Schools For Prophets

Will the schools of the future exist to educate and promote prophets rather than skilled workers? It’s an interesting question. According to Rudolf Steiner, humanity has descended into an evolutionary phase of deep materialism, and the corresponding phase of reuniting with our spiritual vision is the next stage of development. The mass delusion that we understand the world through pure reason will be dispelled. Perhaps, very soon, a different type of knowledge will be needed.

A prophet is one who sees into or hears from the spiritual realms regarding what is going to happen in the future, or what is truly happening beneath the surface of what we understand as world events or even the circumstances of our own lives. The prophet sees beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary, into the innate being behind the material existence we see around us.

As humanity regains this ability to see, those skilled in the process will perhaps become the next educators. It could be said that Plato or Pythagoras ran schools for prophets, combining esoteric knowledge with mathematics and philosophy to educate the next generations. Would a modern school of prophets look similar to an ancient Greek school, or would there be stark differences? One thing I think would remain the same is that the study of history and the process of reason would need to remain bedrocks of the educational process.

In the realm of seers, as they used to be called, there is always the danger of false ones. One way to discern a false prophet from a true one is to examine history. All prophecy has in common circles within circles. What is true has been true and will be true. What has happened is happening and will happen. To read a prophecy and understand it, it is necessary to go in circles. To foresee is to remember, as Plato showed us.

The faculty of reason is also necessary for any good prophet to possess. Finding a pattern in history and elucidating it through visualization and meditation is not enough on its own. We entered a materialist society in part to learn to reason more fully, and carrying that ability with us into the next stage of human development is essential. Reason cannot be lost, but neither can it remain the sole guide along the path of understanding. The future will not permit it.

A school of the future will combine all these elements and add the element of the individual “I,” something previous generations in history did not possess. The “I” is the part of humanity that embodies the individual will. We take this up on the journey out of materialism, and as a result of gaining this faculty, we can no longer be led away from a spiritual understanding of the universe. We learn that our own inner being comes, in fact, from the universe itself, not from the brain alone.

A school for prophets, then, would begin with much of the knowledge we now possess. The difference would be that its students would be taught to relate that knowledge not just to the material world, but to the spiritual as well. If AI takes all the jobs and leaves many of us at loose ends, perhaps even causing the loss of modern education as we know it, students of that time might take the next step in understanding our world. They might go beyond what is know–not by traveling to Mars in spaceships, but by moving beyond the material in a way that once again fuses the material and the spiritual into one.