The Quest
Pedagogy
The Quest - Pedagogy
Pedagogy: The Quest
The mission of education can no longer be to produce ready-made citizens for a system that cannot find solutions to the problems it has created, it is to promote the emergence of men and women capable of building themselves consciously on a truer basis, while building a new world in which they chose to live together without exclusion, around common aspirations and projects.
An Integral Education for ever progressing human beings
An education oriented towards “increasing perfectibility” must build upon the foundation of an awakened body and a life spirit capable of the discipline that can lead to self-mastery. Youth should have a firm grasp of the material field while being capable of lofty flight. A conscious awareness and plasticity in the body, a wide openness in the life-spirit and as few artificial mental constructions in the mind will create the type that is responsive to the future.
Education in Auroville has been envisioned within a society which itself is to be a learning society, a place “of an unending education, of constant progress and a youth that never ages”, dedicated to “a living embodiment of an actual human unity”, according to Auroville’s charter.
The ideal is very attractive, its realisation rather approximative but still, there is a difference between a society aiming at unending human development and a society aiming at constantly improving professional skills so that the labour force can evolve in phase with the technological needs of a competitive economy.
Both can be called a learning society but they actualize two different paradigms. The first puts the unfolding of the multifaceted human consciousness at the center while the other subordinates education to employability and economic performance.
~Jean-Yves Lung, Teacher
The core of this experiment and experience is as large as life itself. The aim is to bring forth a rich, complex and integrated personality rather than one with a set of specialized competences; a personality for whom progress implies always a widening and deepening of activities and of the faculties involved. Human beings need this enlargement and sense of uplifting to meet the demands of the future.
It is also the movement required by life in an aspiring collective. This élan of discovery, asking for a progressive mastery of many fields, has a natural tendency, once enkindled, to spread out from the school environment into other aspects of the city-in-making. Yet, if true, there would be nothing artificially constructed, it would be the movement of a life growing and perfecting itself, a thing so natural as to be unnoticeable.
Finally, if this progression can be achieved, one may arrive at “an unending education, a constant progress and a youth that never ages”, which is the call of Auroville’s Charter.
What is Integral Education?
Is it merely a juxtaposition of numerous subjects and activities? Or is it rather an attempt to create a larger and truer harmony through what The Mother suggested was “the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised.”
Finally, there are domains that lend themselves to soul awakening more directly; areas that are often relegated at great hidden cost, to a subordinate position. All that awakens the creative impulse – imagination, dreaming, visioning – is a most vital aspect of the educational process.
“One of the attractions for this school of Free Progress is there are no exams and that’s a great stress buster for many children.
Many are attracted by the fact that you have no exams, you can do what you want and that’s where the confusion starts for me — to be in this school or to be in such a system it’s more difficult than being in a normal school.
Because in normal schools you have exams to motivate you to, to kind of scare you and you have to study well to have a good degree and then a good job and then a good life and lots of money and you’ll be happy; which usually doesn’t happen. It’s a dream and illusion so uh this is a unique experience.”
~ Satyavan,
Student