It is the last period on a Saturday, and the timetable says PT. Forty children from Class VI spill out onto a ground of packed red earth, the afternoon sun hot on the backs of their necks, chappals and canvas shoes slapping up dust. A whistle shrills. Somebody’s water bottle rolls away under the neem tree. Ten minutes later the class teacher appears at the edge of the ground with a register under her arm and calls them back, because the unit test is on Monday. The children walk in slowly, sweat drying on their foreheads, and the ceiling fan resumes its tired turning over a room full of bodies that were only just waking up.
Most of us have lived some version of this. The body gets a slot on the timetable, and the slot is the first thing to go. That is why it is worth reading two people who refused this arrangement, and reading them carefully.
Education that begins in the body
In 1910, writing in his journal Karmayogin, Sri Aurobindo set down three principles of teaching. The first was that “nothing can be taught”. The teacher, he wrote, is a helper and guide, not an instructor or taskmaster. The child’s mind has to be consulted in its own growth, and learning moves from the near to the far. In the same series he wrote about training the senses, asking that they be made accurate and sensitive, and he recommended regulated breathing to clear the nerves that carry what the senses report.
Decades later, in Pondicherry, his collaborator Mirra Alfassa, born in Paris and known as the Mother, built a school around these ideas. It opened on 2 December 1943 and was renamed in 1959 as the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. In 1951 she wrote that a complete education has five aspects, the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual. It should begin at birth, she said, and even before birth, and continue for the whole of life. Sri Aurobindo, in a message for the new Bulletin of Physical Education, wrote that even the highest education of the mind is not enough without the education of the body.
What they got right
Read the Mother’s essay on physical education from April 1951. She asks for the harmonious development of every part and movement of the body, and wants sports and outdoor games given a prominent place. She calls the body “a being of habits” and warns that bad habits form early and fast. Then she says something few school documents would dare to print. The instinct of the body, while it remains intact, is “more reliable than any theory”.
In 1960, writing to women about their bodies, she went further. She saw no reason for a separate ideal of physical education for girls. She wrote that weakness and fragility look attractive only to a perverted mind, and insisted that becoming strong and healthy can never harm a body, a woman’s body included. How many schools we know would still find that a radical sentence?
What they left out
Here I part ways with them, gently. For Sri Aurobindo the body is “the instrument which we have to use”. He quotes the old saying śarīraṃ khalu dharmasādhanam (the body is the means of fulfilling dharma, one’s ideal and its law). In his writing on education the senses are to be perfected as “ministers to thought”. The Mother names the first aim of physical education as the control and discipline of the body’s functioning. The body is honoured, trained, even transformed, but it stays below. It is the ground floor of a five-storey house, close kin to the old Indian map of the pañcakośa (five sheaths), and the real living happens upstairs.
That is still far better than a school that forgets the body altogether. But it is not the same as saying that the body knows. The Mother’s own line about instinct points the other way. If the body can know what it needs better than a theory can, then it is not only an instrument waiting for orders. It is already a knower. This is the claim of embodied cognition, and it is the claim of this series. The body is not a technique for producing better minds. It is part of what a learner is.
Back to the ground
Go back to that Saturday afternoon. If the body is only the servant of the mind, then calling the children in for revision is a sensible trade. Ten minutes of running for ten minutes of sums. The Mother’s essays already argue against that trade. But I want to ask something harder. If the child who was running under the neem tree was also thinking, sensing and understanding, with her whole self, then what exactly did the whistle interrupt?
Put it into practice: P52 Old games, deep learning: hopscotch, tag and skipping · P29 Balance games and the attending child · P45 A body scan for children
Read next: R60 Physical education as a “period”: how the body got a timetable slot · R22 Pañcakośa: the five sheaths and the whole child
Notes
- Sri Aurobindo, “A System of National Education” (first published in Karmayogin, 1910), chapter “The Human Mind”. Early Cultural Writings, Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vol. 1. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
- Sri Aurobindo, “The Training of the Senses”, in “A System of National Education”. The Hour of God, SABCL vol. 17. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
- Sri Aurobindo, “Message” (dictated 3 December 1948 for the Bulletin of Physical Education, first issued 21 February 1949) and “Perfection of the Body”. The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, SABCL vol. 16. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
- The Mother, “Education” (Bulletin, February 1951) and “Physical Education” (Bulletin, April 1951). On Education, Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 12. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
- The Mother, “To Women about Their Body” (September 1960). On Education, Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 12.
- Sri Aurobindo Ashram, “Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education” and “The Mother”, sriaurobindoashram.org.
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