed and perhaps also guide the child’s interaction so that one or more educational objectives “naturally” inherent in the activity can be achieved. Creating learning experiences in accordance with a given objective, analyzing ongoing activity to see what educational objectives might be suggested, and intervening to insure that they are achieved are critical abilities for ANISA teachers.

Intervention Versus Non-Intervention. Knowing whether it is better to intervene in a given activity or whether it would be best not to interrupt because the children are progresssing very well on their own is important. In some cases intervention can be undertaken so subtly that the children sense no disruption of the activity, and the flow of their work continues smoothly.

Distinguishing Between Process and Content. It is important for teachers to be able to determine whether a child has mastered a given process underlying learning [Page 39] competence or has satisfactorily assimilated content while mastery of the process has still not been achieved. Since both process and content are important, guiding interaction depends on being able to distinguish the difference between process and content and their interrelation so that appropriate environments can be arranged and suitable guidance provided to insure the mastery of process as well as the assimilation of content.

Feedback and Reinforcement. Guiding interaction with the environment also includes providing feedback on what the child is doing, usually in terms of some objective or purpose. There are many types of feedback. It can be a verbal explanation or it can involve demonstrating something. Some kinds of feedback are intrinsic to the activity in which the child is engaged, such as hammering a nail (he either hits the nail or misses it and adjusts the next stroke accordingly); the child, however, may have difficulty differentiating feedback from other less critical aspects of the activity in which he is engaged. In that case, the teacher’s intervention should take the form of helping him to discriminate that part of the activity which provides feedback on what he is doing from the less informative parts. In other cases, it may be important for the teacher to reaffirm the objective or the purpose of a given activity so that the feedback will have some meaning.

Reward and punishment are other means of providing feedback. Teachers should be familiar with the dynamics of reward and punishment in the classroom and their power to guide interaction towards the objective of internalizing those processes which underlie learning competence.

Discovery Versus Explanation. While it would take too long for the child to discover everything that he needs to learn, it is nonetheless important that children be led to make a number of discoveries for themselves, since the process of discovery increases acuity of observation and stimulates curiosity. Therefore teachers need to know how to strike a balance between providing a complete explanation or demonstration of things and arranging environments and guiding interaction with them in ways that lead the child to a discovery of explanations of various phenomena, ideas, and events and the relationships among them.

Organization of Space and Time. Arranging environments includes the organization of space appropriate to a given educational objective. For example, many psychomotor objectives may require more space than some perceptual or cognitive objectives. Timing is important not only for its rhythmic aspects (which help to carry activity forward with minimum effort) but also for its consideration in effecting closure or consummating intentions. Students must be encouraged to set goals and consummate intentions if they are to become independent learners. Certain kinds of experiences may require more time or less time to complete, depending on the development level of the child and his previous experience. Decisions concerning time allocation and the provision of appropriate space are thus important responsibilities of the teacher.

Repetition/Practice and Achieving Transferability. Some kinds of learning, particularly those concerned with mastery of processes underlying learning competence, require repetition and practice. Yet mere repetition can become dull and boring, and it often works against learning how to transfer knowledge. Teachers need to know how to guide interaction so that a balance is maintained between repetition and practice with variation (the introduCtion of novelty into repeated activity is a key factor in teaching the child how to transfer knowledge).

Modeling Versus Explanation. A discussion of the role of the teacher would not be complete without emphasizing that the way the teacher “arranges” himself and [Page 40] guides the child’s interaction with him is of critical significance. A great deal of learning takes place through modeling as well as through listening to explanations. Modeling, in simple terms, means doing what you want the child to do or being like you want him to be rather than telling him what to do or how to be. It is important for teachers to understand how to become effective models and to understand the dynamics of learning through observing or being in the presence of a model. The chief dynamic involved here inheres in the role of the teacher as a model of a competent learner, on the one hand, and as a feedback agent, on the other. If the role is properly performed, a meaningful relationship between the teacher and student can emerge and heavily influence the extent to which the child falls in love with learning, desires to pursue his destiny with joy, and is excited by the mysteries of his own potentialities. Under these conditions a budding faith may blossom in the child that will enable him to approach learning tasks with confidence, saying to himself, “I can and I will.”

Prospects

THE ANISA Model has accepted the challenge posed by the statement that “curriculum is moribund.” A philosophical basis, broadly conceived, has served to inspire a developmental theory that makes possible the creation of a comprehensive curriculum with emphasis on both content and process and a comprehensive guide to teaching to fit the curriculum. This coherent body of theory represents the kind of significant breakthrough—a fresh vision—that curriculum theorists and pedagogues in their most pessimistic moments predict cannot happen for a hundred years. We believe this new direction, which may take a hundred years to implement fully and refine, can functionally and structurally provide the means of insuring the fullest expression of the infinitude of man’s potentialities envisaged by Teilhard de Chardin when he said:

Man is not the center of the universe as was naively believed in the past, but something more beautiful. Man is the ascending arrow of the great biological synthesis.

[Page 41]

[Page 42]

Nine on the Richter

BY W. MARISSA HELLER

SALOMY felt as though she had nothing to do somehow, even though it was Monday and the bus was going in the same direction as always, downtown, taking her to work as usual at eight-thirty. The Zoo would be nice in the fog, she thought, but the animals are probably hiding—it’s so cold and the Zoo is so close to the sea. That was a travesty the Zoo so close to the sea and the sea was never warm and neither was the Zoo. All those African animals were probably hiding in their hay, trying to keep warm. Not the Zoo.

Salomy got off at the usual stop and walked the same half-block to the door as usual where the clock said its normal nine. The typewriter hum, and morning coffee. A sneak at the headlines behind a file cabinet. Salomy dawdled her usual dawdle and picked at her nails, read the newspaper until someone looked at her to make her stop. What did it matter when the City would all be rubble, when the Earthquake Came, and a flood of correction fluid could not erase the mess. Everyone in the City knew about earthquakes. They came once in a while, none since the Great Quake, but everyone knew that the very earth beneath the City was just waiting to buckle under. Geographers said the people were crazy to live where they lived. When The Earthquake Came, they would all be killed. As surely as the Quake would come. But it never did.

Salomy lived alone and never doubted that the Quake would come, but she hoped it would not catch her at home as she lived on a hill. Folly, the geographers would cluck, but she took that chance.

Salomy typed all day and made few mistakes but it was nothing to her. She produced perfectly-lettered, exquisitely-grammared and commaed, sentence-perfect structures all day, typed out lightly by her intelligent fingers. Typing out the years, typing out . . . Could you type a lightyear’s distance, and then how long would that be? If you strung out all of Salomy’s sentences including punctuation, how far would they stretch? Would they get her to the moon? She broke for coffee, but it was nothing to her.

In the paper, someone was predicting Earthquakes. It was no laughing matter. It was coming soon: The Great Quake and the end of the City. Down to the minute, scheduled for nine a.m. In order to be convenient for all. The City took it in its stride. On January 4 there will be a major Earthquake. Please dress accordingly. Business as usual.

Her office was on a busy corner, unfortunately she couldn’t see it or life might have been more colorful at times. Trucks rumbled by and the building rumbled too. It held every vibration of motor vehicles and Salomy’s typewriter shook. Each time, her typing stopped. She held her breath. Would it be her last? Was This It? But no, always trucks. Salomy had an advantage over the rest of the City. When the Earthquake came, she alone would be ready. She had been living with it for months. She knew how it would feel, each rumbling tremor. But which way would the buildings fall, when they fell? They said that when the new bank building fell, there would be a thirty foot sea of glass shattered on the pavement. That would be a sight.

Salomy typed and typed. That was her job and she did it. What comfort was there in a cheese sandwich when the afternoon would be much the same as the morning? And miles to type before I sleep. Salomy didn’t listen to the office gossip at coffee break, there was nothing in it for her. What did it matter when soon enough all the typewriters would be stricken dumb, their cords unmercifully jerked out by the plugs, the current forever off.

Salomy’s fingers typed the last words of the day, her usual, and the clock crawled inexorably toward five. There was no joy in five because [Page 43] tomorrow would be much the same as today. Where was the Earthquake when she needed it?

The same bus came at the corner with fumes and Salomy fed it her usual quarter, received the same transfer she had gotten yesterday at very much the same time, and watched the buildings which had not changed since she had seen them last and the people in the bus who had changed little. The slums went by outside, same as usual, the boarded-up windows and children playing by signs that said do not enter—rodents being poisoned by City Health Department. Signs that had always been there. Were the rodents dead yet, she wondered. How much poison did it take to kill a rodent? And how much earthquake a city? Same streetwalkers walking, same drunks drinking, same empty wine bottles in the street as yesterday. Where was the Earthquake when we all needed it?

Salomy deftly picked up a lamb chop and a package of frozen peas between buses and paid the grocer who didn’t speak English with money he had seen before. She rode the last blocks to her house. If she happened to come to work late on the day of the Quake, she might miss it if she were on the bus.

Salomy’s house was an exercise in Earthquake tolerance. She thought she’d stand out in the street if it came while she was home, because the house would surely fall into the valley. She used to think that there were tremors every Saturday morning at ten until she found out that it was the woman next door doing wash. Thank God no trucks went by on her street. Fire engines did though, and that would be part of it all when the Big One came. Salomy read at night after lamb chops and made tea. Would it be a good idea to fill up the bath tub with water. Just In Case? Someone had said that the water would be the first thing to go. What good would water in the bath tub be if the house had fallen into the valley? Salomy would get it all figured out in time, she was sure. She was willing to accept the Earthquake on its own terms. After all, earthquakes had been around longer than people. And people had not even outlived the dinosaurs yet. They had a long time to go to outlive earthquakes. She accepted it as a fact of life, and she waited for it.

Each day, she paused in her typing when the tremors came and prepared herself, facing toward the Earthquake. Then her typing went on as usual, but she knew she was ready. The City could use a good earthquake she thought sometimes, when she rode past the rodent signs that were always the same. Nothing like an earthquake to shake up a city. It would be good, she was sure. But how would the City take the Earthquake? Would the good buildings, the mellow Victorian landmarks that had stood through the first Great Quake, would they fall and the new polished skyscrapers stand? Salomy wondered. The Victorian houses were so fragile. They had made it through the first Quake, but they were much older now. She was sure that the Earthquake would be just. Salomy waited, every day, pausing in her typing when the trucks went by, but doubt started to grow. She had waited so long: what if the Earthquake never came again? What if it came somewhere else? Everyone knew this was the City of Earthquakes, earthquakes were expected here. But any city could have an earthquake, and many did. Villages in Peru had earthquakes—great ones. What if it came somewhere else, where no one was expecting it? And with all the trucks that rumbled by in the City these days, it could come right here and no one would notice it, thinking it was a particularly large semi that had wandered off the truck route. Could it, could it have already come, right here, and she had missed it?

[Page 44]

Marjory

BY O. Z. WHITEHEAD AND MARZIEH GAIL

HE WAS a fighting reformer, novelist, newspaperman. His father was a banker; his mother descended from Light Horse Harry Lee of the American Revolution. He was Princeton ’87. Pulitzer sent him to London, and in June of ’93 he “scooped the world” when the HMS Camperdown collided with the HMS Victoria off Asia Minor. He wrote, in all, twenty-three novels and a play, did an unflattering portrait of his boss, Pulitzer, in The Great God Success, was praised by Mencken and called a muckraker by Roosevelt I. He used to write every night, eleven to six, six thousand words at a time, and his novels would sell about a hundred thousand apiece. His name was David Graham Phillips, and he is best remembered now for his story of an American courtesan, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise.

Phillips lived in New York with his sister, Carolyn, at 119 East 19th Street, and he used to lunch most days at the Princeton Club, which in 1911 was located at Lexington Avenue and Gramercy Park. In January of that year he had no way of knowing that he had been under surveillance for several weeks. The man watching him from a small room on top of a school building near the Phillips home was Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, son of a prominent Washington physician. Fitzhugh had begun to brood over the novelist’s portrayals of American womanhood; and gradually he had worked out in his mind the idea that one of Phillips’ heroines, Margaret Severance of The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig, was his, Fitzhugh’s, own sister. For weeks, Fitzhugh brooded, and watched; waited there, in his little room, or followed on the streets, training his eyes on the oblivious, tall, casual, and elegant Phillips as he came and went.

On January 23rd, somewhere in or near the door of the Princeton Club, Fitzhugh confronted the novelist and fired at him six times, then blasted away at his own head. Phillips struggled for his life till the next day, saying as he died, “I could have won against two bullets but not against six.”

WE TELL of this event because Marjory Morten—soon to become one of the early American Bahá’ís—found her whole life changed as a result. A close friend of hers says that Marjory, engaged to Phillips, was with him that day, and that from then on she was somehow different. Perhaps, like other tortured young, she decided to punish the world. In any case, she made up her mind not to marry for love, not ever.

Instead she married Alec Morten. Once [Page 45] she described her marriage a little. “Alec was much older than I was,” she said. “I did not know much about men when he asked me to marry him. He adored me. He had a terrible temper, but he never lost it with me. A year or so before he died, he told me: ‘If you promise never to marry again, I will leave you my money outright.’ I said I couldn’t promise. The result was he left it to me in a trust with the provision that if I remarried the money would go to a button factory . . . Once in Paris,” she added, “a Frenchman knelt at my feet and said: ‘Marjory, Darling, I cannot live without you. Is your trust fund irrevocable?’”

AFTER she was widowed, another writer came into her life. This was Kahlil Gibran. “Kahlil and I were engaged, once,” she told us. Asked, “Why didn’t you marry him, Marjory?” she explained: “He was always jealous of me. Finally I said, ‘Kahlil, if I went to live on a desert island, would you still be jealous of me?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would be jealous of your dreams.’”

In after years, her friend, the artist Juliet Thompson, told Marzieh something of Gibran’s life: the sad ending of it, for instance. And also about the time when Gibran came to the Bahá’í Center in New York City to see the motion picture of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. “He cried,” Juliet said. “He leapt to the platform and he called out, ‘I declare that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is the Manifestation of God for today!’ Then he fled the hall.” (Sincere in his tribute, Gibran was, however, not aware that to Bahá’ís, only the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh have the station of Manifestation—or Messenger—of God in this day. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Master, is Exemplar and Interpreter.) Of Gibran’s portrait sketch of the Master, Marjory said: “Good as art, but not a likeness.”

An editor of the Star of the West and later of World Order magazine, she often spoke about writing. “Many writers manufacture,” she said to me. “They write in a ‘literary’ way. Instead of drawing from life, they draw (unconsciously) from books. They imitate; but they can’t write down what they see, what they hear.”

She talked like a writer, wording her statements beforehand, and they lingered in the mind. So much of what she said comes back to us now. There was a youth, for example, who had recently become a Bahá’í, and was a trial to the community. Marjory was asked, “Can he suddenly change?” “Of course not,” she answered. “He will change very slowly, and make his mistakes along the way.” Once during the time when O.Z.W. was presiding as Chairman of the New York Bahá’ís, he lost his temper, and afterward told Marjory he felt sure he was right. Marjory commented, “The person who loses his temper is never right.” Sometimes she would sum up the marriage predicament along these lines: “The husband and wife spend too much time together. They have lives of enforced intimacy. Each one wants to know too much about the other. I think that most men are pretty decent and will put up with a great deal in order to avoid a scene. This does not mean they are happy, only that they are trying to behave well in an unhappy situation.” Once she remarked, “Whenever you help someone, just do it. Don’t expect them to help you back. Your expecting help in return is worse than their not giving it.”

It was the way of Shoghi Effendi (grandson of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith) when a person mourned to assign him some task so that he could put his grief to use. Without knowing the exact circumstances, I believe this had something to do with Marjory’s being directed to write of Bahíyyih Khánum, when that adored daughter of Bahá’u’lláh left this life in 1932. Her tribute, published in The Bahá’í World, is now a classic, known to millions. But it is also my belief that Marjory was a victim of writer’s block. She told me one day in [Page 46] Provincetown, that the Guardian had wished her to translate Bahá’u’lláh’s Book of Aqdas (I assumed from the French), and this she had not done. I knew he had already had one translation made by two individuals, from the Arabic, and guessed that he was planning on several versions in preparation for the ultimate work. Her “block,” if such it was, extended to the lecture platform. I once implored her to take over my assignment to address a large Naw-Rúz audience in New York, but she refused on the grounds that she was scared. So was I.

I CAN SEE her yet. To me, Marjory looked as if her face were swathed in white tulle. Through it the green eyes and pale pink lips shone dimly. Veiled is the word for Marjory. Mysterious. What Mark Tobey —dividing people into inside persons and outside persons—called an inside person. She had dark red hair, brushed back. Was she handsome? She was chic, distinguished. I remember her on the sand at Provincetown, when a fellow-bather complimented her on her slim, pretty legs, and she laughed and said: “Well, I have to have something!” Or again, one evening in New York, wearing an apricot Fortuny gown of pleated silk.

Sometimes four friends—Juliet, fellow-artist Daisy Smythe, Marjory, and Marzieh —would settle on and around the vast “co-occupational bed” (Marjory’s term for it) in Juliet’s bedroom. The sooty New York air would blow in from the little back garden where “Rebecca,” picked up somewhere by Romeyne Benjamin (owner of the house—Caruso’s brother-in-law), stood endlessly waiting on her pedestal, left hand to brow. Juliet’s companion, Helen James, would be crash-banging in the kitchen nearby. The talk was usually between Juliet and Marzieh, with a commentary supplied by Marjory. Daisy would sit silent mostly. A cat might arrive, dig well into the polished wood, and hang by its claws from a chair leg, whereupon Daisy might remark: “Cats are more fun than furniture.”

It was here that Marjory told many stories that the Ladies of the Holy Household, the family of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, had told her, because, they said, they wished her to know Bahá’u’lláh as He really was. One day, she said, they spent hours in the telling. When Marjory spoke, every sentence was finished; we knew this could not be impromptu; surely she had recorded these accounts; thinking of them as hers, we did not write them down. Months later, we set down a few notes. In these stories He was most gay and loving and easy of approach. He wished the ladies of the Household to dress prettily and was, it seems, interested in their selection of materials. He did not care for gloom and mournfulness; He wished happiness around Him.

A special point made was that He was lonely: the pilgrims stood in great awe of Him, in a circle far off, their eyes cast down, and He wanted someone to talk to. He would mount His donkey and the pilgrims would come along respectfully behind. He would say to the donkey boy, “Faster! Faster!” until the pilgrims were outdistanced, whereupon He would remark, “Now we can talk”; and all the way to the Riḍván Garden and all the way back again He would converse with the donkey boy.

When the Family was assigned to the charcoal man’s house in ‘Akká (the prison city), every night the charcoal man would come home, wash up, and come to talk with Bahá’u’lláh. The charcoal man was abreast of everything that went on, and Bahá’u’lláh was interested in all the human news.

At another time, Marjory repeated to me this story which she had heard from Bahíyyih Khánum. Once during the time of the annual Bahá’í Fast the Family of Bahá’u’lláh was tired and restless. Bahá’u’lláh [Page 47] told them: “We will have a picnic this afternoon.” “But this is the time of the Fast!” said one. “Yes,” replied Bahá’u’lláh. “This is the Fast which I ordained. Today we will break it.” And they had their picnic.

One day, I remember, Marjory told this story of Bahíyyih Khánum. As they sat under the old pines at Bahjí, members of the Family with Marjory, a band of desert Arabs came straggling by. One, a blind boy, fingered an imaginary flute. A desert woman strode up and said to the Bahá’ís, gathered about Khánum, “They tell me you have a religion. What is it you preach?” Bahíyyih Khánum whispered to one of the friends, “Tell her: Peace.” At this, the desert woman threw back her head and roared out with laughter. “Peace! We cannot even exist without war! Always, we have war. The tribes are always at war. The very elements are at war.” She struck her great stomach. “Even the organs in the body are always at war!” And she walked on, still laughing aloud. But the blind boy with his flute did not follow. He crept close and settled down by the Most Exalted Leaf.

Khánum was Marjory’s great love and kindly light. One day she said to Marjory: “Don’t worry, Marjory, no matter what you do after my passing, I will help you anyway.”

SOMETIMES we might be in Juliet’s studio room at 48 W. 10th, where ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had visited in 1912. He said the room was eclectic, part oriental and part occidental, and that He would like to build one like it. I remember the spidery old chairs (one with a cord across it, never to be used, because ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had sat in it), the creaky, uncertain floor, canvases looming in the shadows, red coals in the grate, Juliet in her purple velvet with the gold brocade.

Once Marjory told me that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had said to her: “You will never get what you deserve. You will always get bounty.” I thought of this when Marjory was shattered by the death of her old friend, the distinguished, much-loved international lawyer, Mountfort Mills. Immediately, Helen James gave up her bedroom, which meant commuting to work from uptown two hours every day, so that Marjory could be gathered into the warm haven of Juliet’s and Daisy’s home at 48 W. 10th. A scene from that time flashes by: Marjory, fresh from her grief, huddled on Helen James’ bed; I saying goodnight, and God knows why, starting to repeat:

. . . he knows the charms

That call fame on such gentle deeds as these,

And he can spread thy name o’er lands and seas

Whatever clime the sun’s bright circle warms.

And Marjory crying, “Oh, say it again!” She wanted to hear that Miltonian English again.

It was Juliet who brought Marjory, an Episcopalian, to the Bahá’í Faith. What happened, as Marjory related it to me was this: When the Master was due to arrive on the Cedric, April 11, 1912, Juliet asked Marjory to go down to the dock and meet Him. They joined other Bahá’ís at the ship and after a short while ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sent word that He would greet them all later that day, and for them to return home and not to wait.

Marjory said to Juliet: “Why should I do what your Master says? I’m not a Bahá’í.”

Juliet, not wishing to desert her friend, guided Marjory to some wooden crates that were piled up on the dock, and the two young women knelt down behind the crates. Suddenly ‘Abdu’l-Bahá appeared. “As if in a blaze of light, He walked majestically across the deck and down the gangplank.” He was ailing; was sixty-eight; had, for His Father’s Faith, endured forty years of exile and prison; was at this [Page 48] moment beginning the “culmination of His ministry,” His eight-month tour of the United States, which would call forth “the last ounce of His ebbing strength.”

A car door was held open, for Him, but instead of getting in, He walked straight over toward the heaped-up wooden crates. The car slowly followed. The young women were completely hidden. He could not possibly see them. They caught avid glimpses of Him. “From the moment I saw Him,” Marjory said, “I could not take my eyes off Him. He stopped a few yards away. I saw His face plainly. A face on which all sorrow was written, all joy. I knew then Who He was.”

The car waited. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá turned to get in, Marjory whispered to Juliet: “He didn’t see us.”

Whereupon, just for an instant, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá turned back in the direction of the crates—and winked.

Summer Porch

They shall remember this night

With its soft dark,

Bats circling from secret places

To loop the shadows

And insects in choir about their heads.

Down the long tree aisles

Light marks baroque designs

As car lamps flood the road a while

Then give it back to darkness.

In all the flow, only words are broken,

Stranded on the brink of another world

Up where the moon on schedule rides

The blue-green hour of love.

—MAY MILLER

[Page 49]

Malkum Khán: Reformer or What?

A REVIEW OF HAMID ALGAR’S Mírzá Malkum Khán: A Study in the History of Iranian Modernism (BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1973), 263 PAGES

BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

IN THE SECOND HALF of the nineteenth century Persia was a bankrupt nation. Not only her finances and her economy, but the whole fabric of her social, political, and spiritual life was coming apart. Írán’s first confrontation with European power led to defeat and loss of territory to Russia in the Caucasus. Lacking knowledge and understanding of the modern world, shrouded in the fog of misconceptions and superstitions, the government, urged on by a corrupt and ignorant clergy, resolved on a second trial of strength. The new war (1826-1828) resulted in an even more humiliating defeat.

Even these disasters did not awaken the ruling strata of Persian society. The voices of a few enlightened individuals in and out of government were not heard. Weak attempts at minor reforms were submerged in a pervasive archaism which called for strict fidelity to age-old beliefs and practices and for the exclusion of everything new. It is this obstinate refusal to accept innovation that led to the rejection by the major portion of the clergy, and consequently the society, of the claims of the Báb and the massacre of thousands of Bábís.

Traditional beliefs and modes of thought, however, were no longer capable of providing society with norms that would inspire and guide its inevitable transition to modernity. The orthodox Shiite clergy essentially withdrew into the past, while Súfí orders degenerated into clubs for esoteric pursuits. The Bábí remnant, most of whom became Bahá’í after 1867, were driven underground and were engaged in the construction of a community motivated by and dedicated to ideals that entirely transcended local circumstances. A majority of the educated class found itself in a spiritual vacuum precisely at the moment when European ideas began to penetrate Írán.

In a spiritual vacuum any glib charlatan could pose as a thinker, a philosopher, a reformer. Mírzá Malkum Khán was such a charlatan. Son of a Christian Armenian father who “converted” to Islám to further his career, Malkum was born in Julfá, a suburb of Isfáhán, around 1833 or 1834. His childhood and youth are veiled from our eyes partly by the paucity of documentation and partly by the smoke screen of prevarication released by Malkum throughout his life. One does not know, for instance, what to make of the assertions that he was related to Jean Jacques Rousseau. It is certain, however, that he did receive a good Persian education, becoming an eloquent speaker and an elegant writer, and that he also acquired rudiments of European culture, perhaps at an Armenian school in Paris where he is said to have studied for a number of years.

Like many others before and after him, Malkum was unable to integrate his Persian and European experiences. Intellectually and emotionally he opted for the West. Yet, since the profession of Islám was an indispensable prerequisite for a successful career, Malkum [Page 50] called himself a Muslim, while in fact evolving into a Voltairian unbeliever quite common in the West.

Malkum Khán entered government service as an interpreter for some Austrians hired by the Persian government to teach in Írán’s first “modern” institution of higher learning, the Dáru’l Funún. In 1857 he went to Paris with a delegation sent to conclude a peace treaty with Britain. While in France, he was initiated into a Masonic lodge. Upon returning to Persia Malkum began to write articles and pamphlets advocating governmental reform. He also organized a Masonic lodge, the farámúsh hhánih or house of oblivion, through which politically and socially ambitious individuals could spread their views and increase their influence in government circles. For Malkum, who was financially even more unscrupulous and greedy than he was politically and socially ambitious, the lodge was a source of income as well.

The Sháh, who saw in Persian Masons a threat to himself, ordered the lodge closed. Malkum was exiled to Baghdád and, after a short while, to Constantinople, where he gained the favor of Mírzá Ḥusayn Khán Mushíru’d Dawlih, the Persian ambassador who shared Malkum’s enthusiasm for Westernization and reform. Mírzá Ḥusayn Khán appointed Malkum counselor of the Iranian embassy. A few years later, when Mírzá Ḥusayn Khán became prime minister, he brought Malkum Khán to Ṭihrán as his advisor. In that capacity Malkum was deeply involved in the activities of the various European businessmen who sought concessions in Persia. The most prominent among them, Baron Julius de Reuter, bribed several prominent members of the Persian government and obtained a monopolistic concession for the exploitation of Írán’s resources of a scope unequalled in the annals of imperialism. Though Russian pressure forced the cancellation of the concession, association with Reuter made Malkum a rich man. His career advanced rapidly, and he was soon appointed Persian minister in London. While there, he obtained from the Sháh a concession to run lottery and gambling houses throughout the Persian Empire. A number of shady financial operators came together in the Persian Investment Corporation, a company formed to exploit Malkum’s concession. His Excellency the minister was paid £20,000, and more was to come.

The British government, however, was not happy about an English company domiciled in London engaging in activities in Persia that were illegal at home. On the insistence of the British minister in Ṭihrán the Sháh cancelled the concession, “As the matter of a lottery in Írán is contrary to the sharí’at and a cause of mischief and corruption . . .” Of course, Násiri’d-Dín Sháh did not return to Malkum the 30,000 túmáns (£3,000) the latter had paid for the concession. Upon receiving the news that his concession had been cancelled, Malkum Khán suppressed this vital bit of information long enough to sell the invalid enterprise to his English partners for another £20,000.

When the partners discovered that they had paid His Excellency £40,000 (then the equivalent of $200,000 and more than $1,000,000 in today’s inflated currency) for a piece of worthless paper, they went to court. The Sháh, on his part, was infuriated by the unfavorable publicity. He dismissed Malkum from his post, thus removing his diplomatic immunity and making it possible for a British court to try him. One can imagine Malkum’s dismay and indignation at this action of the Sháh, who repudiated his minister’s scheme, while keeping the money that same minister had paid for the concession.

British justice let Malkum go free. The court found that the swindle had been committed by him while he was still Persian minister in London, and thus protected by diplomatic status. He was a free and wealthy man, seething with rage at the Sháh who had betrayed him. For the next several years Malkum Khán dedicated himself to political and literary activity directed against the Sháh, chiefly through the publication of the newspaper Qánún, “Law,” in which Persian despotism, corruption, backwardness, and other evils were [Page 51] mercilessly attacked in the name of general welfare, human decency, the rights of man, Europeanization, and progress. So successful was Malkum Khán in his campaign that posterity has numbered him among the heroes of the Persian constitutional movement.

Upon Násiri’d-Dín Sháh’s assassination, Amínu’d-Dawlih, the prime minister of the new Sháh, anxious to neutralize the nefarious influence Malkum had acquired in the circles that advocated westernization and reform, offered him the post of Iranian minister in Rome. Malkum Khán eagerly accepted, discontinued the publication of Qánún, forgot the struggle against despotism, and once again became a loyal subject of him who was the incarnation of that very despotism.

Malkum’s elevation to the rank of a national hero is ironic, yet understandable. His modernism, his uncritical admiration for Western civilization at its materialistic worst, his use of Islamic phraseology to mask religious indifference and unbelief, his glib generalization and superficiality united with literary flair, and the sheer fact that he was one of the first to raise the issue of westernization, made him an important figure in the intellectual history of modern Írán.

Malkum’s writings, though of low intrinsic value, served to spread ideas totally new to nineteenth-century Írán. The phenomenon of a second-rate thinker achieving prominence as a transmitter of foreign ideologies is well known in Írán and elsewhere. One may cite as an example the eighteenth-century Russian writer, Radishchev, whose famous book The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow was a most unoriginal work, heavily influenced by second-rate French thinkers of the late Enlightenment, who nevertheless achieved lasting fame as Russia’s first radical. Of course, in fairness to Radishchev one must note that he, unlike Malkum, suffered years of exile and misery for his ideas. There was to Radishchev a seriousness of purpose, a dedication to principle, a morality that Malkum never had. Yet Malkum, the swindler, the elegant writer, the spawner of outrageous projects, the inveterate liar, became a major influence on modern Iranian thought.

Professor Hamid Algar has written a solid biography of this unadmirable yet interesting individual. The work is well documented and shows familiarity with a broad range of sources in several languages. It is Professor Algar’s position, not his scholarship, that deserves to be questioned. He has great admiration for and shares the views of traditionalist mullás. This makes it easy for him to lump together all critics of nineteenth-century Persian life, all proponents of change, all advocates of progress. Of course Fatḥ ‘Alí Akhundov, the Ádhirbáyjání freethinker and uncritical admirer of things Russian; Jamálu’d-Dín-i-Afghání, the unscrupulous and unbelieving father of Pan-Islamism; and Mírzá Áqá Khán-i-Kirmání, a mendacious Azalí intriguer, had much in common. Professor Algar, however, who harbors a strong anti-Bahá’í bias, even tries to connect Malkum Khán with the Bahá’ís. In this he fails badly; but the point has been made, and Malkum has been linked to the Bahá’ís, if not by facts then by innuendo. It must be noted in passing that Professor Algar, while making some remarks about the alleged similarity between the views of Malkum and of the Bahá’ís, drawing spurious parallels between the deeply spiritual Writings of Bahá’u’lláh and the self-serving productions of Malkum, and suggesting a kinship which even the most cursory investigation would disprove, shows surprising lack of familiarity with the literature and history of the Bahá’í Faith, which remains for him terra incognita.

Fortunately for the quality of his book, Professor Algar devotes little space to the Bahá’ís. Rather he concentrates on the Masons, westernizers, and political manipulators of whom Malkum was one and with whom he was deeply involved all his life. To have shed light on this corner of Persian history, even if the light is somewhat colored, is a commendable achievement that deserves recognition and praise.

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Authors & Artists

MARZIEH GAIL—translator, poet, novelist, biographer, historian—is a familiar name in the pages of World Order. Since her first appearance in the Spring 1967 issue she has contributed seven pieces in a number of genres. Mrs. Gail has written several books including Persia and the Victorians, Avignon in Flower, and The Three Popes.

W. MARISSA HELLER is a Lecturer in English at Feng Chia College in Taichung, Taiwan. She is a 1971 graduate from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied Spanish, and has done graduate work in Latin American anthropology at the University of Oregon. Her interests include the languages and cultures of the peoples of the world, folklore, and traveling. She has written a children’s book, which she hopes to publish, and is now researching a novel.

DANIEL C. JORDAN is a faithful contributor to World Order, having authored or coauthored ten articles for the magazine. Dr. Jordan directs the Center for the Study of Human Potential in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts. One of the Center’s and of Dr. Jordan’s major projects is the development of the ANISA Model for early childhood education. Dr. Jordan, whose training includes music, psychology, and social anthropology, has written many articles on education, prejudice, and human potential and has spoken on these, and related topics, on many university campuses and radio and television programs. Dr. Jordan is Vice-Chaitman of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

MICHAEL F. KALINOWSKI, who holds a B.A. degree from Bennington College and a M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts, is a doctoral candidate in the Center for the Study of Human Potential in the School of Education of the University of Massachusetts. He has worked with orphanages in Haiti, cut grapes in Bordeaux, interned with UNESCO in Paris, studied schools and orphanages in England and Holland, directed plays in New York, Europe, and the Caribbean, and served as consultant to the Head Start Regional Training Center. Mr. Kalinowski has recently worked with applying the theatrical discipline of improvisation to the process of teaching and has taped, for the National Public Radio affiliate WFCR, “The Salutation of the Dawn,” a recapitulation through theatrical imagery of the experiences from conception through birth.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH, Professor of History at Yale University, is the author of Russia and Britain in Persia, 1864-1914: A Study in Imperialism, as well as numerous articles dealing with the history of Írán in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This summer Dr. Kazemzadeh is teaching a course at Stanford on twentieth-century Russia and a seminar on Russia’s foreign relations.

JALIL MAHMOUDI makes a third appearance in World Order, his “Dysfunctions of Religion and Why” having been published in Winter 1968-69 and “The Institutionalization of Religion” in Fall 1967. Dr. Mahmoudi is Associate Professor of Languages and Sociology at the University of Utah. His books include Dry Farming, How to Teach a Foreign Language, Reading and Writing Persian, and Navay-i Hanava’i, a book of Persian poetry. He has written, in addition, numerous articles on sociology and agriculture. Dr. Mahmoudi’s interests include the sociology of religion, marriage and family structure, and linguistics.

MAY MILLER, a member of the District of Columbia Commission of the Arts, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University and has done graduate work at Columbia University and American University. Her poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies.

DONALD T. STREETS, an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, holds a B.S. degree in business from Indiana University, [Page 53] an M.A. in school administration from Notre Dame University, and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. He is the Associate Project Director of the ANISA Program, at the Center for the Study of Human Potential of the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts, and Director of the Head Start Regional Training Center, also at the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Streets has in press a book, coauthored with Dr. Daniel C. Jordan, entitled Releasing the Potentialities of the Child.

O. Z. WHITEHEAD has appeared in many plays, television productions, and films, including the John Ford classic, The Grapes of Wrath. In 1963 he settled in Ireland, where, in 1966, he won, for his portrayal of Hughie in Eugene O’Neill’s play of that name, the Actors’ Church Union Award for the best supporting performance in the Dublin Theatre Festival. Mr. Whitehead is a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Ireland.

ART CREDITS: P. 4, drawing by Beatrice St. Laurent Lockwood; pp. 16, 27, 28, 41, photographs by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 44, photograph, courtesy O. Z. Whitehead; back cover, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell.

BEATRICE ST. LAURENT LOCKWOOD, an artist and former art teacher, is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts. She resides in Northampton, Massachusetts.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL is Managing Editor of World Order.

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