23: "The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of
education...."
The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education. It
is inconceivable that any nation should achieve prosperity and success
unless this paramount, this fundamental concern is carried forward. The
principal reason for the decline and fall of peoples is ignorance. Today
the mass of the people are uninformed even as to ordinary affairs, how
much less do they grasp the core of the important problems and complex
needs of the time.
It is therefore urgent that beneficial articles and books be written,
clearly and definitely establishing what the present-day requirements of
the people are, and what will conduce to the happiness and advancement of
society. These should be published and spread throughout the nation, so
that at least the leaders among the people should become, to some degree,
awakened, and arise to exert themselves along those lines which will lead
to their abiding honour. The publication of high thoughts is the dynamic
power in the arteries of life; it is the very soul of the world. Thoughts
are boundless sea, and the effects and varying conditions of existence are
as the separate forms and individual limits of the waves; not until the
sea boils up will the waves rise and scatter their pearls of knowledge on
the shore of life....
Public opinion must be directed toward whatever is worthy of this day, and
this is impossible except through the use of adequate arguments and the
adducing of clear, comprehensive and conclusive proofs. For the helpless
masses know nothing of the world, and while there is no doubt that they
seek and long for their own happiness, yet ignorance like a heavy veil
shuts them away from it....
It is, furthermore, a vital necessity to establish schools.... If
necessary, education should even be made compulsory. Until the nerves and
arteries of the nation stir into life, every measure that is attempted
will prove vain; for the people are as the human body, and determination
and the will to struggle are as the soul, and a soulless body does not
move.
("The Secret of Divine Civilization", pp. 109-110; pp. 111-112) [23]