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Education at school level must necessarily and spontaneously lead to character development in all its four dimensions – wisdom, heroic will, universal love and chiselled, perfected skills with the capacity for untiring labour.
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We have an unflinching commitment to academics and our results stand witness of the same. Our stress has always been on the development of imagination and the power to understand and apply, thereby developing in the students the power to assimilate facts and information. From the new academic year, our teaching methodology will introduce self-study, research and group projects.
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Our students are exposed periodically, to a variety of speakers from different spiritual backgrounds. This is their tryst with Knowledge. Wisdom cannot be instilled. It blossoms in them as they absorb information and Knowledge and let it manifest through their being.
While sports, games and yoga help to build in our students healthy, happy, calm, graceful and supple bodies, they are exposed to inspiring heroes of the world through a series of live, stirring lectures and through films and biographies which are made available to them in print and audio-video forms.
Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam or universal love and compassion can be taught neither by instruction, nor by moralizing. Music, dance, art and poetry are the mediums used for refining the personality of our students and for making them subtle and porous to the feelings of the world around them and opening their consciousness to universal love and compassion. Exhibitions are being prepared by a renowned scholar of Art, on different periods of Art, Music and Dance in India, Europe and the Far East. The students are exposed to maestros in these fields either through live concerts or through films in a state-of-art audio-video room.
Perfection of skills is imparted through craft, carpentry, papier-mache, batik, aero-modelling, biotechnology, poetry and prose-writing and forty other activities. To score or more activities are introduced in the school to refine the skills of the students and to make them understand the dignity of labour.
We have been experimenting with teaching Sanskrit from Lower Nursery to class VIII. The rationale behind this experiment is that we are Indians and most of our texts are written in Sanskrit. If we wish to enjoy the exquisite poetry of the Vedas or the Upanishads we have to depend on a Hindi or English translation. Can we enjoy Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ translated in Hindi by one our best poets? If we aspire to learn the values encrypted in these texts, or the science of living being taught in the Bhagavad Gita, we inevitably have to resort to a subjective translation by one or the other teacher. Our aim is to empower our students with internal resources to be able to enjoy the exquisite poetry and spontaneously imbibe the values of the texts, of which they are the natural inheritors.
Our vision is to integrate and synthesize physical education, vital and emotional education, mental and rational education aesthetic, ethical and spiritual education.
Just as the proverbial tip of the iceberg reveals only a tiny portion of the entire iceberg, so also what we know of ourselves is only a small portion of who we truly are. Our integral being is like an unchartered territory. The more we know ourselves in depth, the better we can educate these deeper levels and utilize our full potential in life. The aim of good education is to expose the students to these hidden potentialities and then provide an environment in which these faculties get full opportunity to blossom and flower.
Just as scientists of the material realm have discovered things like minute quarks and massive galaxies, which we cannot see with our own eyes, so also the great exemplars of our tradition have gone deep within to discover the self in more subtle and sophisticated ways than the ordinary mind knows. They say that this “inner space” is an even greater frontier of discovery , wonder and potential than the outer space we are trying to discover. Not only have greater inner scientists travelled within themselves as explorers, they have also left us detailed blueprints of what they found, as well as maps to guide us in our own journey within ourselves. This self-discovery of our ultimate selves should also be a part of education. In fact, the secret of character development lies in making the students comfortable with and unified with the deep layers of their self. From there the students will function with greater perfection and prosper in a greater sense, not only for themselves, but also for the world at large.
Our mission is to develop in our students not only academic brilliance, a well-developed and integrated character, but also such a refinement in their personality that they aspire to feel and sense their Higher Self or Soul within, raise themselves with the help of this Presence and learn to live in its Guidance.
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