Auroville, A Site of Unending Education

Over the last 50 years, Auroville has developed collectively and experimentally as a society dedicated to conscious evolution, grounded in a multiplicity of pursuits – commercial and social enterprises, alternative schooling and environmental restoration, a vibrant artistic and (multi)cultural life. This dedicated opportunity of applying consciousness into everyday life makes Auroville an enhanced learning environment, because every endeavour and interaction is a potential, perpetual site of multidimensional transformation and reformulation, inner and outer, subtle and physical. Precisely how is it ‘enhanced’, one ought to ask? Can we not learn from all of our experiences in whatever context? Of course we can – but our community does provide a socio-economic, political, and spiritual context in which the capacity to engage in shaping oneself and one’s environment meaningfully is practically fostered. One of the things that has come to light for me in the course of my doctoral research on Auroville is how so many aspects of our society are structured in ways that support and facilitate it being a place of ‘unending education,’ ‘constant progress,’ and a ‘youth that never ages’ – in addition to the role of our ideals in inspiring individuals to approach our personal and collective lives embodying these. I share some of these insights with you here.

Educational Offerings

In highlighting Auroville as a learning society, my focus here is on continuing educational opportunities for adults, and not on schooling. Although interesting to note in terms of understanding Auroville as an enhanced learning environment is that many young adults educated in Auroville emphasise their upbringing as a whole, and not just their schooling, as being “an educational experience.” They were exposed to many learning experiences within the community, and developed an adaptable capacity to learn from each of these, a quality which they carried forward in their lives (“Auroville Education Survey; 1968 – 2013”). In a survey circulated to alumni of Auroville schools, I found it significant that many listed teaching as at least one of their current activities in life, given that I too have often taken up teaching various activities, often on a pro-bono basis, intentionally carrying forward the generosity so many showed me in Auroville when I was growing up here.

I wonder if this is a shared rationale, and whether being exposed from a young age to a dynamic and participatory learning environment is conducive to engaging in creating such opportunities.

Incidentally, aside from graduates of Auroville high schools who have chosen to continue on to teach within them, young Aurovilians have become significant contributors to learning opportunities within Auroville and beyond. In the past decade, a team of Aurovilian-raised adults has been organising the “Auroville Holi Tango Festival”, the biggest in Asia. It has shaped the practice and culture of tango in India, where, following the Auroville example, not a single school charges profit-based prices for similar events. The unit Tree Care India, another team of Auroville-raised adults, is offering the only arborist apprenticeships in the country, intent on defining the development of environmentally-conscious arborist practice in India. Wasteless, another young Aurovilian-founded and driven social enterprise, now has its educational material included in the Tamil Nadu Education Board’s school textbooks, with potentially dramatic impact for waste reduction in the coming generation of Indian citizens. The Tree House Community travels internationally and offers workshops to teach people to build their own, eco-friendly housing, and YouthLink offers a number of residential educational programmes in which young adults from across the world and Auroville’s bioregion immerse themselves and learn from our community’s best practices, emerging with UNESCO-recognised certification and the skills to train others. Perhaps the most recent of youth-led educational initiatives is the free night school open to all, “Night Conscious Learning”, launched by the Youth Centre.

I choose to single these out because this is the ‘youth’ edition, but of course there is a huge wealth of learning opportunities that are provided by so many members of our community, in so many fields, contributing to manifesting Auroville as a site of ‘unending education’ for many within and beyond the community. Starting at the primary school level, Auroville serves more children in Outreach Schools than in the community’s own. Guests benefit from the many workshops Aurovilians facilitate, and more young Indians than young Aurovilians intern in Auroville units, such as the architecture studio Dust Studio. University student groups regularly visit our community on accredited field trips. Channelled through Savi – now managed by a team of young Aurovilians too! – hundreds of volunteers each year learn from their immersions in Auroville’s wide-ranging units and centres of research. A 2013 research report “Educational practices & opportunities for Adults in Auroville” reveals that the facilitators of these opportunities aspire to embody and transmit integral educational experiences to their participants, and that their immersion in the environment of Auroville facilitates an inner dimension of personal development. Participants go on to practice, and even teach the knowledge they have acquired within Auroville units – such as Sunlit Future, the Auroville Earth Institute, EcoFemme – elsewhere, so that their reach, while perhaps not ‘unending,’ is certainly not finitely restricted to Auroville.

Personal Development as Unending Education

For adults in Auroville, work is a key site of lifelong learning. The Mother spoke of work in Auroville not as “a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities”; work was to be undertaken as a yoga.

She envisioned an economy in which the basic needs of all would be provided for, in which Aurovilians would not be driven to work long hours, but would also be able to dedicate a significant amount of their time to an integral development.

Work is an important site of yogic practice for Aurovilians (a topic on which a soon-to-become young Newcomer recently completed a Master's thesis in psychology). This principle is key to the very understanding of what it means to be Aurovilian, and is certainly a constant, self-educational work-in-progress. While I assume not everybody in Auroville is engaged in work that is meaningful to them, I also assume that the proportion of the population that is, is considerably higher here than elsewhere. Furthermore, the flexibility of work in our community the capacity to engage with various places and projects, to change fields of work entirely (many of us effectively ‘learning on the job’!) – also facilitates exposure to diverse learning experiences, and is an inconceivable freedom for the vast majority of working people in modern society.

Various other avenues of personal development are pursued within the community, including physical practices such as yoga, tai chi and dance, in addition to meditative, contemplative and healing practices, as well as artistic production and performance. In following with Auroville’s economic values, these opportunities are made available to all Aurovilians free of cost – whether funded by SAIIER with GOI donations, the community’s central fund, income-generating centres such as Quiet and Vérité, or the generosity and financial capacity of individual teachers. They include weekly classes as well as free or cost-price workshops and training, enabling Aurovilians to become certified aquatic body-workers or Awareness Through the Body facilitators, for instance. Such pursuits are restricted to the wealthy in the vast majority of modern societies, for example, an hour-long yoga class in the United States is almost double the hourly minimum wage. Beyond these personal development opportunities, our central fund and SAIIER also subsidize performances, concerts and arts exhibitions, making them free to Aurovilians and visitors, and thus fostering a public erudition. Again, such cultural exposure elsewhere is often expensive, and thus limited in its accessibility to the general public.

Unending Civic Education

Let’s take a look at our governance, too, which strikes me as a key site of unending communal education as well. In my observations and experience, virtually all aspects of community life and development in Auroville are constantly being deliberated and (re)defined, at various scales and forums, formal and informal and somewhere in between, sometimes overlapping. Such forums are few in representative democracies (let alone dictatorships), existing almost exclusively in activist spaces or within political parties. Few engage with these: the only form of political participation for most people throughout the world, is voting for national leadership once every several years – an individual, not a collective practice.

By contrast, the sheer magnitude of participatory processes occurring in Auroville at any given time is overwhelming; even in my own full-time doctoral field research, it was impossible to follow most of them. Our community’s political life thus consists of an almost unparalleled opportunity for an enacted civic education, in communal self-governance. While Auroville is certainly not the only collective using self-governing, horizontal and participatory forms of decision-making and community management in the world, it is one of the most significant. Consider the fact that in Auroville, any one individual or group of individuals can design and propose a policy, or the amendment to a policy, and bring it to the community-at-large for ratification – as has recently been the case, with the Entry Policy for example.

Because less than 10% of the population is ever present at a General Meeting, or Selection Process, or required for a community vote to be considered, many draw the conclusion that there is a low level of involvement among Aurovilians in shaping our public life. However, many who do not participate in General Meetings, nor vote on community-wide matters, are not politically inactive. On the contrary, they are engaged in forums at other scales, more directly related to their areas of interest and activity. I am not saying we should not concern ourselves with considering whether there are systemic issues that discourage greater participation in our ‘centralised’ political processes. On the contrary, I think we need to work for an increased quality of exchange that is facilitated in these spaces – that is, we need to recognise the incredibly active decentralised network of political agency and involvement that is key to the everyday functioning and development of our community, and this is an important aspect of our learning society.

Our Living Ideals

Our ideals really are alive, in practice. I had my doubts when I started my PhD. I started out questioning whether the ideals actually were alive, and if so, how and to what extent – and I am surprised by how much my research has revealed and convinced me of this. They are alive because they inspire people in their individual lives, and because they have, and continue to inspire (some of) us in intentionally shaping our public life in order to facilitate a societal framework in which they can flourish. We’re not perfect, of course, and I don’t want to distract us from looking at our limitations – we all know that there are many we need to work through, get over, and move beyond, to continue to move towards realising an integral society and not be unravelled at the seams through various other pulls. But I think we also fail to recognise the ways in which our ideals are alive and articulated, and that in recognising this we are empowered to build on it.