Recently, a friend told me how she had grown up at the Ashram school. Mirra Alfassa founded this school with a radical pedagogy. Children could freely choose what they wanted to learn and when. Quite radically: there was a timetable for languages, history, mathematics, philosophy, gossip, sports, and so on, but the kids could go wherever they wanted. And so each child received exactly what they needed for their own development. If a child needed gossip, then that was simply how it was; this need was worked through, and after a few weeks an interest in philosophy or languages would come…. The school offered learning opportunities up to a B.A., recognized by the Indian state and transferable internationally. This is still the case today, if I understood correctly.
When Auroville wanted a school, the Aurovilians planned a school with an open curriculum. When they rather proudly asked Mirra Alfassa what she thought of it and what name she would give the school, she said, somewhat reluctantly, “Last School.” She did not like schools.
And finally, it should be mentioned that Auroville understands itself as a ‘living university,’ an open laboratory. When founding an Auroville university was discussed here on several occasions, there was much resistance. The logic of degrees, a strict curriculum, academic disciplines does not fit Auroville’s understanding of itself.
The Humboldt Ideal
This reminds me a little of my own student days in Germany. I studied before the Bologna Process, that is, in a university system where I could freely attend all seminars. Nobody wrote down who came when. There were no assignments; sometimes there were exams, but in the humanities, seminar papers were the usual practice. If you wanted a record of academic achievement, you submitted a seminar paper. If it was good, that showed you had engaged with the topic. How often you had attended the seminar did not matter. And of course it was not about regurgitating the lecturer’s material either. The topic of the paper had to fit the general topic of the seminar; otherwise it was free. We called this the Humboldt ideal. Research and teaching were one. Lecturers did research and shared their research process with the students. The students learned the principle of research and wrote their own papers.
The intermediate examination demonstrated that you had worked your way into a discipline. The Magister thesis showed that you now mastered the basic principles of research, that is, investigation, argumentation, structure, expression—the whole embedded in a topic that attempts to give an overview of a research question and formulate an inquiry. The doctoral dissertation then shows that you are able independently to formulate a new question, to open up a question or topic that has not been addressed up to that point. A habilitation documents that you have made a new contribution to an entire discipline.
This always seemed to me to be the ideal of free teaching. I do not think much of the Bologna Process—the American way of flexibly organizing the school and university system into units of achievement measured in credits, which in turn are standardized and therefore easily transferable between institutions and countries. I see the advantages for an education industry, but that has little to do with the human mind.
The Synthesis of Yoga
Auroville is based to a large extent on the idea of the synthesis of Yoga. With this, Sri Aurobindo defined a concept that encompasses far more than the world of concepts. It is a teaching that is more than a school. It is about understanding human existence as a whole and anchoring it in its spirituality. At its center is self-knowledge that points beyond one’s own Self. Knowledge of the Self that manifests itself in the world. It is about the question of consciousness, which in its purest form can be experienced only in meditation. Here, in meditation, that is, in the radical reduction to one’s own consciousness, is the seed of all knowledge. Only from here can we understand the world.
It is therefore central that young people be allowed to unfold freely, rather than be molded from the outset by an abstract system of knowledge that is not anchored in the reality of their lives, their own development, and their own interests. Learning is an intrinsic drive of all human beings. We want to learn and grow; we do not have to be forced to do so. The fact that much of what is learned in a free environment did not fit into a capitalist value chain should not tempt us to question this learning critically, but to question capitalism.
At the center of learning, then, is knowledge of the Self, nothing else, but this all-encompassingly. Here is the seed of the synthesis of Yoga and a radical pedagogy. There is no room here for Bologna Processes, but a free place to engage with what alone counts: the exploration of consciousness. Only on this foundation should the individual disciplines then rest. Everything else is alienated. Marx sends his regards, albeit from the other side of the seven rivers.
AUM