“Everyone here is a learner”: update on The Learning Community

The Learning Community (TLC) was formed in 2008 by a small group of like-minded people around a vision to create a community of children and adults who grow more conscious by living and learning together. They implement ways to practice the concept of Integral Education as defined by Mother and Sri Aurobindo, where each part of the being is helped to grow into its full potential, and the psychic being becomes the leader of one’s life and growth through an unending education.

At present TLC has 20 children between 6 – 13 years, supported by a core group of facilitators and an active group of parents.

Auroville Today spoke to some of the facilitators to find out more about the TLC journey, as well as the personal learnings, challenges, insights and ‘magic moments’ this has involved.

Free progress is an essential element of Integral Education as practiced in TLC. What do you understand by the term ‘free progress’?

Tamar: It is not just about freedom because freedom when one is not ready for freedom can become inner and outer chaos. So in free progress the child is encouraged to explore its individuality while being held with loving and gentle support, and being nudged when there is something in that being which is being asked to be nudged in a certain direction

I decided this is the education which I wanted to give to my children and many others so that when they reached a certain age they would have the tools to decide for themselves, from a place of inner freedom. What we do here is preparing them for that freedom.

Maya: When we talk about free progress, it is not freedom in a traditional sense; it’s not doing what you want, when you want, driven by likes and dislikes. It’s about getting to know yourself and learning how to guide yourself, and take responsibility for yourself and be responsible towards others. It’s not an outer vital freedom of impulses but finding the inner freedom to follow yourself in a true way. In this sense, free progress links to the discovery of the psychic being. The more we are free inside, the more we are able to be in touch with the psychic being, and that is what this education is about.

Sara: We are facilitators, not teachers. We do not impose or teach, we are more observing and guiding because we want the child to grow from within.

What are the major challenges?

Maya: When it comes to actually allowing children to be free, it’s very challenging for parents to really trust and allow the child to go through the ups and downs they need to go through to be able to work towards and discover that inner freedom. We have parents who come from many different cultural backgrounds, with their own traumas from their schooling, and with their dreams of what they want for their children.

Mainstream education gives a security as we can see and measure its immediate results. When we don’t organize or measure education like ours parents can feel like nothing is happening with their child’s learning, as what we are trained to look at are academic outcomes. Some leave TLC for this reason. There are also parents who want to fully free their children from the conventional system, and to allow them to grow without any educational structures or frameworks. For parents like this who join TLC, it can be difficult to understand the concept of freedom in Integral Education, as they are looking for another type of freedom for their child. We put a lot of energy into building understanding and trust in parents: this work can’t be done without that.

Also, children need time to find themselves. It can take three years for a child to begin to figure out what it wants or doesn’t want, and if parents withdraw their child during this period, it doesn’t give a chance for anything to happen.

Can any child benefit from this kind of education? Or is it only for some?

Maya: I’ve no doubt that every child can benefit from this.

Sara: Yes because we allow each child to find and follow their learning style. Some can learn better alone, others in a small group, some like to work on one thing for a long period, some like to do different things in one day.

Tamar: I think it’s for every child, but not for every parent.

In the film about TLC (see link below) somebody remarks that the real work is with the parents, because often when you are working with the child you are actually dealing with the parent.

Tamar: This is very true. One of the challenges we are dealing with is the different forms of parenting and their influence upon the child. One of these factors is a very deep fear in parents of having their children bored. Parents are used to piling one activity upon another so that the child is never bored. However, when a child tells me they are bored, I find it a cause for celebration, because then the child realises that nobody is going to come to give them the answer about what to do next, and this is the moment when the child can really look inside, and there is a possibility of free progress.

At the beginning of TLC we had a child who, for three months, simply swung on a swing. It was a huge challenge for the parent, but we started reading about what swinging does for the being, and we discovered that it helps the two sides of the brain to interconnect. So obviously this child knew, without knowing, that she just needed to do that. This child was not bored, it would it be an adult projection to say she was bored. After three months, the first thing she did was she went to Johnny and said she wanted to learn maths. And she never got on that swing again.

Mrinalini: I think one thing that is quite unique with TLC is that it requires an active choice: it’s not a school where you simply send your child, you join as a whole family. So the parents need to be on board. They need to try to grow in this direction along with their child, because if we are looking at a holistic education it cannot happen separately from what is happening at home.

I understand that in TLC you would like to start working with parents and their children from a very young age.

Maya: Exactly, because by the time the child is six or seven, the parents have already found their way of parenting, and they also have fixed expectations for the future of their children, while parents with small children, especially with their first child, are still forming their ideas of parenting. When we have children joining at age seven or eight years, which is what happens now, it takes something like three years for a child to really land in this system, and for the parents it may take even longer.

If we could work with parents and children from a younger age, ideally with parents during pregnancy, and have them fully on board, we could reach much, much further than we do now. Typically, when a child comes here we have to start with a huge unlearning, and this takes time. If this could have happened during the first three years of life, it would be completely different because there then there would be this trust in the parents, and we can see the difference in the child when the parents are fully trusting what we are doing.

Conventional schools have tests and examinations through which the students and teachers can assess progress. Here you have none of these. So how do you assess progress or the growth of the individual?

Maya: The problem with this form of education is we don’t really have a road map, we don’t even have the vocabulary to communicate properly to parents what is happening here, even though we can see it really clearly when working with the children. So we felt we needed to understand better what we are doing here so that we can communicate it better. This research started with the making of the film, and we also formed a team to talk about it regularly. The question was, how do we assess free progress?

Quite early in the research we identified what we called ‘magic moments’, moments when we see something happens in the child, something shifts, and the child pushes through to something new in its development or inner realization. We started a whatsapp group with facilitators and parents, and as soon us somebody saw a magic moment, we would share it. Then we could go to the child and ask them what happened at that moment, what was going on?

During one year we also shared reflections among TLC facilitators, parents and children. With the children we also conducted deep interviews to help them to reflect on their own learning. When we analyzed all this material, what emerged were three main categories of our work with the children. One was about independence, encouraging self-motivation, self-knowledge, and children steering their own learning. The second one was what we called ‘inter-independence’, which is all the things that happen together, like children learning from each other, the mixing together of different ages, and caring for shared things like community assets. The third category was the forms and processes we have discovered in TLC to try to work on these issues of independence and inter-independence.

When we looked a little deeper, we saw we could associate these three categories with Sri Aurobindo’s three principles of education. The first principle, that nothing can be taught, means that it’s all about independence and inner development, which is integral yoga if you take it one step further. In other words, how can we, through education, give children a foundation for integral yoga?

The second principle is that the mind must be consulted in its own growth. So how can we create structures that offer that possibility to the children, so they are allowed to be where they are in their growth? And what does that mean for the relationships between children? How to organize education to move away from competition and comparison, as in traditional education, and allow diversity and each one to value the richness of this diversity? This is the principle that helps us work, through education, towards human unity in Auroville.

The third principle is the how, ‘from the near to the far’. We take as the starting point the child’s present interests and needs, and use this as a means of development. Everyday life and every moment is the best school of all. So, for example, we have the kitchen project where a lot of learning happens around food, and the magazine is another learning project created by the children out of their need to understand Auroville better.

It is clear from the film that at times you are confronted by children with emotional traumas. How do you deal with these when you don’t have the traditional schooling structures to fall back on?

Maya: Children everywhere have emotional issues – this is not peculiar to TLC – but generally children have to keep them inside at school and maybe let them out on to their parents when they come home. But at TLC working with the vital being of the child is what we do the most because we have many kids coming with a lot of things they have to work through, and here we provide the space for that to happen.

Mrinalini: It’s about honouring the inner being of the other. But if you’re trying to look at the need of the inner being of another, you have to have a connection with your own first. You can be calm in one part of your being but not necessarily in the vital. With children also you always have to be present in the moment. And if you are willing to be on this journey and you want that growth, it is just amazing. Every moment you’re learning, you’re growing, you can see yourself expand to be able to hold the situation when things get difficult or go wrong.

Maya: That’s why it is so beautiful that were are a community in TLC, because we have others who support us and can offer insights when we get upset about something that is happening with a child or parent. Because it’s clear, whether you’re a parent or a facilitator, that you are joining a learning community and none of us is expected to know all the answers or be perfect. After all, we’re all beginners, we’re only scratching the first steps of what integral learning means. This means there is much patience and support here when we go through ups and downs in ourselves and with the children: this is a very safe and caring learning environment for adults, too.

Tamar: Everyone here is a learner, and maybe the adults the most. TLC was actually started as a vehicle for the adults’ personal growth, and we are using our children’s educational journey for this! In fact, the kids are fine, it is us who have to unlearn, to change, and when we do they will benefit. It’s difficult when you’re alone, but with a group which is also going through the same thing, it is possible because you can vent and rant and they will support you. That’s a beautiful thing, because then perhaps you won’t burn out and run away when things get difficult. And even if you do need to step back for a while, you can do that here because there’s an understanding that if a facilitator doesn’t feel able to hold the children one day, it is better that s/he doesn’t come, and the rest of us will support.

Flexibility is also something that we really expect from the parents, for this is not Industrial Revolution-style education where everything, including education, is mechanized. This is life, and life flows and life changes all the time and if you are not able to be flexible with that, it’s going to be very challenging for you to be part of TLC, because here it’s about people and life and flow, not structures, goals and outcomes.

As TLC is also for the growth of the adults, do you remember any significant moments in your own development?

Sara: I cannot find just one, but every day there are moments when I feel I have to put aside most of my beliefs and conditioning and just try to be present. When I manage to do this, I find it’s magic. But I realize that a lot of the time I have many expectations, so when something emerges which is different from what I would wish would happen, it’s a real challenge. This is the work I’m doing on myself, day after day.

Tamar: My facilitation of Awareness Through the Body (ATB) is an interesting journey for me because one of the guidelines is that when we enter the ATB hall we leave ourselves outside - and that is so difficult to do. It’s so tangible. If I facilitate a session when I’m feeling upside down, bothered by something that happened outside, the class is completely different. But if I manage to put aside what I arrive with, everything happens in that space like magic. This is really a barometer where I can follow very clearly where I’m at: to see if I’m managing to be in the essence of who I am rather than all the other stuff which is not me, but which is affecting me. 

Mrinalini: A lot of the time, the magic moment is when it’s really difficult for me to handle something, and suddenly I get an insight. For 20 years I have been working with movement in groups, and a lot of the time it’s about sensing the group, being where they are at and sensing what their need is at that moment, then adapting. Recently, however, I’ve been working with a group which always feels completely scattered. I’d been trying different things and they were not working. Then there was this moment when I realised that they’re really not a group, they are all very individual and their needs are individual, so this group thing is not going to happen. And then I knew what needed to happen.

When TLC began, it wanted to break down the division between school and community and make the larger Auroville community the learning field. One way it did this was by having no fixed campus. In 2012, however, it acquired ‘Base Camp” as its fixed campus. Has this led to a certain institutionalisation of what you are doing here?

Tamar: That’s very interesting because there was a moment five or six years ago were we realised that this had started happening without our really noticing it. Suddenly we found we were having fixed classes at fixed times with fixed groups, and with a predetermined syllabus. We had fallen asleep before some of us realised that actually this is not what we are here to do. It was very difficult and very traumatic because we had to really shake the boat to get us back on track, and this split the community. But since then we’ve been very vigilant to keep our original vision, because we all come from an educational background which uses the traditional methods of scheduled classes, predetermined syllabus and grades.

What about outside pressure? You are part of SAIIER. Has there been any pressure upon you from SAIIER to conform to any educational expectations?

Tamar: There hasn’t been any intervention in terms of what we are doing, but we have definitely had challenges in getting acknowledgement for our work.

This raises the question of the larger context of education in Auroville. How supportive is it of what you are trying to do here?

Maya: I think there is a need to build a conversation around what education, and particularly integral education, should look like in Auroville because now each school chooses its own educational path and there is no common sharing. Integral education has a huge role to play in Auroville but we are not appreciating this or seeing what it would involve, and at the moment we even see a trend in Auroville of families sending their children out of Auroville to receive a mainstream education.

To get more clarity, currently I am researching the whole of Auroville education. I’m interviewing a long-term teacher from each of the Auroville schools to try to find what are the challenges and the needs of each school, what kind of education we want to foster in Auroville, and how we could come together to do this.

How do TLC students cope when they go to other Auroville schools?

Tamar: Many of them go to Last School. There is definitely a cohesiveness about the way we work here and the way Last School works, and there’s very good communication between us. Some of our students have also gone to Future School and colleges outside, which are exam-based in their approach, but I think the TLC children are equipped for any kind of framework once they leave here. Children in TLC learn how to learn. And a child who wants to learn can learn anything, anywhere.

Alessandra Silver’s film about TLC, ‘Learning From the Intangible’, won the Cinema Paradiso Award at the 2022 Auroville Film Festival. It can be viewed at https://youtu.be/guBtplqBl8o