Education : Principle for Implementation

Karmayogi

  August 5, 1972

Educational Principles for implementation:

• Opening up the faculties of each part of the being to function in its full capacity to subserve the cause of the Soul's aspiration. Every dynamic principle of Integral Yoga like aspiration, surrender, consecration, renunciation, equality, oneness, detachment, sincerity, inspiration and so on.
• Not allowing the mental encrustation that accumulates because of the organization of the lack of awareness. 
• To insist on maintaining the freshness of the child's being.
• To help maintain the spirit of discovery. The child must learn joy, beauty, hate, usefulness and so on from its first principles and not from society.
• To desist imposing the teacher, the society or any other externals on the child.
• To help the child discriminate between the play of soul faculties and mental and vital faculties.
• To build the size of the faculty itself and make it function as a soul-subsidiary and not on its own.
• To limit the educational effort before the child's native energy is exhausted.
• To stop teaching when the dimensions of teaching over-reach the teacher's build.
• To concretely demonstrate the corresponding soul counterparts (mental, vital) to impulsion.
• To remove all possible systems that help deadwood grow.
• To fashion systems that refuse to get rigid.
• To help the opening of subtle faculties.
• To constantly make the child see the functioning of its own subtle faculties.
• To help clear the rustings as and when they collect.
• (a) To allow life to come to you, not go out seeking it; (b) To seek life and not wait for things to overtake you.
• Each endeavour of growth into freshness must help dissolve a layer of habit inherited, that is, a forward progress must accompany a rearward clearing too.
• Education is not a training, a conditioning, a falling into a pattern, it is just bringing the individual and life face to face.
• Discipline is, to the lower from the higher part of being. It must be there, for example, the mind disciplining memory and not the other way about.
• The skill part like walking, eating, speaking and so on can be taught best.
• The Divine behind things as well as sounds can be made to reach the child by the inner divine in the child.
• The child must be taught to be aware of an inner centre that responds to outer activities.
• In essentiality each child must have its own standard of right and wrong.

Methods of Implementation of Chosen Principles:

• The principle should first become normal life in the teacher, second, be actively shown to the child in its practice, and third, a system should be devised to inhere the principle, like, for example, learning the mother tongue at home.
• As physical exercise lessens physical tamas, so mental exercises can lessen mental tamas. Even so, "spiritual exercises" can increase awareness.
• Refusal to make a mental decision awaiting an inspiration in right contexts does encourage the appearance of it.
• When equality is lost, the roots of losing it can be seen and removed.
• Observation and concentration need much cultivation.
• Awareness of beauty and life in things can be taught.
• Normally the child is cast into the mould of the existing society. If it is not done, much of the child's life will be available for education.
• What the teacher does not have cannot be taught.
• The child can be encouraged to look into the significance of life movements (nothing in this world happens in vain).
• A dull hour is potential deadwood.
• To rest in consciousness is more important than meditation.
• Constant remembrance and awareness is the base, the atmosphere of which the teacher and the institution have to supply.
• Keep different ideals as goals.
• It is a privilege for one that he or his things are (rightly) used by others. It is really the Divine using one.

• The difference between Indian and Western children is one of degree and not of an essential difference that we look for.
• This education cannot be given to all. Nothing in this world is meant for all in the beginning.
• In a child if all the negative habits it has inherited are removed, there will be a core of his own positive propensities. The former can be removed and the latter must be put under its own enlightened mind voluntarily. Instead of notions of sin being inculcated, the child can be shown the power of prayer to remove them. It can be referred to the point of light the child has already perceived.
• The voice of the teacher comes from his soul and ultimately reaches the child's soul. Incidentally the child can be made to feel that the vibrant consciousness of the teacher manifested through his voice is not merely heard by the child's soul but is absorbed by the floor, walls, furniture, etc., consequently making them throb in a small measure. Behind the habit of the teacher to do well in his customary classroom is this subtle truth that in an atmosphere already tuned to his consciousness, his own best comes out.
• Even material things resent rough handling that downgrades their consciousness.
• Human (the child's) interest must acquire a higher dimension as the child's awareness of the hidden divine in things and a seeking of it.
• Just at the time of going to school a child feels an impulse to play, feels lazy:

At present the child fears the consequences of his absence from the school and goes. In doing so, he hears the parental authority, that is, the social unit that they are. The child really fears the social consequences. The act of going to school is society-oriented.

Now, we must have provided enough freedom for him to express what he has felt. Either he comes to his teacher or when the teacher approaches him the child speaks out his mind. The teacher refers the child to his own inner conditions which makes the child feel that this laziness is not conducive to his inner light. Having seen that, he needs the will to obey the light.

The child is shown that the lesson that is to be learnt has a personality of its own. The previous day when it was left at a point there was an understanding in that personality that the child would return to it to pay attention and that personality awaits him. That is some thing to be honoured.

• Sincerity: The child can be shown the choice that lies at each moment between the movement that makes for oneness and the one that asserts its own separativity.
• Even as meditation is silently prepared for during the whole of the day, teaching must be silently supported by a consenting consciousness all over the day.
• Seeking some thing like ‘peace' is done by a psychological centre. Usually this is the old personality. The quality of seeking and its assimilation will be far greater if this centre represents the new personality.
• The child should normally be intensely happy where he is and with the present. He should seek nothing in Time or Space. The present must fully occupy the child and it should realize the oneness there.
• Problems are what Ignorance meets on its way to knowledge.
• There is one Truth but multifarious untruths. Conflicts are of the latter; oneness and harmony are of the former.
• The child must be approached from many sides, rather all sides. The achievements of one part of the child's personality can always be undone by the assertion of another. So, the other side, corresponding to each such achievement, must be dealt with so as to preserve the former.
• The child normally takes the adult habit of relying on a mental opinion in case of a problem or a fear etc. It can be shown from a felt divine centre that instead, he can rely on the Divine inside.
• Children are essentially vital in their responses. The parents and the society they live in are essentially mental. We see an imperceptible change firmly creeping over the children that makes them mental in their responses by the time they are 14 or 15 or even earlier. This is so because man endeavours to live up to his mental social needs and ideals and silently passes it on to the child. What the man consciously attempts in the child, the society subconsciously fortifies.
• Similarly the vital and mental responses of the child can be led to a spiritual awakening when the parent and the family in which the child lives are wedded to the spiritual ideal and are permeated by spiritual consciousness.