=1 "Education Unlimited – Evolutionary"

Education Unlimited: Evolutionary

Yesterday humanity lived in a static world, or in a world where evolution was so slow as to be imperceptible. Each generation naturally brought up its children in the same way it had been brought up, prepared them for the same world with the same problems. The ideal held before the child was the adult, a professional man, a possessor of formulas, not an eternally developing being.

To be an adult was to have been indoctrinated with the superstitions and opinions handed down from preceding generations and given a course of study consisting of words instead of depth of understanding, instruction in place of education. This impeded the flow of further evolution.

The great technical or philosophical innovators of mankind have always been those who, by some happy chance, kept their youth, and continued to develop throughout their life.

Thanks to these beings who remained like children, humanity exists today, and still evolves. But our schools continue, methodically, to prepare our children for a world that no longer exists, and to give them a static, cut-and-dried image of life. As soon as someone is called a teacher he proclaims as eternal truths the ‘scientific’ conclusions of his ancestors. But those responsible for the education of tomorrow will strive to bring up the next generation for life in a world which is continually changing.

Evolution has become visible and accelerates before our eyes. It is foreseen that within the next seven years [1968-1975], the number of discoveries will have doubled, each discovery giving a new value and significance to the old observations. Thus we can no longer pass on our knowledge as one passes a basket of bread; tomorrow it will be stale, entirely out of date.

The university of the future will stimulate a continual earthquake under all edifices of thought for a systematic rejuvenation of the world. Man will be obliged constantly to change his ways of seeing and of doing. Self-transformation will become the normal, habitual condition. To learn is as necessary as to breathe. A continuous education will offer to each person the possibility of self-development throughout his life. Tomorrow, from birth to old age, we will have an education for remaining young.

But the world of men is not the only world that evolves. Having become conscious of itself in man, evolution is in the process of discovering new means, new techniques, new fields for transformation and acceleration. Man's destiny is to transform himself and his universe. A planetary university will be the centre of conscious evolution. It will be responsible for the evolution not only of man, but of all living creatures, plants and animals, and for the transformation of matter. It will really mean, for the first time on earth, an education for all.

No school will be able to contain such a group of participants, any more than any school can equal the whole of life as a source of energy, information or stimulation. The borderlines between in-school and out-of-school vanish, for the entire universe becomes our school.

Thus the University of Auroville will be identical with the town of Auroville. Its plantations, its factories, its airport and harbour, its shops, theatres, Olympic grounds, its animals, artists and scientists, all will enrich its living field of experience and action. As in ancient Taxila and Nalanda, the famous Buddhist university towns, the whole town will be the university.

Even beyond that, Auroville does not intend to be an isolated town, one among so many others. Even the most beautiful or the most perfect, it would soon be surpassed. It wills to be born and to develop with the certainty that the whole earth will become one single town, one single garden, one single university, in constant transformation.