On Education: Sri Aurobindo Ashram School - I The history of the Ashram school – now known as the International Centre of Education – can be probably divided into four periods. The first period is from 1943 to 1950, the second one is from 1951 to 1958, the third is from 1959 to 1967 and the fourth one is the period after that. This article will deal mainly with the third period – that is to say from 1959 to 1967. However, the first two periods will be briefly touched upon. Before the 1940s children were, as a rule, not permitted to live in the Ashram. But when, during the war, a number of families wer

An experiment worth emulating   The Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education stands out as an interesting and unique experiment in the field of education. We present in this brief article some of its salient features   The first striking feature lies in the goal of education. The goal here is to help the child to grow to the fullest development of his being according to his nature, swadharma. It is based on this concept that education must be a bringing out of the child's own intellectual and moral capacities to their highest possible value and must be based on the psychology of the child-natur

Sri Aurobindo Ashram School 3 We shall first review the developments in the school from the year 1959. As already stated earlier, the Free Progress System was introduced on an experimental basis in 1959 at the Secondary level; from there it evolved to a surer and larger base in 1961; a small group of students were trying out this method and the Mother named it Vers la Perfection. However the whole of the secondary section was not following the Free System. One section – in fact the larger section was still continuing with the old method. The school at the secondary level was thus divided into two sectio

Sri Aurobindo and the Hindu-Muslim problem One of the most serious and apparently intractable problems that the Indian subcontinent has been facing for the last century and more has been the Hindu-Muslim problem. This problem which surfaced in a big way at the beginning of the 20th century finally culminated in the formation of Pakistan in 1947. It was thought then by many – and that included most of the senior Congress leaders- that with the formation of Pakistan the Hindu-Muslim problem would ease and finally even cease to exist; it was believed that the Muslims of the subcontinent bound by Islam and having their

THE HINDU-MUSLIM PROBLEM  The co THE HINDU-MUSLIM PROBLEM   The country is passing through a difficult and critical phase on the vexed issue of the Ayodhya - Babri Masjid problem. It is not really a problem of the temple and the mosque but much more fundamentally the problem of the Hindu - Muslim coexistence. It was the inability to solve this problem that led to the partition of the country in 1947 and unless we face this issue squarely and boldly and solve it once for all on a sure and sound basis it will recur again and again whether at Ayodhya or at Varanasi or in fact anywhere; for there are many contentious issues which can at any moment rai

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo In the history of mankind, the advent of Sri Aurobindo represents a turning point; it has opened the world to a new life and consciousness and ultimately to a new race. To attain to that consciousness, he has given us the way – the Integral Yoga. We shall mention briefly in this article some of the characteristics of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. For this Yoga as its name implies takes up the whole of human life in its fold. Let us see in Sri Aurobindo’s words the characteristics of the Integral Yoga. The first question that arises in our mind is: what is Yoga?

Secularism, Religion and Spirituality A new word has recently been cast into the shifty language of politics, — a language of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which almost immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so that men may fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing they are battling for, —it is the word “secularism”. The Late Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, introduced this word into the Indian Constitution in the mid-seventies, during the Emergency. Since then, the word secularism has become the battle cry of political parties, intellectuals and opinion maker

Indian culture and Hinduism Indian culture has been from the beginning and has remained a spiritual, an inward-looking religio-philosophical culture. Everything else in it has derived from that one central and original peculiarity or has been in some way dependent on it or subordinate to it; even external life has been subjected to the inward look of the spirit. 1. Sri Aurobindo It is this inward-looking religio-philosophical culture which goes by the name of Hinduism. However, in modern times, both in India and abroad, it is under severe attack and is often branded as communal, n