Wednesday, 28 October 2009 05:24 by
cjd002
I’ve been thinking more and more about the idea of education as a form of initiation. It was about a year ago that this idea was first suggested to me. I was very taken back at first; I had never thought about education in this way. More and more now I see education as exactly that, a form of initiation into a particular society, or tradition. It really starts quite young. Take the kindergarten, for example. It is the first time in these children’s lives that they are put in the position to recognize their own family as one amongst many. It is the first time that they have to cope with interacting with their peers. And you can notice the lack of familiarity with these interactions clearly, with blunt comments like, “Can I be your friend?” And they are constantly corrected by their teachers, with the most simple things, whether its acting “inappropriately” or “out of line” with the proper and expected order. “How many times do I have to tell you,” we usually ask the child, “before you understand?” The process of getting them to sit, and listen, to follow the rules of a game without cheating. After all, everyone knows that “no one likes to play with cheaters.” At least that’s what we tell them. Maybe it takes some time for them to figure out that cheating just takes a more clever approach, and then nobody knows you’re cheating...
Kindergarten is really quite a delicate time in a child’s life. You can really see that the children are being shaped. J, the one Tibetan girl in the class, ran away after she heard that the one fairy-tale book was Chinese. “Nothing Chinese, nothing Chinese!” she yelled. I asked her why she ran away like that, knowing of course that there is not a good relationship between Tibetans and Chinese since the Chinese decided to usurp their home, and she replied that the Chinese destroy Tibetan people and their homes. I told her that I know that and it is not nice, but that it is still okay for her to listen to a Chinese fairy-tale. At first, I was a bit surprised to see such a prejudice in AV, but maybe that’s just a sign of my own hopes and dreams for a dreamy, ideal AV (once again, the philosophy or theory of a place just doesn’t match up with its reality). Then again, maybe I just can’t sympathize with a group of people that nearly has been destroyed by another group of people; I guess “my people” have always been on the dominating side. At any rate, the experience really made me realize how important this part of a person’s development is. The child learns her most basic assumptions at this age...
As for a dreamy AV, well, I’ve had this hope disheartened repeatedly too. I don’t know why my hopes always manage to persist for so long. I was walking with a friend and recalling that the last time I was here the unexpected rain rotted all of the cashew-nut crops. He said that he remembered that, and he was glad because it reduced that value of the land, making it more easily affordable for AV. “But that’s awful for the farmers,” I replied. “Yeah, well, the world is an awful place, Carissa,” he remarked. Somehow, I still manage to hope that Aurovilians are these characters that like to dream, and so when I hear them say things that are so blunt and cynical, I find it a bit disappointing. At the same time, it’s refreshing to know that they are not living in a world of illusion, which is the gist I get from some of the people I meet here, especially the ones that constantly throw around the word “spiritual,” usually with a bit of a snotty tone, without ever seeming to be fully clear on exactly what they mean by the word. Sri Aurobindo says that it is the idealism in the human that makes her distinct and promising for the progression of life, and when she loses her idealism, perhaps to the disasters of the world or even to reason itself, then she flirts with becoming stagnant, immobile, and losing sense of the real potential of the conscious and creative human. Part of me has a lot of respect for the more cynical, “realistic” minds in AV that don’t cling to these seemingly unreachable ideals, and then the other part of me thinks that this attitude was not meant to be in AV. The funny thing is, I think most of my friends here are on the cynical side. There is definitely some sort of delicate balance between this critical approach to the world and the hopeful one...