Mother’s Sutra
The Mother’s list of names given for Auroville schools
LAST SCHOOL TO NO SCHOOL
“The aim of education is not to prepare a man to succeed in life and society,
but to increase perfectibility to its utmost.”
~ The Mother
Why is it called Last School? (2024)
InLight, Auroville
Free Progress learning:
A journey of Self-Discovery and Integral Growth
Last School is named to reflect Auroville’s vision of lifelong learning, where education is not separate from life. Guided by The Mother’s vision, it follows a Free Progress approach that allows students to develop along their own paths. Learning focuses on inner, psychological, and character growth rather than fixed academics. Teachers act as facilitators, supporting freedom, responsibility, and self-discovery.
Why is it called Last School?
“It was indeed the first school of Auroville and the mother who is at the origin of the Auroville project when she was asked to give a name for the first school of Auroville she gave this name Last School. The whole of Auroville is supposed to be a place of unending education and constant progress therefore there will be no separation between school and work and school as we know them will not exist.”
~Teacher, Age 81 years
Why is it called Last School? (2024)
InLight, Auroville
Free Progress learning:
A journey of Self-Discovery and Integral Growth
Last School is named to reflect Auroville’s vision of lifelong learning, where education is not separate from life. Guided by The Mother’s vision, it follows a Free Progress approach that allows students to develop along their own paths. Learning focuses on inner, psychological, and character growth rather than fixed academics. Teachers act as facilitators, supporting freedom, responsibility, and self-discovery.
Why is it called Last School?
“It was indeed the first school of Auroville and the mother who is at the origin of the Auroville project when she was asked to give a name for the first school of Auroville she gave this name Last School. The whole of Auroville is supposed to be a place of unending education and constant progress therefore there will be no separation between school and work and school as we know them will not exist.”
~Teacher, Age 81 years
Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research
Over the last 17 years, through Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER), Auroville has strived to realise this vision. Auroville’s commitment and its past history now position it to make evermore significant contributions to the world at large toward the manifestation of human unity.
As this theme is vast and is also being pursued in several other international universities, it is felt that in Auroville this theme should be focussed on special subjects found in the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
SAIIER promotes and coordinates most of the educational and cultural programmes in Auroville, the international township in South India dedicated to the evolution of consciousness. Since its founding in 1984, the Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER) has served as a living support system for Auroville’s wide-ranging educational work. It holds the function of nurturing, protecting, and resourcing educational initiatives aligned with the spiritual vision of Auroville and the Integral Education of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. SAIIER anchors dozens of schools, research programmes, community initiatives, and collaborative experiments across Auroville and its bioregion. The strength of the Institute lies in its quiet continuity: in the people who have built it through trust, through steady work, and through a shared aspiration to place the soul at the center of education.
One of the principal means for attempting the growth of consciousness towards a future of unity, mutuality and harmony, was an enabling education. Thus in the 50’s, was launched in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the plan of an international university centre.
The Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (SAICE) came into being on the 6th of January 1952 located near the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Puducherry. This centre, which has never adhered to the mechanical examination processes of the certificate system that are so cruel sometimes to the psychology of growing youth, has shone forth as an inspiration for the possibilities of a truly child-centred education much more conducive to the psychological disposition of the growing child. It has seeded the country with hundreds of its ‘graduates’; youngsters educated in the free progress system, that The Mother described as an education guided by the soul and not subject to habits, conventions and pre-conceived ideas. The freedom to progress in one’s own way is the most favourable condition for self-finding – it is the technique that universal Nature adopts for her thinking instrument: man – so why should it be denied to the growing psychological nature of the child.
“I must have the courage to stand outside the utilitarian logic of the world. Free progress refuses the pressure of certification, comparison, and competition. To hold that space requires a certain tapasya (determination) — an inner clarity and steadiness that does not waver when the world pushes back.”
~ Teacher, Age 67 years
“I must have the courage to stand outside the utilitarian logic of the world. Free progress refuses the pressure of certification, comparison, and competition. To hold that space requires a certain tapasya (determination) — an inner clarity and steadiness that does not waver when the world pushes back.”
~ Teacher, Age 67 years
About Last School
About Last School