‘On Education’(by The Mother) is but a series of 6 brief essays, but it
is also a vast arc of comprehension: from Matter to Spirit, from the physical,
vital and mental to the psychic, spiritual and supramental, from animal to man
and from man to God! Education is a movement, an unfolding, a becoming: what is
already involved as a result of the holocaust of the Spirit in inconscient
Matter awakens and puts out its sticky leaves of bud of promise, and must end
at last in the full blossoming of the Divine potentiality.
-
K.R.
Srinivasa Iyengar in ‘On The Mother’
The education of the vital or the life-impulses is as difficult as it is
important. The vital is a veritable despot of contraries, forever demanding,
and forever unfulfilled. Our knowledge of the nature and functioning of the
vital is vitiated by two notions: the hedonistic and the fatalistic. All is
indeed the Delight of Existence - raso
vai sah - but with man it ordinarily takes the form of the pursuit of
pleasure, which may sometimes satiate but can never satisfy. As regards the
notion that human character is like an unalterable birthmark - Character is
Destiny! - it is too crude and definitive a description of reality. In a
dynamic changing universe, man too can change, the race as well as the
individuals:
“The transformation of
character has in fact been realised by means of a clear-sighted discipline and
a perseverance so obstinate that nothing, not even the most persistent
failures, can discourage it.”
Human nature, it is known, is a knot of opposing pulls, “like the light and shadow of the same thing”.
The divine and the asuric are
constantly at variance with each other reducing life to a battlefield or an
insurrection. This is how “all life is an
education pursued more or less consciously, more or less willingly”. The
problem is to encourage in the vital being “the
movements that express the light”.
If the education of the vital is begun as soon as the child can use his
senses, “many bad habits will be avoided
and many harmful influences eliminated”. To facilitate and promote
movements in the vital expressing light two things have to be done: the proper
growth and efficient use of the sense organs, and the self-mastery of one's own
nature or character, and the determination to change and transform it nearer
one's heart's aspiration. As for the first, the education of the vital is
really something akin to the development of psychological health comprising “the cultivation of discrimination and the
aesthetic sense”, for it is essential that the child “should be shown, led to appreciate, taught to love beautiful, lofty,
healthy and noble things, whether in Nature or in human creation”. As for
self-knowledge and character-transformation, the child should be encouraged by
a gradual process to observe himself, to mark and measure the opposing pulls,
to attempt judicious discrimination, to initiate change, and to persevere in
spite of set-backs or failures:
“One must gain a full knowledge
of one's character and then acquire control over one's movements in order to
achieve perfect mastery and the transformation of all the elements that have to
be transformed.”
Now most of what passes for education is really mental education, yet it
is both incomplete and quite insufficient. The aim seems to be to load the
memory and make it carry a whole rag-bag of odds and ends of facts, dates,
names, formulas and other information. At best it is “a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain”.
If anything like a revolutionary change is to be effected, mental education
will have to be conceived in five phases promoting respectively
“1. the power of attention and
concentration;
2. the power of expansion,
wideness, complexity and richness;
3. the power of organisation of
ideas around a central idea or ideal;
4. the power of
thought-control, involving rejection of the false and selection and fostering
of the true; and
5. the power of inner calm and
mental silence, facilitating “receptivity to inspirations coming from the
higher regions of the being”.
This is a consummate analysis of the whole science of mental education.
In the life of the growing child, a thousand things distract its attention, and
hence to forge intelligent attention and lively reception is the beginning of
mental education. The child's curiosity, which often finds expression in
continual questioning, should not be frowned upon but used as a means of
advancing self-education. Since the enemy of all true education is soulless
standardisation, the pupil should be encouraged to view diverse approaches to a
subject and to appreciate “the extreme
relativity of mental learning”, this in its turn awakening in him “an aspiration for a truer source of
knowledge”. From the capacity to concentrate, it is a natural development
to learn to accomplish the expansion of knowledge and its organisation around a
central idea; and “the higher and larger
the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the
more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts
which it will be able to organise and harmonise”. After such exercises in
expansion and central organisation, the next mental discipline would be
self-control and resolved self-limitation - and so on to the casting away of
all thoughts and perceptions, and the invocation of mental silence, the
meditative calm in which the higher lights may be seen reflected, resulting in
an accession of peace:
“...all mental vibration can be
stilled and an almost total silence secured. In this silence one can gradually
open to the higher regions of the mind and learn to record the. inspirations
that come from there. ...
...When it is agitated, thought
becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquility, the light can
manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity.”
When the best has been achieved through physical, vital and mental
education, there will be a cardinal insufficiency still: for, firstly, they
cannot by themselves be integrated, and, secondly, even their sum will only be
a frustrating incompleteness. It is psychic education alone that can team the
other three purposively together, and also link them to the creative centre.
Unfortunately, current educational systems have no idea of psychic education -
thus tragi-comically playing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
…to be continued
(K.R.
Srinivasa Iyengar in ‘On The Mother’,
Chapter 37, “Mother on Education”,
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry)
"Each human being
is a self-developing soul and the business of both parent and teacher is to
enable and to help the child to educate himself to develop his own intellectual,
moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic
being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic
material." - Sri Aurobindo
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