This book describes the role & responsibility of the teachers, the basis of the 'Free Progress' system & gives an inside view of the practical working of SAICE.
On Education
THEME/S
I
The world knows Sri Aurobindo as a Mahayogi, a great philosopher, a renowned poet and an accomplished literary critic. But not many people know that he has been a great educationist as well. Even those who are aware of the fact that Sri Aurobindo was a very successful teacher, — first at the Baroda College during the years 1899 and 1906, then in the Bengal National College, Calcutta, in the years 1906 and 1907, — have not much cared to study his educational thoughts and insights or may not even be cognisant of the other fact that the great propounder of Integral Yoga kept up a life-long interest in the subject of what true education should connote and imply. Although Sri Aurobindo had contributed his first thoughts on education as far back as 1894 to the Journal Indu Prakash of Bombay and expressed his views on the same subject for the last time in 1949 in the quarterly Bulletin of Physical Education published from his Ashram, it came as a pleasant surprise to many of his admirers to hear from the Mother in 1951 after the passing of the Mahayogi that "One of the most recent forms under which Sri Aurobindo conceived of the development of his work was to establish at Pondicherry an International University centre open to students from all over the world." The Mother was more specific when she revealed on 24 April of the same year at the inaugural session of Sri Aurobindo Memorial
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Convention held in Pondicherry:
"Sri Aurobindo is present in our midst, and with all the power of his creative genius he presides over the formation of the University Centre which for years he considered as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life." (CWM, Vol. 12, p. 112)
All of us know that an integral divine transformation of human life and existence in all its manifold expression has been the one consistent and persistent occupation and preoccupation of Sri Aurobindo during the last forty years of his life. Hence, when we come to know from the Mother, his spiritual collaborator in the same great enterprise, that the establishment of a right kind of Centre of Education was conceived by Sri Aurobindo as "one of his most cherished ideals" (Ibid.), we cannot but feel eager to know how education can possibly play such a momentous role in the achievement of a total spiritual transformation of man and his life — his life outer as well as inner. For, the type of education that we are habitually acquainted with, that we see practised around us, does not offer any hope, even the slightest hope, of accomplishing this great task of human transformation that Sri Aurobindo, the Integral Yogi has envisaged. Thence arises our natural curiosity to know more precisely Sri Aurobindo's idea of genuine education, its essential character and traits, as well as its method of execution so that it
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may smoothly and infallibly advance towards the fulfilment of the great and noble task the Mahayogi has assigned to it. The present essay is a humble attempt to satisfy this curiosity, although in brief; for, the short compass of a few pages cannot possibly do justice to the adequate presentation of Sri Aurobindo's thoughts in all their multisplendoured rich significance.
To understand the educational philosophy of Sri Aurobindo in all its bearings, to comprehend the logical justification and inter-relation of all its principles and practices, we must first try to understand the basic Vision of Sri Aurobindo as regards man, Nature and the world-process. For, everything, all of Sri Aurobindo's views and formulations, whether literary, philosohical or spiritual, derive organically from his fundamental world-vision. And education is no exception to this general proposition. Sri Aurobindo's educational outlook is entirely moulded by and draws its inspiration from his Integral-synthetic theory of Reality.
After all, this is as it should be. For, sincerity demands that our metaphysical knowledge, our view of the fundamental truth of the universe and the meaning of existence should naturally be the determinant not only of our thought and inner movements but of our whole conception of life, our attitude to it and the trend of all our life-activities.
Now, the integral theory of existence as advanced by Sri Aurobindo looks upon our earthly existence as a becoming with the Divine Being for its origin and object, a progressive evolutionary manifestation with the timeless spaceless Su-pracosmic as its source and support, the Other-worldly for a condition and connecting link and the Terrestrial for its field,
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with human mind and life for its turning-point of release towards a highest perfection. It should be noted that the supracosmic Reality is the supreme truth of every individual's being; to realise it is the highest reach of our consciousness and we have to realise it if we would be really perfect.
But this highest supracosmic Reality is not cut off from the world of manifestation. It is at the same time the cosmic Being, the cosmic Consciousness, the cosmic Will and life; it has put these things forth, not outside itself, but in its own being as its own self-unfolding and self-expression in the framework of Time and Space. There is a divine significance and truth in this cosmic becoming. The manifold self-expression of the Spirit is its high sense.
Thus, a perfect self-expression of the Spirit is the only object of our terrestrial existence. But this cannot be achieved if we do not first grow conscious of the supreme Truth of our being; for the direct touch of the Absolute alone can possibly help us arrive at our own absolute.
But neither is our perfect individual self-expression feasible if we exclude the cosmic Reality. The individual will ever remain incomplete, bound within the confines of a separative ego-consciousness, if he does not open into universality and thus become universal himself.
It follows that a consciously realised unity of the transcendent, the universal and the individual is an essential condition for the intended fullness of the self-expressing Spirit. Now, this material world, this earth and this human life have, as we have noted above, their divine possibility, but that possibility is evolutionary. A progressive evolution of consciousness is the secret sense of our birth and terrestrial existence.
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Earth-life offers the field for a continuously ascending self-unveiling of consciousness and an adventure of self-discovery. The partial consciousness already evolved upon earth is a portent for further evolution and must surely develop in the very nature of things into complete consciousness with all its attendant accomplishments. A perfected and divinised life is what the earth-nature has always been seeking.
In its progressive evolutionary development, consciousness appearing upon earth has been at first rudimentary, half subconscious or just conscious instinct. Advancing step by step, it developed into intelligence in animal man. Advancing still further, it has elevated the thinking animal into the status of a reasoning mental being. But even in his highest elevation man is still weighed down by a heavy stamp of original animality. Therefore mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood which shall be the next product of evolution.
A great responsibility lies with man; for with his advent upon the earth-scene, the evolutionary movement has entered a new phase: it has become conscious of itself. The process of evolution has now the possibility of proceeding ahead with the conscious and deliberate co-operation of the species called man. Man should not therefore be satisfied with the leading of a gloriously opulent intelligent animal existence. He should become awake and aware of his spiritual destiny. An enlightened aspiration, will and seeking should actuate all his movements. He should offer his participating will to the urge of the indwelling Spirit to come out into the open in full glory.
For man as he now is cannot be the last term of earthly
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evolution. He is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, his mind and life too are limited forms and instrumentations. He is only a transitional being. A greater destiny beckons him and he should heed the call to the New Adventure. The various tasks set before man, the unique species, by evolutionary Nature may be succinctly described in the luminous words of Sri Aurobindo:
"Man is there to affirm himself in the universe, that is his first business, but also to evolve and finally to exceed himself: he has to change his partial being into a complete being, his partial consciousness into an integral consciousness; he has to achieve mastery of his environment but also world-union and world-harmony; he has to realise his individuality but also to enlarge it into a cosmic self and a universal and spiritual delight of existence.
A transformation, a chastening and correction of all that is obscure, erroneous and ignorant in his mentality, an ultimate arrival at a free and wide harmony and luminousness of knowledge and will and feeling and action and character, is the evident intention of his nature....
But this can only be accomplished by his growing into a larger being and a larger consciousness: self-enlargement, self-fulfilment, self-evolution from what he partially and temporarily is in his actual and apparent nature to what he completely is in his secret self and spirit and therefore can become even in his manifest existence, is the object of his creation."
(SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 684)
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The above quotation from Sri Aurobindo, arranged here in three paragraphs, demands close and attentive perusal from the readers; for it puts in a nutshell the whole meaning and purpose of man's existence upon earth, his role as a biological species, and the all-important programme that Nature and the Divine have set before him. A simultaneous awareness of man's actuality and his great potentiality makes it clear to us that a proper educational system has to be developed which, when rightly conceived and clairvoyantly put into practice, will help man the individual and man the collective being to realise the great destiny that is awaiting the race. And, be it noted, all the principles of education enunciated by Sri Aurobindo are designed to fulfil that very task.
We have advisedly employed the expression "man the individual and man the collective being". For, the insistent problems of man do not pertain to his isolated individual existence alone; they urgently concern his group-life too. Since the beginning of his appearance on earth, man has always dreamed of establishing a fourfold harmony: (i) a perfect harmony within his own subjective being, (ii) a harmony between individual and individual, (iii) a harmony between an individual and the group or groups of which he is a part, and finally (iv) a harmony between the different groups. But the deplorable fact is that all these four types of harmony have eluded the grasp of man. Even a cursory look at the affairs of the world and a glancing introspection into the state of his own inner being cannot but convince any discerning man that something is terribly amiss somewhere in his upbringing and education, which has brought him to the brink of the abyss. All man's agelong efforts at remedying
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the situation have inevitably miscarried, because the conventional educationists have not cared to probe the problems to their depths; they have mostly confined themselves to the task of whitewashing the surface and offering palliatives. To solve the problems of man one has perforce to comprehend the complexity of his composite nature and provide for the harmonious fulfilment of all the facets of his being.
It is high time that we renounce the old and effete superstition that the mind of man is the same everywhere and can therefore be passed through the same machine and uniformly constructed to order. There are three things which have to be taken into account in a true and living education: (i) the man, the individual in his commonness and uniqueness, (ii) the nature or people, and (iii) universal humanity. For, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "...within the universal mind and soul of humanity is the mind and soul of the individual with its infinite variation, its commonness and its uniqueness, and between them there stands an intermediate power, the mind of a nation, the soul of a people." (SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 196) And if education is to be a true building or a living evocation of the latent powers and possibilities of the mind and spirit of the human being, and not just a uniform machine-made fabric, it has to take into consideration all the three factors mentioned above. To quote Sri Aurobindo again:
"...that alone will be a true and living education which helps to bring out to full advantage, makes ready for the full purpose and scope of human life all that is in the individual man, and which at the same time helps him to enter into his right relation with the life, mind and soul
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of the people to which he belongs and with that great total life, mind and soul of humanity of which he himself is a unit and his people or nation a living, a separate and yet inseparable member." (SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 198)
A further truth that Sri Aurobindo insists upon is that man is not just a living body somehow developed by physical nature which has evolved in him certain vital propensities, an ego, a mind and a reason. Man is not pre-eminently just a reasoning animal of the genus homo, nothing more than a thinking, feeling and willing natural existence, a mere mental product of inconscient physical Nature. For if such is the view we take of man — and this view is tacitly adopted by most of the secularist educationists —, the business of educating a child cannot but assume an erroneous character, both in its meaning and content and in its application. For, then, education reduces itself to the task of culturing the mental faculties of the student, training him into an efficient, productive and well-disciplined member of the society and the State as a political, social and economic being. The whole life and education of the individual man will, in that case, be turned towards a satisfaction of his legitimate vital propensities under the precarious government of a trained mind and reason and for the best advantage of the personal and collective ego.
But Sri Aurobindo cannot accept this view of man nor, therefore, these goals of education as ordinarily envisaged. He does not, of course, deny that the things alluded to above do represent aspects of human being and living in their actuality and must be given due importance in the early
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undeveloped stages of humanity but they are only outward things, parts of the instrumentation, mere accessories and never the fundamentals or the whole of the real man. All these are powers of the soul that manifests through them and grows with their growth, and yet they are not all the soul.
These remarks naturally lead us to the question: What then, is man? And what should be the aim and purpose of his education?
Sri Aurobindo sees in man the individual a soul, a portion of the Divinity enwrapped in mind and body, a conscious manifestation in Nature of the universal self and spirit; at the summit of his ascent man is bound to rise to something greater than his physical, vital and mental personalities, to his spiritual being. And therein lies the supreme manifestation of the soul of man, his ultimate divine manhood, his real paramārtha and the highest puruṣārtha.
Sri Aurobindo sees in the nation or the people not merely an organised State or an armed and efficient community well prepared for the struggle of life and putting all at the service of the national ego, but a great collective soul and life that has appeared in the whole and has manifested a nature of its own and a law of that nature, a svabhāva and a svadharma, and has embodied it in its intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, dynamic, social and political forms and culture.
Sri Aurobindo sees in humanity the Universal Spirit manifesting in the human race, evolving through mind and life but with a high and ultimate spiritual aim. There is a spirit, a soul of humanity which is advancing through whatever struggle and concord towards an ultimate human unity, a unity which will at the same time preserve a needed
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diversity through the varied culture and life-motives of different peoples: a perfectibility in the life of the human race as in that of the individual is the intended goal of earthly evolution.
If we take such a view of man and his destiny — and, of course, this idea may be disputed by many — the only true education will be that which will be an instrument for this real working of the Spirit in the mind and body of the individual and the nation and the human race. And for that the very first thing the educationist has to do, whether he be the teacher or the parent, is to approach things from the subjective standpoint, know accurately and profoundly the psychology of each child as he grows into manhood and to base the system of teaching and training on that inner reality alone. There has to be a new psychic dealing of man with his own being, with his fellow-men and with the ordering of his individual and social life. The aim of education should be to help every individual child to develop his own intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, moral, spiritual being and his communal life and impulses out of his own temperament and capacities. Thus the distinctive individual psychology of the child should be the guide in the matter of his upbringing and education. For each human being is a self-developing soul and the sole task before the parent and the teacher is to enable and help the child to educate himself, to develop his potentialities and grow freely as an organic being, and not to knead and pressure him into form like an inert but plastic material.
In a true education, one should not regard the child as an object to be handled and moulded by the teacher according
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to the conventional ideas or individual interests and ideals of the teachers and parents. And yet, this is what we have been doing all the time in the prevalent systems of education with some cosmetic embellishments here and there. Mostly ignoring the individuality of each child, we seek to pack much stereotyped knowledge into the student's resisting brain, impose a stereotype rule of conduct on his struggling impulses, and mechanically force his nature into arbitrary grooves of training and conditioning — all decided upon from above and outside by authorities entrusted with the charge of "teaching". This sort of "loading process" cannot fail to damage and atrophy the faculties and instruments by which each individual human being is expected to assimilate, grow and create in his self-chosen fields of endeavour.
Sri Aurobindo invites us to discard the lifeless "academic" notion that the studying of subjects and the acquiring of this or that kind of information is the whole, or at least the central purpose in the undertaking called "education". No, the acquisition of various kinds of information from outside is only one and by no means the chief of the means and necessities of education. The central aim of education should be the training of the powers of the child's mind and spirit, the formation or rather the evoking of knowledge and will from within, and the developing of the capacity to use knowledge, character and culture for the highest all-round development of personality. This at least if not more, but there is much more as we shall presently see when we come to deal with the education of the future.
We have just spoken inter alia of the process of "evoking knowledge from within". The idea may perhaps sound queer
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to those readers who are not well acquainted with the spiritual teachings of Sri Aurobindo, the propounder of the Yoga of Integral Self-Perfection. Constraints of time and space do not allow us to elaborate further on this topic here. However, we may content ourselves with mentioning in brief a few salient principles that the Master-Yogi has recommended for making education luminous and efficient.
First Principle: We must know that all knowledge is within and has to be evoked by education rather than instilled from outside. In this view the teacher's role is altogether different from what is normally thought of. In Sri Aurobindo's vision the teacher is not an instructor or task-master; he is just a helper and guide. "His business is to suggest and not to impose. He does not actually train the pupil's mind, he only shows him how to perfect his instruments of knowledge and helps and encourages him in the process. He does not impart knowledge to him, he shows him how to acquire knowledge for himself. He does not call forth the knowledge that is within; he only shows him where it lies and how it can be habituated to rise to the surface." (Ibid., p. 204)
Now, the question is, How to evoke the knowledge that is within? Sri Aurobindo has adumbrated the process in chapter III of his opuscule The Brain of India. The inquisitive reader may refer to the relevant passages there. We quote here only one significant sentence indicating the beneficial result of the process: "The highest reach of the sattwic development is when one can dispense often or habitually with outside aids, the teacher or the text book, grammar and dictionary and learn a subject largely or wholly from within". (SABCL, Vol. 3, pp. 336-37)
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Second Principle: It should never be forgotten that every one has his own svabhāva and svadharma, his intrinsic self-nature and the characteristic turn of his being. He has something divine in him, "something his own, a chance of perfection" and fulfilment in whatever sphere the Divine "offers him to take or refuse." The chief aim of education "should be to discover it, develop it and use it" to the maximum extent possible. The teacher should try to help the child to draw out that in him which is best and noble and make it perfect for a worthy use. And for this the mind of the student has to be consulted in its own growth. The teacher must not seek to hammer the child into the shape desired by the parent or teacher: the student himself must be induced to expand according to his own nature. Otherwise, if we try to disregard the child's svadharma or self-nature and attempt to bring him up in a way not congenial to his divinely ordained turn and temperament, the results can only be disastrous to a great extent. As Sri Aurobindo has warned us:
"There can be no greater error than for the parent to arrange beforehand that his son shall develop particular qualities, capacities, ideas, virtues, or be prepared for a prearranged career. To force the nature to abandon its own dharma is to do it permanent harm, mutilate its growth and deface its perfection. It is a selfish tyranny over a human soul and a wound to the nation, which loses the benefit of the best that a man could have given it and is forced to accept instead something imperfect and artificial, second-rate, perfunctory and common." (SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 204)
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Third Principle: Every child is, in his characteristic fashion, full of various samskāras or impressions both inborn and acquired. The teacher has to be cognisant of this ground reality, take the child as he is and begin his teaching from there. For, the principle of effective and creative teaching is to "work from the near to the far, from that which is to that which shall be." Therefore, the teacher in his hasty and rash ignorance should not try to lift and divorce the child from his natural soil and milieu and transplant him in an imported atmosphere. In Sri Aurobindo's words:
"We must not take up the nature by the roots from the earth in which it must grow or surround the mind with images and ideas of a life which is alien to that in which it must physically move. If anything has to be brought in from outside, it must be offered, not forced on the mind. A free and natural growth is the condition of genuine development." (Ibid., p. 205)
Fourth Principle: Education has to be national but not parochial and sectarian. A superficial consideration may easily lead one to believe that to speak of a "national education" is to talk arrant nonsense. For, is not education something universal in nature, transcending the borders of any particular country? Mankind and its needs, one may aver, are the same everywhere and truth and knowledge also are one and have no country. How can one then talk of offering any "national" education to a child?
A deeper consideration will not fail to expose the fallacious nature of this line of reasoning. A nation or a people is
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not, let us remember, just a geographical unit or an arbitrary conglomerate or an assemblage of men brought about by the vagaries of History. A veritable nation is a specific soul-manifestation of the universal Spirit just as every individual human being is. It has a uniqueness of its own just as it has some elements in common with the other nations of the world. It is expected to play a distinct role in the comity of nations and bring its own rich contribution to the total multi-aspected flowering of humanity as a whole.
And, according to Sri Aurobindo, India is such a nation and if its citizens have to fulfil their intended creative roles and enrich the composite but harmoniously blended civilisation of the world, Indians should have a national education which will be truly "national" in spirit but at the same time organically imbibing and assimilating every possible positive and constructive element derived from other national educational efforts.
Thus Indian "national education" does not mean on the one hand an obscurantist retrogression to the past forms that were once a living frame of our culture but are now dead or dying things, nor the taking over of any foreign patterns — however suitable to other countries — only with certain differences, additions, subtractions, modifications of detail and curriculum and giving it a gloss of Indian colour. A rightly conceived Indian "national education" will be one which will be faithful to the developing soul of India, to her future need, to the greatness of her coming self-creation, to her eternal spirit. It has to take its foundation on our own being, our own mind and our own spirit.
Thus, when Sri Aurobindo speaks of Indian national
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education, it is then not a question between modernism and antiquity but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future, not a return to the fifth century but an initiation for the centuries to come, not a reversion but a break forward away from the present artificial falsity to her own greater innate potentialities. (Vide, SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 194)
Fifth Principle: We have to change the focus of our educational efforts from the "furnishing" of knowledge to the adequate building up of the faculties of knowedge and the strengthening of the moral fabric of the student, of each individual student. We should not try, as we habitually do now, to erect a huge superstructure of "knowledge" in the mind of the student without first preparing a solid foundation to sustain that "knowledge". We have to encourage the student to have a free play of his intelligent attentive thought on the subject of his study; we must correct the habit of spoiling his instruments of knowledge by the adoption of false methods. We should bear in mind that "Information cannot be the foundation of intelligence, it can only be part of the material out of which the knower builds knowledge, the starting-point, the nucleus of fresh discovery and enlarged creation. An education that confines itself to imparting knowledge, is no education." (SABCL, Vol. 3, p. 331)
Therefore, instead of thinking that our task is over once we provide the student with an ever-increasing store of knowledge and skill in various fields of study, we have to devise a great and unique discipline involving a perfect "education" of the soul and mind of the child and for that we
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have first to find the secret of success in a profound knowledge of the working of consciousness in man. The teacher must know how to train and develop in the child his various faculties of memory, imagination, perception, reasoning, judgment, concentration, etc., which help to build the edifice of thought and knowledge for the knower. These faculties must not only be equipped with sufficient tools and materials supplied from outside but clairvoyantly trained to bring into play fresh materials and to use skilfully those of which they are in possession.
The teacher has to know how to handle and develop the innate powers of the four layers of man's mind or antaḥkaranas (i) Chitta or the basic storehouse of memory, (ii) Manas or mind proper — the so-called 'sixth sense', (iii) Buddhi or intellect — the real instrument of thought, and (iv) Bodhi or the faculty of direct knowledge.
The teacher has to fulfil another important task. Since the foundation of the ever-growing structure of knowledge can be sustained with solid stability only if the student is provided with a sufficient fund of energy—sufficient to bear the demands of a continually growing activity of the memory, judgment and creative power,—the teacher should be capable of helping the child to discover the source of infinite energy and tap its resources as and when the demands arise. For, we should not forget that "The source of life and energy is not material but spiritual, but the basis, the foundation on which the life and energy stand and work, is physical.... To raise up the physical to the spiritual is Brahmacharya, for by the meeting of the two the energy which starts from one and produces the other is enhanced and fulfils itself." (Ibid., p. 334)
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Sixth Principle: It needs no emphasising that the development of the intellect and the culture of mental faculties alone cannot enable the child to grow into full manhood. His ethical-aesthetic nature too has to be developed at the same time. When we say so, we are surely not referring to any conventional "moral training" with the help of moral text-books lifelessly imparted by the teacher who acts as a "hired instructor" or a "benevolent policeman" without any correspondence with his own personal conduct. That sort of moral training cannot but make the child insincere and a hypocrite, mechanically and artificially professing high things but never caring to put them into effective practice. As Sri Aurobindo has pointed out: "You can impose a certain discipline on children, dress them into a certain mould, lash them into a desired path, but unless you can get their hearts and natures on your side, the conformity to this imposed rule becomes a hypocritical and heartless, a conventional, often a cowardly compliance." (SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 209)
Yet it is an axiomatic truth that the education of the intellect divorced from the perfection of the moral and emotional nature is patently injurious to human progress. But this perfection can be brought about in the child's nature only if the teacher becomes perfect in the matter and sets a living personal example before his student. He should act as a wise friend and guide and helper to the student and draw the latter to the right path of development by silent but potent suggestion, and the best method of suggestion, let us repeat, is the personal example of the teacher. To be worthy of bearing the title, a "teacher" should be able to help a child under
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his tutelage to develop in himself the following qualities:
Thirst for knowledge, purity of thought and feeling and action, courage, ardour, nobility, beneficence, skill, industry, good taste, balance, sense of proportion, lofty strength and steadfastness of will, self-discipline, etc.
In Sri Aurobindo's words: "The children should be helped to grow up into straightforward, frank, upright and honourable human beings ready to develop into divine nature."
These last few words, "ready to develop into divine nature", lead us to the consideration of the seventh and last principle, the principle of future education.
Seventh Principle: We cannot stop at the borders of ordinary humanity with all its basic insufficiencies and limitations. And education cannot be allowed to confine itself to the sole task of catering to the needs of the sensational, economic, rational or political man. Commercialism has been the bane of modem civilisation; a sensational activism is still its driving force. Modem education has not been able to redeem the sensational man who still lives in the vital substratum, but only wants it to be stimulated from above. As a result, thought and art and literature have been cheapened, and talent and genius have been made to ran in the grooves of popular success.
Or, at times, education is given another dimension, and its main object and form are conceived to be not so much cultural but scientific, utilitarian and economic. The value of education in that case lies not so much in the building up of a noble specimen of humanity but in the preparation of the efficient individual unit to take his appointed place in the body of the economic organisation.
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Or, at its best, education is planned to turn the mostly infrarational human being into a rational creature, and the disordered human group into a rationalised human society. But this hope has been belied; right information and right training alone have not been able to solve the problems of man. For, as Sri Aurobindo has so aptly observed: "...it has not been found in experience, whatever might have once been hoped, that education and intellectual training by itself can change man; it only provides the human individual and collective ego with better information and a more efficient machinery for its self-affirmation, but leaves it the same unchanged human ego." (SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 1057-58)
Where do we go then from here? And how to come out of this cul-de-sac? What is needed for that is a large and profound view of human life and destiny, and a solid foundation in a rightly conceived education different in nature and scope from what it is now. We must penetrate down to the fundamentals with an effort of clear, sound and luminous thinking and know precisely what are the fundamentals and what the accessories of true education. If our new educational venture has to succeed when others of the past or even of the present have failed in the task of the regeneration of man, it has to disengage itself from all ambiguities and be clear about its essential sense, its primary aim and basic procedure.
About the pitfalls inherent in starting new educational experiments without precise clarity about the basics, what Sri Aurobindo has remarked with some poignant wit is worth pondering.
"To be satisfied with a trick of this kind is to perform a
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somersault round our centre of intellectual gravity, land ourselves where we were before and think we have got into quite another country, — obviously a very unsatisfactory proceeding.
...nothing is easier than to start off on a false but specious cry or from an unsound starting-point and travel far away from the right path on a tangent that will lead us to no goal but only to emptiness and failure." (SABCL, Vol. 17, pp. 192, 193)
The basic assumptions guiding the new education of the future,—and those are not mere intellectually cogitated assumptions but wise insights bom of spiritual experience, — are, in an adaptation of the language of Sri Aurobindo:
(1)All life, even the vital and material life, is indeed a manifestation of the universal Power in the individual but veiled in a disguising Maya, and to pursue the lower life for its own sake is to persist in a stumbling path and to enthrone our nature's obscure ignorance and not at all find the true truth and complete law of existence. (Vide, SABCL, Vol. 13, pp. 549-50)
(2)"...the pursuit of intellectual, ethical and social standards, the mind that insists on salvation by the observance of... moral law, social duty and function or the solutions of the liberated intelligence, is... indeed a very necessary stage" of human development, but it is not the complete and last truth of existence. "The soul of man has to go beyond to some more absolute Dharma of man's spiritual and immortal nature." (Ibid., p. 550)
(3)One has to rise beyond the mere terrestrial preoccupation;
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for, a supreme and arduous self-fufilment by self-exceeding is the goal of human endeavour. The spiritual life is a nobler thing than the life of external power and enjoyment. The thinker is greater than the man of action but the spiritual man greater than the thinker. The soul that lives in God is more perfect than the soul that lives only in outward mind or only for the claims and joys of thinking and living matter." (Vide, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 70)
(4)Once the individual has built the substructure, when he has paid his debt to society, filled well and admirably his place in its life, helped its maintenance and continuity and taken from it his legitimate and desired satisfactions, there still remains the greatest thing of all, his own self, the inner being, the soul which is a spiritual portion of the Infinite, one in its essence with the Eternal. This self, this soul he has to find, he is here upon earth for that. He has to come out of his ego-imprisonment and become a universal soul, one with all existence. Then two different possibilities will open up for him: he can either act in divine liberty for the good of all living things or else turn to enjoy in solitude the bliss of eternity and transcendence. (Vide, SABCL, Vol. 14, pp. 114, 115)
(5)But not a withdrawal into supracosmic transcendence nor a dwelling in some supraterrestrial heavens, but an attainment of divine perfection of human being and living here upon earth is the central aim of our existence. "All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfilment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human
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being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, life to the Spirit within him and in the world." Mind, life and body are the means of this growth, but they can find their last perfection only by opening out to the Divine. The education of the future should be designed to help man in fulfilling this ideal of integral perfection. (Vide, SABCL, Vol. 21, pp. 590, 591)
So we see that education changes its meaning and content in Sri Aurobindo's vision of the education of the future. The revealing and finding of the divine Self in man should, in Sri Aurobindo's view, be "the whole first aim of all its [the spiritualised society's] activities, its education, its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economical and political structure." (SABCL, Vol. 15, p. 240)
But how to fulfil this aim? Surely not by any external manipulation of human nature or through the artifice of externally contrived education and social machinery. No social machinery can possibly cut human mind and life into perfection, for mind and life are only instruments of the soul and unless this soul is given a lead in the matter, nothing tangible or permanent can be achieved. Every teacher has to realise that there is a soul or psychical entity in every individual behind his physical-vital-mental parts and this represents the fundamental truth of his existence, the individual self-manifesting divinity within him. He should know that the evocation of this psychical entity, the real man within, is the most rewarding object of education and indeed of all human life if it would find and live according to the deepest truth and law of its own being.
And what will be the contribution of this psychic being
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if it is made to come out into the open? Sri Aurobindo assures us:
"It is not yet realised what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as 'the leader of the march set in our front,' will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception." (Ibid., p. 28)
Will the elite of today pay any heed to these words of Sri Aurobindo? Most probably not. Because the ideas may seem to them too outlandish and the hope of changing human nature by this inner means too chimerical a dream. But whether they believe it or not, Sri Aurobindo assures us that what is demanded of us is not something altogether distant, alien to our existence and therefore radically impossible. For "what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation." (SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 1059)
And this possibility can surely enter the domain of
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practicability if only we can shake off from us the disabling clingings of past notions and habits and arm ourselves with an active faith and robust optimism in the divine possibility of man. What is necessary for the success of this new educational venture of the future, for the birth of a new humanity, is that "there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible... and to find the way." (Ibid., p. 1060)
Is it too much to expect in this Hour of God that some of us who are actively involved in the task of finding the right kind of education for the children of the future, admit the new truth revealed by the Master-Yogi, turn our minds to this "new knowledge of oneness, and world and God and soul and Nature, a knowledge of oneness, a knowledge of universal Divinity" (SABCL, Vol. 13, p. 575) and make this new knowledge and vision the sole motive of all our action for the sake of the divine fulfilment upon earth?
Let us close this long essay on Sri Aurobindo's thoughts and insights on education by quoting a significant passage from the Master-Yogi who has been a distinguished educationist at the same time:
"This is an hour in which, for India as for all the world, its future destiny and the turn of its steps for a century are being powerfully decided, and for no ordinary century, but one which is itself a great turning-point, an immense turn-over in the inner and outer history of mankind. As we act now, so shall the reward of our Karma be meted out to us, and each call of this kind at such an hour is at
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once an opportunity, a choice, and a test offered to the spirit of our people. Let it be said that it rose in each to the full height of its being and deserved the visible intervention of the Master of Destiny in its favour." (SABCL, Vol. 27, pp. 506-07)
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