About Last School
Towards Free Progress
The quest for beauty has been a dominant thread guiding Last School’s journey in its seeking to embody an integral educational approach. A beauty both in its physical school environment as well as a formative condition of consciousness.
The Last School team has had the sense that its search for integrality cannot be found in formed or fixed systems and programmes of education, but rather it is something generated by a constant seeking, and a living response to life – a life that wants to grow and perfect itself.
Thus, Last School has stayed committed to a free progress approach which seems the most plastic for this openness of consciousness. It is not easy to describe something that is always evolving and adapting to events and circumstances. Yet there are broad patterns that have stood out through almost four decades of experimentation.
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.
As Sri Aurobindo remarks, it is now more or less acknowledged that:
“Each human being is a self-developing soul and that the business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material.”
But what is not yet conceived is the true power and sovereignty of this soul. For if this soul were once allowed to come forward and assume the role of leadership in the child’s psychological nature it:
“will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception.”
It is this truth, brought in not merely as an idea, but as the fundamental axis and guiding principle ⎯ a standard and a norm that reorganizes ⎯ which could give birth to a new and vibrant method of education, revolutionary in its results for the individual, the society, the nation and also humanity.
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.
“It should be known and we should not hesitate to proclaim it—that the whole purpose of our school is to discover and encourage those in whom the need for progress has become conscious enough to direct their lives.”
~ The Mother