Designing an education for humanity

In 2000, while I was still living in the US, I conducted a conference in Chengalpattu, Tamil Nadu for 120 NGO partners of Asha for Education to learn from each other. Teachers from Auroville’s Isai Ambalam school came and presented alternative education methodologies. They didn’t talk about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s philosophy as such, but simply about their fascinating work with children.

The implicit philosophy

At Isai Ambalam, they had worked on many techniques, such as the Glenn Doman flash card method (where children are introduced to words even before they are introduced to letters). [See AV Today 270, January 2012.] The scientific basis for the idea is that enormous implicit learning is possible at a young age. And, of course, in Sri Aurobindo’s and in Indian philosophy, it is also the intuitive part of the mind that is being exercised, not the mental or vital part. It’s a very subtle method, although it looks like you’re just showing flashcards. Another example had been adapted from the Learning Ladder method developed at Rishi Valley that allowed children to freely progress at their own pace through different activities around a theme, like art, reading, songs or group games. 

The invitation was for people to come to Auroville in order to learn and practise these methods. So my introduction to Auroville education was the idea of centres for excellence, places that had done something well, where people could come, learn and then go back and apply the learning in their own domains. We continue to have diverse creative approaches to education in Auroville, with a number of individuals or groups doing exceptional work, though often in silos.

From mathematics to self-awareness

When I moved to Auroville, I decided to focus on mathematics because I had observed that many children hated it. I felt if I could transform that hate into enjoyment and love, then we would be working, in a way, on the yoga of transformation.

Children usually learn mathematics as independent topics and don’t connect the dots. When they are able to make connections, they understand that the different topics are the same thing seen from different vantage points. This grows the sense of having a perspective and of abstraction, which is also the basis for self-awareness and self-observation. We want children to be self-aware and to observe themselves, and we can help them learn how to do this through our approach to mathematics.

It is much easier for children to describe what happened and what they did, rather than share what they learned through the activity, and even harder to reflect on what they learned about themselves through the activity. Our goal in the educational initiatives is to support children to learn to use the mind in a more grounded way; not simply to think about many things, but actually to still the mind and to be able to look at one thing and themselves from different perspectives.

Tools for deepening self-awareness

This is also something I do with the children and youth as a Radical Transformation Leadership (RTL) practitioner coach. We all engage with these practices together to reflect on self.

RTL provides tools and templates that allow us to work on three aspects: who I am, how I think and what I do. Who I am is what I deeply care about, and what universal value I stand for (at my best). For me, those values are self-awareness and equanimity: equanimity being the ability to stay still in the vicissitudes of life. The second aspect is honing my critical thinking or ‘pattern mind’, which is my ability to see the culture or system and what shifts may be needed to align these with what I deeply care about. The third aspect is what I do – my everyday actions. When all three aspects are in alignment, we call it a conscious full spectrum response. My response – not my reaction  – is conscious, and it is addressing all three aspects.

Different people have their own different practices from integral yoga for working on themselves. I am also a Vipassana practitioner. RTL assumes you’ve worked on yourself and offers you ways to reflect on how you’ve grown through that. 

RTL and Integral Education

I was introduced to RTL through the Stewardship for a New Emergence programme offered in Auroville by Dr. Monica Sharma, a former UN Programme Director. In the very first session, we talked about what we very deeply cared about, the value that I embodied at my best and designing from a space of universal values. Being in touch with who I deeply am – what we call the psychic being - and letting it manifest in action and design from inside out is very much in line with Integral Education. It is not top down or bottom up. It’s inside out. 

With RTL, we also look at socialised fears that limit us. My first fear was not being in control. I had a very structured classroom with a lot of rigour but no interaction among the children. But what did I deeply care about? Self-awareness. And how was developing self-awareness even possible if children did not interact with others?

As I let go of each of these fears and my ego, I create a structure that is more in line with who I am. Then the classroom becomes more interactive; we work with each other, we do projects together. In a very small way, it’s a transformation simply based on the fact that I notice what’s important for me is not just that children learn how to add fractions, but that they grow, which means they have spaces to engage and reflect with their whole being.

RTL for teams

RTL is not just a personal leadership tool; it’s a team building tool, and all of my teams do it because it allows us to have a common language and find alignment with common goals. 

Each of us has our sadhana, our personal practice. Many techniques and methods are available at a personal level, but we don’t quite know how to bring these into how we work with teams. We are human; ego creeps in and the growth of the individual doesn’t translate into growth for the organisation. RTL offers team building tools that allow us to pause to see if there is a gap between where we are and what we would like to be. 

One of the tools is called ‘breakdown to breakthrough’. It’s a senior practice (building on many other tools) that allows the entire team to be brought together, declare a breakdown and design a breakthrough. When it’s done well, it creates a space like STEM Land, the learning space we opened at Udavi school in 2015 [see AV Today 317, December 2015].

In schools, what similar processes can we have in place that create alignment and allow for new initiatives to flourish? This would allow schools to keep evolving and progressing and not be so dependent on the ups and downs of specific people joining or leaving.

Assessing our progress

Auroville has about 30 diverse educational initiatives with children and youth. Most people, even those who work in education, are not aware of all of them. Each school or initiative has a slightly different understanding of Integral Education, which reflects in their structure and practice. There are individuals of a certain excellence and groups that have done some things very well. Each school also has their area where they feel they have progressed in some way. Lately we’ve been having conversations about how to meaningfully assess ourselves in a way that reflects Integral Education and which could also help us progress. We have worked out one such rubric and the Auroville schools have used it for self-assessment.

A hub for Integral Education?

I had already been working in education for years when I came to Auroville, but I didn’t know much about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. I just knew there was something valuable here and I was open to learning. I believe many people come to Auroville like this. Once they come, we should be able to have a conversation about the fact that education is not meant to help children fit in, or even to stand out; it’s to actually discover who each of us really is. A soul-centered education.

But we would need to deepen and broaden our own learning (and concurrently document this as research) if we aspire to create an environment where other people could come, learn, interact and engage.

I mentioned earlier the Rishi Valley Learning Ladder which Isai Ambalam school teachers recreated in Tamil and made relevant for Tamil Nadu. This was noticed by some State Government officials who then asked government schools to send teachers to Isai Ambalam for training. The room where we are sitting was built in 2005 for teachers to come, stay and learn. From 2005 to 2009, 300 groups of teachers came to learn. 

That is how the Activity-Based Learning (ABL) system became the common standard across Tamil Nadu. 

To create and nourish an Integral Education classroom, school and ecosystem is challenging. As practitioners, we tend to be so busy with day-to-day activities that it is hard to take time for inputs other than through peer learning or informal conversations. Our awareness of what’s happening beyond our own schools is often limited. We don’t get together frequently enough to learn from each other. The recent Integral Education Practitioner Gatherings were one step in this direction.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s philosophy of Integral Yoga and Integral Education is the basis of our work. If we don’t work on understanding this philosophy explicitly in schools, we may end up practising child-centred education rather than soul-centred education. With young children the learning is implicit. But as they grow up, if we don’t engage in conversations of why we do things the way we do, we may not be engaging them in their own education as intelligent beings. Our role is also to stimulate the interesting existential questions that are already in children and youth to allow for such explicit exploration. 

Organisational partnerships

We do have pockets of excellence, but we need to find multiple ways to come together more often, not just for training and sharing, but also working with each other. STEM Land, for example, works closely with Isai Ambalam and Udavi schools; Yuvabe works with Deepanam [see AV Today 401, December 2022]. These connections between education and practice (in this case, commercial units) are needed. Partnerships are needed. The quality of a school in Auroville is actually decided by the quality of its engagement with Auroville. How can we create more internships and bridges where children can actively learn from units and organisations which have very good practitioners? How can we make the partnerships systematic and organisational rather than only through personal contacts, and how can this work be documented?

Higher education

We also need to have a higher education that is in line with what we believe in. We create a beautiful environment of integrality when children study in our schools and then many go into an entirely different system which they cannot connect with. I think the first opportunity Auroville has had to explore what we care about post schooling is the three-year B.Voc. degree in affiliation with Pondicherry University. 

We have designed three curricula, which have been approved by the University’s Board of Studies: green energy and electric systems; production technologies; and software development and machine learning. The course design builds on our experience from Becoming and Being a Shifu (Master), the one-year programme initiated through C3STREAM Land Designs [see AV Today 388, November 2021]. The B.Voc. develops both practical skills and the integral personality, including leadership, integral yoga, etc. We have started first with the software development and machine learning programme. Last year we had two students, this year we have 15 students and I hope this will grow. It is enriching for me to see the children who studied with me at Udavi, Isai Ambalam and Last school in this programme this year. 

On synthesis

Of late, there have been many polarising conversations in Auroville. Our role as Integral Education practitioners is to transcend polarisation and create synthesis. Subhash (who was then the coordinator of Isai Ambalam School) used to say to me, ‘Anything we do well with sincerity in Auroville has an occult effect. It will spread everywhere.’ We are supposed to have every problem of the world, and when we tackle it, we believe it will express itself in the rest of the world. Isn’t that an amazing thought to work with?

We should give an opportunity for all the goodwill around Auroville to come out. Do we create those opportunities as schools? If we realise that our role is not only for the children here, but for humanity as a whole, then we will find ways to make those links. We will then look at our work a little differently.