The University of the Future —The Auroville Model

What system of education will be used in Auroville?

It is less a system than an environment. We want to give everyone, and especially our children, the possibility of living in an environment which constantly helps them to evolve and to become that which they can become when there is no difference between school and home or between study and play.

The learning process will no longer be something which is turned on from 7.30 to 11.30 a.m., but the natural attitude of a normally developed mind in this universe during its whole life, an attitude of inquiry, a joy of knowing, and a joy of being and of being able to do.

In ancient India the education of the Brahmin was not limited to a few hours a day. You learned twenty-four hours a day to be a Brahmin. It was the same with the medieval knight. The artist of the renaissance did not go to school from 9.00 to 11.00. He was apprenticed to an artist twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year. Outside of his laboratory a physicist is still a physicist, and a mathematician remains a mathematician even when he brushes his teeth. The children of the future cannot afford to learn only a few hours a day, to belong for only a few hours to the future, with the rest of their day dedicated to the past. The past has power enough! A transformation of the whole being is needed to assure survival for the next generation.

That is why Auroville is not a mere school, or a mere university. It is a place where the whole environment, the whole population has only one raison d’être; to transform man, to humanize him and his city, to help him prepare for a new age.

What will be Auroville’s contribution to the progress of education?

In Auroville we will humanize education. Therefore the first thing to disappear will be the institutions which we know as schools.

There will be a big park reserved for children: Auro­devenir, an enclave of the 21st century set in the 20th. We have said for children, but with our new definition of childhood and of education unlimited, no one need feel himself excluded from Aurodevenir. It is rather to express the spirit of the place that it has been called the Youth Park, just to prevent conservative people from complai­ning about the noise or the innovation. But every adult who wants to become a child and learn or play or discover himself may go there.

The second thing to disappear will be the teachers. They will be replaced by artists, psychologists, writers, engineers, programmers, architects, gardeners, cabinet-

makers, smiths, and finally by the whole society.

The third thing to disappear will be education itself. It will be replaced by a new way of life.

How can you organise a university without professors?

A university? You mean those places where they have riots, where they are forming prefabricated minds? Do you mean we should build one in Auroville just now when so many people would like to get rid of theirs?

In Auroville there will be no such separations, compart­mentalizations, as a professor, a student, or a university. The whole town, the university-city, will be at the service of education, of planetization, of the universalization of man.

How then will the students learn?

They will learn mainly by doing and by being. In ancient times a philosopher became a philosopher, a surgeon a surgeon or an architect an architect, not so much by listening to lectures as by being the constant companion of a philosopher, of a surgeon or of an architect. What a lecture can teach a student, he can as well learn from a book or by means of a teaching machine. But he will become a real philosopher, a good surgeon or a famous architect only by doing and being.

Education in Auroville seems to have very different aims from education in other schools. Why the implied reproach of even our progressive schools?

It is hardly a reproach. They are not responsible for their poverty. Schools are the creation of the neolithic age and as a village institution they had their role to play. Now that role is out-dated. For example, people think it very important that reading and writing should be drilled into a child. They call that making him literate. But this is merely a kind of ritual performance of the mechanical mind. It is not education. What to read and what to write and above all how to think, are much more difficult to teach. For that, mere instruction is not sufficient. True education is needed.

Our schools do not really remove ignorance, that fundamental ignorance which ends with people looking at the universe but having no idea what they are doing in it. We hope it will be different for the children of Auroville.

How can it be different?

It will be different because education in Auroville will marry the inner and the outer worlds, science and spiri­tuality, geometry and ontology. We have written a small book for children, The Great Curve, in which spirituality and the modern scientific theory called geometrodynamics converge in a vision of the universe which unifies all its aspects of comprehension, plasticity and creativity. It can be painted, sculptured, mimed and danced. It gives a direction for education in the future: a play, a union, an intersection of everything with everything.

Can you be more specific and give us a practical example of your method of education?

There is one thing especially which the educator has to help the child to establish without diminishing him by adult power moves. That is to become conscious of his limitations, sensory and intellectual. He has then to show him the exercises which can lead him beyond those limitations.

In the beginning of our education we are not able to concentrate our attention on a subject for a very long time. But an educated man can do just that. So the true educator will choose a subject which interests the child most, and study it with him in depth — any subject, linguistic, mathematical, scientific. The aim is an identi­fication which is so continuous that it equates to total absorption, a formation which will always be part of the child. He has become that, not only in a fugitive flight of imagination, but in the totality of his being. From that moment onward, the child will have the capacity for meditation on any subject which he loves.

The aim of education here is no longer an accumulation of knowledge in the form of a multitude of facts more or less well-organised, but an entirely new way of being. It is not that the child will acquire mathematical tricks, but he will become a mathematician. He will not be cleverly instructed in medical science, but he will become a physician, a healer. He will not be introduced to astro­nomy, but he will be able to live among the stars. He will not be taught zoology, but he will have been, one after the other, all the animals.

Is this the way you will create specialists?

I don’t see how it will work. When one has studied since childhood only that which one truly loves, one arrives quite naturally at the only specialization which is important, the truth of one’s own being. And it is as a unique being, as a true individual, that one will find one’s place in a society.

That means, of course, that one has followed for years and years strictly one’s own individual programme, and all the fundamental knowledge which one has gained in the course of study has become a means of self-expression. The specialty or the specialities which one has acquired will be, themselves, unique. Finally, in such a society there will be as many specialists as there are human beings, and all the expertise will be closely interrelated to form one body of knowledge, a communal continuum.

Do you envisage an education entirely without fixed programmes?

Just as we would avoid programming, helter-skelter, an expensive computer, merely to fill up its memory, so — and how much more vigilantly — will Auroville education avoid child-cramming.

Everything will be related to everything, every detail will find the resonance of the whole. There will be no isolated disciplines in this new psychology of society. There will no longer be any difference between work and play because everything will be, above all, education, the joy of progress, the evolution of the individual, the society, and our human environment. Everything we do will be as servants, as playmates, as architects of evo­lution.

What do you consider to be perfect education?

The ideal of truly perfect education is expressed for India in a legend of the Buddha known as the flower sermon. One of the famous frescoes in the Ajanta caves illustrates this parable:

Once upon a time the Buddha was sitting in the midst of his disciples, and after a long and happy meditation together he asked them if anyone had a question. And it was then that Kasyapa, the favourite disciple who had already, as they say in India, sat at the feet of the master through many moons, asked him: “Lord, what is the ultimate reality?” Without a word the Buddha picked up a lotus flower which was lying before his folded feet, and with the famous smile of the-one-who-knows, held the flower, as it is represented in the picture, and showed it to his disciples. With this simple gesture the miracle was fulfilled. At that moment the whole knowledge of the Buddha — his luminous consciousness, the entire expe­rience of intimate reality, of nirvana, and of samsãra, which only a Buddha can have — passed from the master to the disciple; at that moment the disciple was fully illumi­nated. Not only had his question been answered, but all his questions of the past and of the future; not only did he know now what ultimate reality is, but he knew everything that a Buddha knows. He himself had now become a Buddha, a knowing one.

This famous painting and this legend represent the Indian ideal of education: the passage of the total con­sciousness with all its contents from the master to the disciple, the spontaneous creation of liberated soul, a Buddha.

Do you think that such an exalted education is again possible in India?

Education will again be a way of life, as it was in ancient India, a transmission of consciousness from teacher to student, and not a mere teaching of facts, even of new facts and new techniques. It will be rather the transmis­sion of a capacity to handle facts, to know where and how to find them and what to do with them, to understand their limitations. Above all it will give the capacity to learn, to be open, to absorb, to engage one’s whole being in the acquisition and the possession of knowledge and at the same time to acquire a mental instrument which is as applicable to the yoga of the Vedic rishis as to the electronic engineering of the 20th century.

What can be the role of computers in modern education?

Computers will liberate teachers from the Sisyphus­labour of endless repetition. They will liberate students from rote learning, calculation and mechanical remem­bering. And for the first time on earth, thanks to their extreme complexity and multiversity, they will permit billions of earth creatures, human and animal, to receive an individual education and to become unique beings —educators and creators themselves.

One prodigious thing computers have already taught us is the difference between a mechanical system and a biological organism.

Education is not an accumulation of knowledge, like an encyclopedia or the storage bank of a computer. A human being has no resemblance to these storage bins since he is a living entity, a biological system. And each fact, each acquisition of knowledge, can be meaningful to him only if it changes something somewhere in this biological system.

In a merely mechanical system knowledge accumulates. In a biological system knowledge transforms. Thus edu­cation should avoid being accumulative and be purely transformative. A million facts presented to a child need not have a transforming effect, while a single fact at the right time, presented in the right way, can elevate him into a vastly superior biological being.

If education thus equals transformation and not accu­mulation, our whole educational system, with primary, secondary and higher schools, falls flat. Any repetition, even the most casual, either is superfluous or demon­strates that that fact was presented in the wrong way or at the wrong time or under the wrong circumstances or with wrong connections. A chicken bitten by a centipede has to be bitten only once to learn forever that centipedes bite. If you explain to a child his relationship, his direct descent from the first generation suns, you should have to do that only once. Only skills are acquired by repetition, but there also, once acquired, they are never lost. The child will never forget how to swim or ride a bicycle or catch a ball, during his whole life. Some transformation has occurred; perhaps a single click in his brain synapses or the growth of a whole system of new synapses for his neurons, has taken place once for all.

Education equal to transformation can be fun from morning to evening, day after day, for a hundred years if dreary repetitions are carefully avoided and an entirely new programme is presented every day just as nature presents it to the little gazelle or to the little lion. Repetition is not merely annoying to the child, but indeed harmful. It changes the biological system which has to submit to the repetition from a marvellous learning organism into a learning fossil. Fossilization of human beings takes place in all our schools, and is one of the darkest chapters in the not-very-bright history of the human race. It would be a thousand times better to give no education at all than an education which makes a fossil out of a ten-year-old child.

The occupation of a child, and his only occupation, should be play, and if our education cannot be play, it is better not to have any. A hundred years ago 80% of our children were crippled by slave labour. Today 100% are crippled by education.

We have said that only an education which transforms can be called education. This transforming process does not need endless hours day after day. It can take place in a few minutes per day. All that is going on now in our schools in eight hours of work could be condensed into a few minutes. The rest is not education. It is hypnosis, a state between sleep and waking. If we could really stimulate our children in an educational environment they would all be M.A.s or Ph.Ds at fourteen. That this can be done has been shown many times, but not in an ordinary school, of course.

All that we have to provide is a stimulating environment. With the money we spend on schools, we could easily build a stimulative environment for children with museums, parks, playgrounds, excursions, mountain climbing, visits to civic and industrial institutions, underwater exploration — all that is now reserved for the over-privileged adult of the West.

And there would be unlimited opportunity of living for a short time with an engineer, an architect, a farmer, a tractor driver, a ship’s captain, a cook, a nurse, an artist, a smith, or a carpenter. This would provide an unending stimulation for the average intelligent child, a child with a normal learning capacity which has not been throttled by a school.

It is this learning environment that we want to provide in Auroville. How we are going to organize it in detail, we do not yet know, but we will find out, and our educational

system will grow as the new city grows. It will become, the city itself, a living educational toy, a playground, a workshop, a laboratory for the new generation of man.

What is the minimum that an education should give?

I think the minimum that we should be able to give each child is the opportunity to be creative, to be a truly individual being, capable of seeing, of feeling, of thinking, of living and of evolving in his own way.

What children are taught in school is to be like others, to know what everybody knows, under the same narrow angle of vision as the teacher. But what evolution would like is for everyone to be different. Nothing could be more deadly for the mission of the human race than its present system of education.

Only a society of slaves does not create, a society whose capacity to create has been systematically destroyed by an evil system of education. One copies from others because the whole system tends to produce and intends to produce the babu, the Charles Dickens clerk, or a judge program­med by prejudice who writes judgements exactly like all those written before him. The judges of tomorrow, in order to heal behaviour, have to be creators.

Only an educational system which produces children who are individualized and unique will survive.

With such a system of education, there may be many things that the children of Auroville will never have a chance to learn!

Even if our children in Auroville know only, let us say, 40 to 50 per cent of what other children with an academic education know, this 40 or 50 per cent will be a living part of them. They won’t forget it five minutes after the exa­mination.

Of course there will be many things they will never learn. We live in an evolutionary universe and the sum of knowledge is infinite. But by whatever ways they choose they will be inexorably led, from connection to connec­tion, to meet the whole. And while those who have received a conventional education in a school will possess a heap of facts, perhaps at best a heap of concepts, none having much relevance to their life or to their personal problems, every child in Auroville will become an inti­mate of the whole. The child who has received this global education will be as distinct from ordinary man as twentieth century man is from the stone-age hunter.

What will be the most striking or revolutionary aspect of education in Auroville?

The education of children under three, and prenatal education. Every newborn child left without an adequate edu­cation, without a carefully organised, continuous stimula­tion, can be considered an orphan, abandoned, on the way to maladaptation. Of all the animals, man most needs to be integrated, from his very birth and even before birth, into the society and into the universe which sur­rounds him. But instead of that we treat a baby like an idiot, let it participate in nothing, and put it into intel­lectual quarantine. The stars and the electrons dance without him, the rivers run without him, the animals play without him, and the artists and creators create without his enthusiastic participation.

Nobody adds to his capital of knowledge and of being or shows him what a truly human consciousness is, global, unitary, capable of embracing the whole. And it is this which we want to do in this most important domain of education in Auroville which we have called the Milky Way. It is designed for children from minus one to plus three years.

If education is really, or can really become, what the ancient rishis of India thought it was — a transmission of consciousness, an imprint with a total vision of the universe rather than the passing on of little facts and names — then the prenatal age and the age before three will again become the most important years for it. It will no longer be important to have an M.A. or D.Sc. but “He was imprinted with the greatness and compassion and generosity of the universe before he was three years old.” Or “He became an expert in ontology before his birth; he never lost his fullness of being.”

Your conception of an ideal education seems to me extreme­ly difficult of application. It might be possible but only in some far distant future!

We don’t think so. All we have to do is not to damage irreparably the children by wrong methods of education. This might seem difficult but it should be possible once we know what we want. It will certainly be less expensive in final analysis when you take into consideration the amount of intelligence that gets ploughed under by our pseudo-education.

Everything we have mentioned — the rich environment, the patient helpers backed by a whole society uniting like the rays of a laser beam to produce this child of the future — we can have tomorrow if we all decide that we want it. For the first time in the history of mankind we possess both the technology and the psychological knowledge to change entirely for the better the social make-up of mankind.

You will have many practical questions to solve. For example, people speak a lot about teaching a child in his mother-tongue.

How will you manage in Auroville with children coming from so many countries?

Our children in Auroville will learn and speak many tongues, all their mother-tongues. Each language a stu­dent chooses will be for him a mother language. He will learn it by staying in a house and in a family in which this particular language is spoken exclusively. For six months or a year his whole being will be engaged in listening to and speaking this language, from morning to evening. The aim is for the knowledge of that language to become part of his subconscious.

This intensive family way of learning a language will be reinforced by audiovisual methods. Until the child has learned the language, all his studies will be exclusively in that language. When he normally dreams in that language, it has become a mother-tongue for him.

And what about the so-called dead languages, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek?

For us there are no dead languages. The moment a language is spoken in a house by a mother, father, and a child or two, it becomes a living language. Hebrew also was a dead language fifty years ago, and Sanskrit may become a living language in Auroville because it can be spoken in a simplified form, not only by a few eminent teachers but by some fathers and some mothers.

Is there a scientific way of learning?

Our knowledge of education is still like our knowledge of chemistry was in early medieval times: 90 per cent superstition.

We don’t yet know even what learning is, and what the maximum and minimum conditions are for remembering things. Up to now our education has been rather instinc­tive, and the little we can teach a dog or a cat shows our ignorance.

From time to time we stumble on to laws which nobody could suspect but which show us the rich vistas opening before true educational research.

None of the old wisdom books told us, for example, that if a child did not play with other children before a certain age he would probably never become a parent. They didn’t know, and yet it seems to be a law. Nothing could be more urgent for mankind than to learn these laws. Take another example. How does a child become a criminal? It can already be predicted before the age of six, with 80% certainty, which children will have a future of criminality, merely by observing certain signs in them and their environment. But our schools, our ministries of education, our universities, our police administrations, don’t want to know this, for the simple reason that nothing is more subject to old atavisms, racial supers­tition, or obscurantism, than education.

What are the respective roles of nature and education in the development of a human being?

The development of an embryo, of a foetus, of a child, of an adolescent is pushed forward by nature with a formi­dable energy. Yet nature accomplishes only a small part of those possibilities which she offers to a growing being. The most important part of the programme remains un­executed as long as another knowledge, another conscious­ness does not take over the push. It is just where the deployment of a new personality starts in all its unique­ness that nature herself in her mechanical way cannot assure the push. It is here, and at all those moments where nature stops intervening directly in the formation of a hu­man being, that education or a conscious evolution starts.

A centre of education, a university becomes really alive and interesting when it launches into research. What kind of research do you envisage in Auroville?

Of course we do not intend to compete with the big laboratories of the United States or Europe, but there is still room for critically urgent research in other directions.

We are thinking principally of research on the funda­mental properties of consciousness and for that we need only a tree under which to sit. (A magnificent tree flourishes at the exact centre of the Auroville site!) There is also fundamental research to be done in the field of education, and we are specially interested in education from conception to the age of three. As Auroville deve­lops, many other fields will open of themselves, from the desalinization of seawater to the realization of human unity. We won’t be embarrassed for lack of problems to be solved.

After the indications given by Sri Aurobindo, we have reason to think that the next great conquest ahead will be the conquest of time. This will mobilize mankind much more than the conquest of nuclear energy or of the moon.

It will open completely unsuspected perspectives and entirely new possibilities. It will give us a new dimension of the world, with all the consequences which that will have for the conquest of space and of mortality.

It might well be that our ideas about time are nothing but an enormous supersitition.

One of the privileged domains for the study of time will be the study of biological growth and specially the growth of the foetus and of young babies. It is also here that an applied knowledge will have the most spectacular results which will revolutionize not only our notions of educatior

but also our ideas of knowledge and of consciousness The universe will be transformed into a fantastic spectacle of space-time which has only one substance: consciousness Time will become a landscape in the same way as space. And man, let us hope, will live finally in this space-time which contains everything else. Matter or matters, life, thought, — all will be perspectives with which man will be able to play.

The scientific ambition of Auroville? To be the inspirer of this conquest of time as Sri Aurobindo has described it, lived it and promised it, and to help this promise to become a reality.

What are your sources of inspiration?

What have been the sources of inspiration of evolution during the billions of years of earth’s existence? Evolution is a cosmic force of which man has just become conscious, which holds in itself its own sources of inspiration and force of becoming. It is now initiating a new age.

We would like to be able to profit as directly as possible by this force of evolution and its power of inspiration. It manifests itself through thousands of discoveries, — in Psychology, ZOO-psychology, molecular biology, genetics, physiology of the brain, etc., — all of which are contri­butions to the new age. We should like to unite all these different strains in a vast synthesis to build in Auroville a way of life that is Consciously a permanent evolution.

How do you conceive education in its broadest meaning and aim?

One might look at this universe as an immense educa­tional institution, an education leading out of indifference into the heart of joy.

But concerning joy, we are still far from realizing all its possibilities or its intensities. We havn’t even started to meet the need of human beings on this planet for joy, still less of all living creatures for which we are responsible.

Once we have attained these simple planetary delights there remains the whole scale of inter-planetary, solar and galactic beatitudes to win by an education without end. They will awaken us from our indifference into indescrib­able intensities of superhuman joy. This is the aim of education.