Sri Aurobiondo’s views on Education :-
Sir aurobindo always laid great stress on education. He himself had the best education while in Cambridge, and between 1897 and 1906, was a professor in the Bengal National College. So he knew the question in depth. And he had hopes in the young. He trusted that youth can give their good contribution in rebuilding the nation. Sir Auribindo never tired of calling for what he termed “ a national education”. He gave his brief
definition for it.
The
education which starting with the past and making full use of the present
builds up a great nation. Whoever wishes to cut off the nation from its past is
no friend of our national growth. Whoever fails to take advantages of the
present is losing us the battle of life. We must therefore save for India all
that she has stored up of knowledge, character and noble thought in her
immemorial past. We must acquire for her best knowledge that Europe can give
her and assimilate it to her own peculiar type of national temperament. We must
introduce the best methods of teaching humanity has developed, whether modern or
ancient. And all these we must harmonise into a system which will be
impregnated with the spirit of self-reliance so as to build up men and not
machines.
Sir aurobindo
had little love for British education in India, which he called a ‘‘ mercenary and soulless education,” and for
its debilitating influence on the “ the innate possibilities” of the Indian brain.
“ In India,” he said “ the students generally have great capacities, but the
system of education represses and destroys these capacities.” As in every
field, he wanted India to crave out her own path courageously:
The greatest knowledge and the greatest
riches man can possess are India’s by inheritance; she has that for all mankind
is waiting but the full soul rich with the inheritance of the past, the
widening gains of the present, and the large potentiality of the future, can
come only by a system of National Education. It can not come by any extension
or imitation of the system of the existing universities with its radically
false principles, its vicious and mechanical methods, its dead-alive routine
tradition and its narrow and sightless spirit. Only a new spirit and a new body
born from the heart of the Nation and full of the light and hope of it’s
resurgence can create it.
Young Indians
are increasingly deprived from their rightful heritage, cut off from their
deeper roots. He have often found himself in the curious position of explaining
to some of them the symbolic meaning of an ancient Indian myth, for instance or worse,
of having to narrate the myth it self. Again, a French or English child will be
given at least some semblance of cultural identity, whatever its worth; but
here, in this country which not long ago had the most living culture in the
world, a child is given no nourishing food only some insipid, unappetizing
hodgepodge, cooked in the west and pickled in India. This means that in the
name of some irrational principles, India as an entity is throwing away some
precious treasures. As Sri Aurobindo put
it :
Ancient India’s culture, attacked by
European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the
indifference of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of the
nation that holds it in its keeping.
Young Indians are increasingly deprived from their deeper roots. He have
often found
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