Editorial

Education has been popularly defined as the process of acquiring knowledge on a certain body, phenomena or object or the acquiring of skills to do a particular work in a prescribed way. It has been in existence since the dawn of human life as man strove for his survival in a world co-habited by other life-forms, learning to do what he was doing better and better for the purpose of survival. With the evolution of modern man, education too has evolved in its meaning and execution. Generally, it has been a means to pass down from generation to generation the learnings of the previous generation. Or it was a means to educate groups of people on skills needed for an occupation that earned that group of people a living. Education, formal and informal, has through the centuries, played a vital role in the intellectual, administrative, economical, social and cultural structures of societies.

Within the existent framework of mainstream education, modifications and changes have become prevalent, thanks to revolutionary thoughts on Education by the likes of John Dewey, Jean Piaget and Vygotsky. However, fundamentally, the function of education has not shifted from serving a utilitarian purpose to one that is practiced for the happy development of a whole person.

Alternative methods of education begin from a changed perspective of viewing the learner as someone deserving more than realize the functions and expectations imposed on him or her by a larger society. In these methods, the learner and his or her inner development is given prominence for his or her own fulfillment. Education is a way of facilitating the flowering of something inherent within the individual, which was the seed source of all else in him or that arises from him. Education is merely a tool, not a template that moulds a being into prescribed, predetermined shapes and sizes to carry out certain functions in society.

In the philosophy of integral education, for example, education is a means to the flowering of the soul, from its obscure depths in a being to the full light of a higher existence. The soul that flowers forth takes over the workings of the mind, life and body and leads the being towards the fulfillment of the purpose of its birth upon earth. In the process, perfection of all the instruments of this nature are called for, initially undertaken as a kind of tapasya and later, when the psychic being from within rises to the fore, blossoms into a harmonious movement of the being towards its own fulfillment.

A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illumine
This dusk room with its dark internal stair,
The infant soul in its small nursery school
Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned
Outgrow its early grammar of intellect
And its imitation of Earth-Nature’s art,
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
In living symbols study Reality
And learn the logic of the Infinite. -Savitri

According to Sri Aurobindo, “Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as a potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the creature” and the true purpose of education is to show the child, “where this knowledge lies and how it can be habituated to rise to the surface.” According to The Mother, the mind is merely an instrument of “formation, of organization and action” not “an instrument of Knowledge, since “knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the regions of pure ideas”. In fact, the “mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it.”

Partho, a practitioner of Integral Education sums up a vision for education thus: “The education that shall labour to awaken the highest and the deepest in man will have to be an education touched and moulded by the deeper truths of the soul…..It is by possessing the soul that man will possess this truth that will fulfill his being and his race.”

It is in the interest progress that one explores education in depth, first of one’s own education and then of the collective. Some questions are in order: What are one’s views on education? Who or what has shaped them? Who decides what a “good” education is? How do we shape the way education is practiced in our country and in the world at large?