Children Education

 

by Mother’s Service Society

 

Work is not done by the body

 

  • One who works for long hours is known to be hard working. It is true in the physical sense.
  • As the quality of transport rises from walking to vehicles and the speed of vehicles, the quality of work rises by the plane in which it is done.
  • Brick laying can be a hobby as with Churchill, but for one who builds his house brick laying is not work. It must be given to one who can do it as the owner has better use of his time.
  • In fact, work starts in us as a thought and our body does it. Truly, work is done by Shakti and is determined by the Supreme.
  • To work from the highest plane one can work is reasonable.
  • If the plane is not physical but mental or spiritual and we agree to work from there, how can a certain work be done best?
  • Initiation of the work decides the plane. The quality of energy is decided by the will that releases it. If you want to run, the energy released is physical. When you are chasing a thief, it is the vital that releases the energy. Physical exercise which the mind chooses for better health releases mental energy in the physical. Any decision of the Spirit releases spiritual energy in silence.
  • The direction too can be given by various plane. So also is the organisation of the energy. Skills too can be anywhere from physical to spiritual.
  • The best for us is to choose the plane, release the energy, direct it, organise it and convert it into result from the highest we can.
  • "I am running a school. There is so much to be done at the school. What I am to do?"
  • What you alone can do must be done by you. For the rest you must train people to do it.
  • It is easy for us to see whether we do something out of interest or out of necessity.
  • Well, you can try the following;

What work needs to be done the next day you can think of and plan mentally. That is to raise the work to the mental plane. To some extent, it will be done better. If a new computer is installed when you see that it can be operated by another, but you love to do it yourself, you can part with it. Arrange that way for every work others can do. Don't say others won't do it properly. It means the training and supervision are not proper. Or you are making it an excuse to do it yourself. Beyond that examine your daily list of work and see whether it can be upgraded. Apart from delegation, you may be doing a mental work physically. When you want to buy seven items, you go to different shops and buy them. First of all it can be bought by another. Well, it may be something you alone can buy. Sit down for some minutes and plan what to buy where and when. It is to raise the work to the mind. The clumsy waste of time and movements will be eliminated. Instead of active mental planning, planning in Silence is to move to the spiritual plane. Not to plan is to raise it to the supramental plane. The culprit here is your own joy in working the computer, shopping, etc. That has no place. SIT QUIETLY. Raise the work from the nerves. Be honest. You will find yourself doing ten times more work ten times more efficiently. The lazy man moves slowly. We walk briskly. To walk slowly when there is an urge to walk briskly is to spiritualise walking. Walking briskly is the nerves walking. Teach the nerves NOT to initiate walking. Move the centre to the mind. The character of walking changes. Instead of your walk being brisk, work will become brisk and your walking can be very brisk but you won't find yourself walking much. When this upgrading is on, you will see people come to you, work comes to you, money comes to you. We seek people, work and money when we work. As we raise the level of work, they come to us. Their coming to us is a measure of our upgrading the work.

  • The health education I spoke of, if it is to be taken up, there are details to be worked out. Basically a better fed child is less prone to disease. We will build the vitality of the child which gives the immunity from diseases. Knowledge raises the immunity further. Spirit is ultimate.
  • From First Principles: We have moved from memorisation to understanding. The child understands what it is taught or reads. That is understanding. That is not thinking. The child that questions thinks. Shifting from understanding to thinking will be a great thing. Though this is the unconscious basis of Western education, they have settled for understanding. Let us move to thinking. Understanding explains how. Thinking tells us why. Thinking largely draws upon our beliefs, especially our superstitions. Thinking that goes to the first principles is final. Even there, there are physical principles, vital principles rising to spiritual ones.

The child learns because of interest. It is a step in thinking. Why is the child interested? The in-gathering energy interests itself. Why should the energy gather in the child? Because it is a growing organisation. To the question why the child grows we accept the answer, that is its nature. Beyond that, it is philosophy. If we push the understanding to the level of thinking from the first principles as far as the circumstances permit, we will be opening in the child the evolutionary apertures of original inquiry.

  • Unfailing success comes to one who has inner stable equilibrium. In the face of any situation, if one can keep his inner psychological equilibrium, he will not fail. His own inner provocation is more difficult to control. It is equality when controlled. All these have to be applied to individual practical situations over and over and ratified and then generalised before finding the individual variation. However, they are details. The central fact is your own understanding and successful practice.
  • It looks as if I am asking for the moon. If you see how we socially survive or psychologically grow, we find.

-         our social skills are perfect before we survive.

-         to psychologically grow we do not provoke anyone nor do we get provoked.

Going deeper to skills of the subconscious, we see we KNOW subconsciously all this and our involuntary muscles function thus.

  • There need be no debate as to whether we can learn consciously what we know already subconsciously.
  • We all depend on somebody or something for doing anything. It is possible to show that when the child does it herself she does it better. So, "Do it yourself" is a great rule. It can be raised to "Do it by your inner best". That never fails. All successful men at times of crises act thus. They say, "I came to the end of my tether. Then something struck me. It worked." This is doing his unconscious best which has one further step the conscious best. The conscious best depends upon what you are conscious of.

Manners

  • To laugh at a fool's remark is universal. It never occurs to us he will be hurt or humiliated. Manners are aimed at pleasing others. Schools can teach lots of manners, if the teachers are imbued with it and they issue from a felt emotion inside. The most important of them is to readily appreciate any value in others. More important is NOT to recognise a defect in others. When the school as a whole has learnt that attitude as an unwritten code or unspoken attitude, the very atmosphere will learn to appreciate what the children are and what we are doing.

Speech

  • Children shout and enjoy shouting. Primary school is not a place to practice low volume of speaking. Still, the principle is true and its practice will be found true. To shout is natural, to talk low is a discipline. They don't combine in unidimensional characters. We practice dual attitudes even from a young age. In truth, we are multidimensional. The children can learn speaking low with advantage. We will find later that those children who can shout the most, will practice low speaking better. Speaking low for a shouting child is a challenge. The greater the challenge the greater the success.

Balance

  • Rhythm and balance are the watchwords. When you are dynamic or efficient greater results arrive quickly before greater culture settles down. Obviously, culture is a slow acquisition, efficiency is not. All neo-rich have acquired money thus. Prosperity in abundance could come to USA readily. Still balance is to be restored as early as possible. A thinking child is slow in speech. Teach the children to think, their energies will be blotted out. Feeling does it more. No excess energy will be on the surface if the child learns to think and feel.

 

 

Truth Speaking

  • Truth speaking is difficult to learn in a social atmosphere of universal falsehood. Still much can be taught. More than speaking truth, it is difficult to accept that one must always be true.

Helpfulness

  • One cannot have an instinctive attitude of help without expansive goodwill. Individuality, a very desirable quality and helpful nature are in opposite directions. The school, i.e. the teachers have to accept all these values as their own personal values. Otherwise, the whole thinking will remain a dead letter.

School is a miniature

  • The child through the family gets into touch with the society at several points. The job of the school is to forge conscious links with all the LIVE points of the society that matter to the future of the child. Maybe the school is so at a few points like that. There are more than a hundred ways in which this can be forged and several of those aspects imported into the school permanently.

He is to you as you are him

  • This is as old as The Bible and as old as life. This aspect exists at 100 levels. The teachers can acquire some twenty and pass on  to the child a few. The effect will be miraculous. If a child is scolded by another, is it possible for him to reflect "I abused my brother, now this boy is abusing me." The moment he realises this, his tension and the quarrel disappear. It may be small, but revolutionary. Some of these attitudes can make a child Gandhiji.

Observe yourself

  • We know of memory and at an adult age one knows he thinks. There is in us apart from memory and thinking, the capacity to understand, OBSERVE, imagine and many other faculties. To activate the observer in us is a revolutionary growth of the mind. About children there are two things:

1.       Great important things cannot be taught to them.

2.       Important things can be more easily taught to the children than adults. The principle behind is the more you know of your mind, the more you can grow mentally. There are classroom situations where the children can be made aware of these processes with benefit though nothing can be directly taught. In a class if a few children can possess calculators, they can find great use for them. Psychological faculties can be given as useful tools to the children thus.

Higher Consciousness

  • The general belief is unless one is born with intelligence or other great qualities, he cannot acquire it. In any field -- teaching, philosophy, law, medicine, and technology, there are two aspects.

1.       Simple factual details.

2.       Capacity to use them with benefit.

A vakil's clerk may know ALL the details of law and court. He cannot argue a case. The Life Divine is known to be tough. I have collected all the DETAILS of the process of creation which is the highest knowledge Sri Aurobindo gave and few received it. But I see anyone interested can understand ALL these details and many have acquired them.  The man at the top has a high consciousness, capacity, strength, courage, etc. It is obvious people at the lowest level do not have it. That is why they are low and others are high. The school can give, as part of the curriculum, all the details of consciousness for the child to acquire before he leaves school. It is true all cannot be trained to be great. With this equipment, 90 out of a million reach greatness. If there is any valuable foundation for the school, it is this. There were days when it was a fact that to rule a nation one should have been born in the royal family. Today we see that at least there are 100,000 people in India who can rule this country. In advanced nations the percentage is greater. Democracy aims at making each so. Spirituality says that all men are born equal. Between fact and theory lies the training.

 

  • Already schools know that in each class there are children fit for the next class. Let us organise the life in the school so that children will perform beyond their age. It is a beginning. Our aim by the time the boy leaves the school is he should have the capacity of one who retires at least in potential.
  • The rule is the child can learn better itself than through teaching. The soul of the child has all the knowledge that is there in the world. It needs no learning. It has come on earth to learn the experience of the society and its life. What it already knows it rediscovers in the new context of society. So society is a field of experience as well as limitation. It becomes a limitation when it imposes its conditions on the SOUL. So, the family and the school are limitations. I am pleading for a school where the child will be provided ALL the context it needs for learning and consciously desist from imposing its own limitation. If the theory is understandable and acceptable, we take the first step. It is a great leap forward.
  • The above approach is an application of Sri Aurobindo's yogic principle to education. Man in the effort of civilising himself has moved from the physical existence to vital life which he is informing by mental ideas. Yoga wants him to move from mind to the several levels above – Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind and Supermind. Today he thinks. Giving up thinking – surrendering – he understands more. Silence increases it. Surrendering Silence he gets Light, Intuition, Knowledge and Supramental knowledge. Surrender is His method. In the school we give up successively punishment, discipline, teaching, learning, observation, thinking, understanding, knowledge etc.
  • Till we reach the end of the school's possible effort and meet with the limitation of the child's own personality, we can go. And that will give the student ALL the knowledge he can ever get in a life of sixty years.
  • It is a practical goal, achievable.

 

 

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