Principles and Goals of Integral Education

II

The Mother's Eleven Goals of Education

It is by now well known that the Mother has given the world a well-structured integral philosophy of education. This philosophical vision is unique in many respects — both in its objectives and in its method of implementation. Thus, a centre of learning established anywhere in the world but drawing its inspiration from the Mother's educational teachings cannot but be basically different from most other schools and colleges found elsewhere. For the aim of true education should be, in the Mother's view, to give the students a chance to distinguish between the ordinary life and the life of truth — to see things in a different way. And the teacher's mission should be to open the eyes of the children to something which they will not find in conventional schools.

To crave for money and worldly recognition or to be engrossed in the pursuit of "career-building" must not be the characteristic trait of the students educated in the Mother's way. For, as she has said, the aim of education is not to prepare someone to "succeed" in life and society but to increase his perfectibility to its utmost. Here are some of her words addressed to the students:

"Do not aim at success. Our aim is perfection. Remember you are on the threshold of a new world, participating in its birth and instrumental in its creation. There is nothing more important than the transformation. There

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is no interest more worthwhile." (CWM, Vol. 12, p. 120)

If the students are made aware of these basic truths, it cannot but be that certain definite traits will mark out the pupils studying under the benign influence of the Mother's philosophy of education. But what are these traits? We have the answer in the Mother's own delineation:

"To learn for the sake of knowledge, to study in order to know the secrets of Nature and life, to educate oneself in order to grow in consciousness, to discipline oneself in order to become master of oneself, to overcome one's weaknesses, incapacities and ignorance, to prepare oneself to advance in life towards a goal that is nobler and vaster, more generous and more true..."

(Ibid., pp. 353-54)

The purpose of the present paper is to draw the attention of the readers to some of the principal educational goals envisaged by the Mother. She has spoken a lot and written much on educational matters and has left us detailed instructions concerning all possible aspects of a truth-based education. A judicious study of her published guidance brings into clear focus eleven well-defined goals that an educationist should keep in view while seeking to discharge his responsibility towards his students. The students on their part should assiduously try to attain these eleven educational goals. For even a small measure of success in this field will adequately equip them to face life and its problems with their heads high and hearts free.

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What follows is a succinct account of the eleven educational goals envisaged by the Mother in her writings on education.

First Goal: To Live in the Right Way

A teacher's primary responsibility to his students is to help them in a meaningful way to mould their thinking and living along right lines. Instead of confining himself solely to the task of teaching an academic subject, he should try by all possible means to turn the attention of his pupils from the undesirable rut of ordinary living and make them conscious of the true raison d'être of man's existence upon earth. A student should be helped to grow up as a jijnasu, a "questing consciousness", who loves to think and reflect and ask deep questions such as, "Why am I here? Why is there an earth at all? Why are there men? Why do I live? What is the purpose of life?"

The teacher should be vigilant that his students do not get attached to the mode of ordinary human living. But what do we mean by "ordinary human living"? The Mother has characterised it in the following words:

"[This] is the attitude of men in general: they come into life, they don't know why; they know that they will live a certain number of years, they don't know why; they think they will have to pass away because everybody passes away, and they again don't know why; and then, most of the time they are bored because they have nothing in themselves, they are empty beings and there is nothing more boring than emptiness; and so they try to

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fill this by distraction, they become absolutely useless, and when they reach the end, they have wasted their whole existence, all their possibilities — and everything is lost." (CWM, Vol. 7, pp. 313-14)

And what is then the right way of living? To make the point clear we may be permitted to refer to what the Mother said in answer to a question put to her:

"It is not a question of preparing to read these works or other works. It is a question of pulling all those who are capable to do so, out of the general human routine of thought, feeling and action; it is to give all opportunities to... [the students] to cast off from them the slavery to the human way of thinking and doing; it is to teach all those who want to listen that there is another and truer way of living, that Sri Aurobindo has taught us how to live and become a true being — and that the aim of the education... is to prepare the children and make them fit for that life." (CWM, Vol. 12, p. 117)

So this is the first educational goal set by the Mother: To live in the right way.

Second Goal: To Acquire a Mould of Aspiring Consciousness

The students should not degenerate into actuality-bound, "practical-minded", unprogressive human beings possessing nothing else but a dull and coarse common sense. Instead, they should be helped to develop in themselves the spirit of

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adventurous optimism and to look towards all that is high and wide and noble and true. It would be the sacred task of the teachers to instil into their students an unquenchable ardour and intensity of aspiration, an inner enthusiasm for the glorious unknown and for the undreamt-of perfection, the will to conquer the future, the will always to look ahead and to want to move on as swiftly as one can towards — what will be. The students should be helped to discern between the fugitive joys and superficial pleasures ordinary life can offer and the marvellous things that life, action and growth would be in a future world of perfection and truth. They should be aided to cultivate within themselves the certitude that what belongs to the future is essentially true and not the fossils of the present.

In short, the "Students' Prayer" as formulated by the Mother should be a living reality with every student and correspond to his actual state of aspiration. Here is that Prayer:

"Make of us the hero warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully the great battle of the future that is to be bom, against the past that seeks to endure; so that the new things may manifest and we be ready to receive them."

Third Goal: To Develop the Zeal for Perpetual Progress

One of the principal tasks before a teacher is to instil into his students a thirst for continuous learning and uninterrupted progress. Instead of passing one's time as somnolent children, the students should develop a learning attitude, what may be called a "state of progress", in which one can

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learn and make progress at every moment. For, when one is indeed in such a frame of consciousness, one is prompted from within, before every situation and circumstance of life, to ask oneself: "What is it that I should learn from this particular circumstance? What progress should I make to overcome myself? What is the weakness that I must eliminate? What is the inertia that I must conquer?"

While speaking about the beneficial effects of such an attitude of learning and progress, the Mother has said:

"...everything, no matter what, the least little circumstance in life, becomes a teacher who can teach you something, teach you how to think and act.... Your attitude is so different. It is always an attitude which is awaiting a discovery, an opportunity for progress, a rectification of a wrong movement, a step ahead, and so it is like a magnet that attracts from all around you opportunities to make this progress. The least things can teach you how to progress." (CWM, Vol. 6, p. 154)

This, then, is the third educational goal: to inculcate in the students an insatiable urge for progress.

Fourth Goal: To Learn to Concentrate and Forget One's Ego

The Mother has remarked that the essential worth of a person may be judged by the power and quality of his concentration. Now, the fact is that an average student's nature suffers from the disability of an inert subjection to the impacts of things and demands as they come into the mind

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pell-mell, without order or control. His habitual attention is a haphazard imperfect one, managed fitfully, irreguarly, with a more or less chance emphasis on this or that object according as they happen to interest him at the moment. It is the teacher's responsibility to help the student overcome this "restless, leaping, fickle, easily tired, easily distracted" movement of his consciousness, which usually creates a kind of haziness in the brain, something cloudy, like a fog somewhere. The student should be trained in the art of gathering all his attention and focussing all his energies upon whatever he is doing at the moment.

At the same time, the student should be taught how to forget his little ego and petty self-infatuation. He should be helped to become what he is himself doing and not remain the small person complacently looking at himself doing it. About this aspect of education, here is what the Mother has said:

"One may... do what one does as a consecration to the Divine, altogether disinterestedly, but with a plenitude, a self-giving, a total self-forgetfulness: no longer thinking about oneself but about what one is doing.... If, in oneself, one succeeds in becoming what one does, it is a great progress. In the least little details, one must learn this... When you are at school, you must become the concentration which tries to catch what the teacher is saying... You must not think of yourself but only of what you want to learn... And the best way is to be able to concentrate upon what one is doing instead of concentrating upon oneself." (CWM, Vol. 4, pp. 363, 364, 365)

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So, this is the fourth educational goal envisaged by the Mother: how to increase the power of concentration and forget one's little ego and its petty interests.

Fifth Goal: To Know Oneself and to Choose One's Own Destiny

The Mother has said: "... the finest present one can give to a child would be to teach him to know himself and to master himself." (CWM, Vol. 12, p. 167)

And this is what she means by "knowing oneself" and "mastering oneself":

"To know oneself means to know the motives of one's actions and reactions, the why and the how of all that happens in oneself. To master oneself means to do what one has decided to do, to do nothing but that, not to listen to or follow impulses, desires or fancies."

(Ibid., p. 167)

Hence the Mother's emphatic advice to all those entrusted with the task of educating young children:

"Essentially, the only thing you should do assiduously is to teach them [the students] to know themselves and choose their own destiny, the path they will follow; to teach them to look at themselves, understand themselves and to will what they want to be. That is infinitely more important than teaching them what happened on earth in former times, or even how the earth is built, or even... indeed, all sorts of things which are quite a necessary grounding if

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you want to live the ordinary life in the world..."

(CWM, Vol. 8, p. 182)

Sixth Goal: To Overcome the Tyranny of Lower Desires

While dealing with their students, the teachers are often confronted with the spectacle of the youngsters and adolescents being constantly harassed by blind desires of many kinds. The problem is compounded hundredfold because of the fact that most often the students cannot sufficiently distinguish between a genuine need and a mere desire-impulse. They are apt to take all their desires for needs or necessities and plunge themselves into these with passionate abandon.

It is the teacher who has to step in here and help his students to turn their attention from all undesirable pulls and orient their desire-impulses into the right kind of channels. Here is the Mother's advice concerning this important issue:

"In fact,... one should begin by shifting the movement [of desire] to things which it is better to have from the true point of view, and which it is more difficult to obtain.... For example, when a child is full of desires, if one could give him a desire of a higher kind — instead of its being a desire for purely material objects, you understand, an altogether transitory satisfaction—if one could awaken in him the desire to know, the desire to learn, the desire to become a remarkable person... in this way, begin with that. As these things are difficult to do, so, gradually, he will develop his will for these things."

(CWM, Vol. 6, p. 413)

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To come out of the prejudicial habit of always hankering after a trivial something or the other, becomes the sixth educational goal in the Mother's philosophy of education.

Seventh Goal: To Make the Enlightened Reason the Governor of Life

Young people mostly live by impulses; they are not "reasonable" creatures. They have to be carefully taught how to control the imperious urges of their impulses and obey only those which are in conformity with their deepest aspiration and the luminous ideals they wish to follow in life. The students should develop in themselves a kind of mental discernment whose role it will be to govern the rest of the being. Of course, in the further development of the being towards spiritual illumination the reason itself has to be transcended and be replaced by intuition. But that is miles and miles away. Also, we should never forget what Sri Aurobindo has said in this connection:

"It is not by becoming irrational or infrarational that one can go beyond ordinary nature into supernature; it should be done by passing through reason to a greater light of superreason. This superreason descends into reason and takes it up into higher levels even while breaking its limitations; reason is not lost but changes and becomes its own true unlimited self, a coordinating power of the supernature." (SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 269)

The following words of the Mother should act as a guiding light so far as this particular question is concerned:

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"Of course, it is well understood that reason is not the supreme capacity of man and must be surpassed, but it is quite obvious that if you don't have it, you will live an altogether incoherent life.... The least thing will upset you completely and you won't even know why, and still less how to remedy it. While someone who has established within himself a state of active, clear reasoning, can face attacks of all kinds, emotional attacks or any trials whatever.... Well, reason can stand back a little, look at all that, smile and say, 'Oh! no, one must not make a fuss over such a small thing.'

If you do not have reason, you will be like a cork on a stormy sea."

(CWM, Vol. 8, p. 184)

To make the enlightened reason, the liberated intelligence free from the slavery to vital impulses and physical appetites, the governor of life is, then, the seventh educational goal envisaged in the Mother's philosophy of education.

Eighth Goal: To Be Self-disciplined

In the Mother's view, the education of children should be based on a principle of genuine freedom and a glad and spontaneous choice on the part of the students; rules, regulations and restrictions should be reduced absolutely to the minimum.

But why should it be so? What is its necessity and justification? The Mother answers:

"... from the spiritual point of view this is infinitely more valuable. The progress you will make because you feel

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within yourself the need to make it, because it is an impulsion that pushes you forward spontaneously, and not because it is something imposed on you like a rule — this progress, from the spiritual point of view, is infinitely greater. All in you that tries to do things well, tries to do it spontaneously and sincerely; it is something that comes from within you, and not because you have been promised rewards if you do well and punishments if you do badly. Our system is not based on this."

(CWM, Vol. 6, p. 431)

But the question may arise: What is the place of discipline in this type of free system of education? The answer is: There must be discipline but of another order. For, freedom does not mean either whimsicality or lax waywardness. The essential and all-important difference lies in the fact that in the system of education envisioned by the Mother, instead of exacting from the students an externally imposed conventional discipline of ordinary institutions, the teachers are expected to help their pupils to have an inner self-discipline set by themselves, solely for the love of progress and perfection, their own perfection, the perfection of their being and nature.

The acquisition of this excellent virtue of spontaneous self-discipline constitutes the eighth educational goal that has to be set before the students.

Ninth Goal: To Help Every Individual Child to Blossom

One of the most basic goals in the Mother's system of education is to attend to the inner needs of every individual

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student. The education imparted should not be impersonal and group-oriented. It has to be sensitive to the total personality of each individual child. Therefore the task of a teacher teaching in the Mother's way becomes much more exacting than that of the teachers in the conventional schools. As the Mother has said:

"The teacher should not be a book that is read aloud, the same for everyone, no matter what his nature and character. The first duty of the teacher is to help the student to know himself and to discover what he is capable of doing....

The old method of the seated class to which the teacher gives the same lesson for all, is certainly economical and easy, but also very ineffective, and so time is wasted for everybody."

(CWM, Vol. 12, p. 369)

To be a successful teacher teaching in the right way as recommended by the Mother, one should scrupulously refrain from stereotyping his manner of teaching, from making it the same for all the students. There should be great flexibility and clairvoyance on the part of the teacher. He should not make any fixed rules or theories beforehand and apply them more or less blindly, irrespective of the needs of individual students. He should remember that each case is different and requires a different procedure.

Tenth Goal: To Develop Genuine Individuality

The Mother has always insisted that the students should be patiently helped to disengage their true nature from the

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opaque covering of foreign influences pouring in upon them all the time from outside. They should be their own selves and not act the spurious selves with which they identify themselves without even knowing it. The Mother has referred on many an occasion to the absolute necessity of this process of "individualisation". Here are, for instance, some relevant passages from what she spoke to a group of students on 28 July 1954:

"... at least ninety-nine parts of an individual's character are made of soft butter... on which if one presses one's thumb, an imprint is made.

Now, everything is a 'thumb': an expressed thought, a sentence read, an object looked at, an observation of what someone else does, and of one's neighbour's will. And all these wills... [are] intermingled, each one trying to get the uppermost and causing a kind of perpetual conflict within....

"So one is tossed like a cork on the waves of the sea.... One day one wants this, the next day one wants that, at one moment one is pushed from this side, at another from that, now one lifts one's face to the sky, now one is sunk deep in a hole. And so this is the existence one has!" (CWM, Vol. 6, pp. 256-57)

Hence arises the necessity of helping the students discover their true nature and essential individuality which can stand as a rock of self-defence against any undesirable invading influence.

Let us close our discussion of the tenth educational goal

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by quoting some significant words of the Mother:

"First one must become a conscious, well-knit, individualised being, who exists in himself, by himself, independently of all his surroundings, who can hear anything, read anything, see anything without changing. He receives from outside only what he wants to receive; he automatically refuses all that is not in conformity with his plan and nothing can leave an imprint on him unless he agrees to receive the imprint. Then one begins to become an individuality!"

(Ibid., p. 257)

Eleventh Goal: An All-round Development of All the Instruments

It may be stated without much ado that the basic Vision that should permeate all educational effort is that the earthly life is the destined field of a progressive self-manifestation of the Spirit and that the students, as everybody else, should prepare themselves as instruments, as perfectly as possible, to express adequately and without any distortion or diminution the divine Will in the world.

Now, the mind, the heart, the vital and the body are the four instruments of manifestation of the Spirit. Thus, there is the mental being which produces thoughts, the emotional being which produces feelings, the vital being which produces the power of action and the physical being that acts and gives form to everything else. Now, the basic duty of a teacher is to help his students in the task of developing these four instruments to as great a perfection as practicable. The mind, the heart, the vital and the body should be cultivated,

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educated and trained. They must not be left like shapeless pieces of stone. In the Mother's words:

"When you want to build with a stone you chisel it; when you want to make a formless block into a beautiful diamond, you chisel it. Well, it is the same thing. When with your brain and body you want to make a beautiful instrument for the Divine, you must cultivate it, sharpen it, refine it, complete what is missing, perfect what is there."

(CWM, Vol. 5, p. 48)

We have discussed in brief eleven distinct educational goals set by the Mother before the students. But what is the best way of attaining these goals? It goes without saying that a great responsibility devolves upon the teachers in this matter. For, they are the direct intermediaries and instruments for the fulfilment of the great Vision. And it is surely not by acquiring technical competence in the subjects they are to teach that the teachers can expect to be successful in the task of discharging the sacred responsibility they bear towards their students. No, there is only one way out and that is for the teachers to put into practice what they are supposed to preach. And it should be clearly understood as the Mother has pointed out, that "each one, whatever his worth and capacity, can and must progress constantly to realise an ideal which is much higher than the present realisation of humanity.... The main thing is to keep the certitude that whatever may have been accomplished, one can always do better if one wants to."

(CWM, Vol. 12, pp. 358-59)

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