May 4 at Sri Aurobindo Institute of Culture, 3 Regent Park; 6 pm: Discourse on The Life Divine by Prof. Biswanath Roy.
The youth wing holds weekly readings of Sri Aurobindo's works and ... It was on April 4, 1910 that Sri Aurobindo reached the city of Pondicherry from ...
Since 1963, he has been an ashramite at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. Manoj Das is currently an English professor at the Sri Aurobindo International
Then I found a teacher from the International School belonging to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. His name is Narendra. He has developed a novel, inspiring and light method to teach grammar, which doesn’t feel like you do any grammar at all. At the same time it isn’t diluted for beginners so you don’t end up with partial knowledge. I also followed a few Sanskrit Conversation camps, which all brought about more familiarity.
Narendra says he owes his method to Sri Aurobindo and his companion The Mother who inspired him to come up with the course we now follow in Dublin. This is one of the many things The Mother said to inspire him:“Teach logically. Your method should be most natural, efficient and stimulating to the mind. It should carry one forward at a great pace. You need not cling there to any past or present manner of teaching.”
This is how I would summarize the principles for teaching Sanskrit as we carry it out at present:
1. Language learning is not for academics as everyone learns to speak a language from an early age before they can read and write and know what an academic is. So why insist in teaching Sanskrit academically?
2. The writing script is not the most fundamental thing to be taught. A language is firstly made of its sounds, words and spoken sentences. [The script we use -though very beautiful- is only a few hundred years old.]
3. Always go from what is known to what is new.
4. Understanding works better than memorisation in this Age. Learning by heart should only take up 10 percent of the mental work, rather than the 90 percent rote learning in Sanskrit up to the recent present.
5. Don’t teach words and endings in isolation; teach them in the context of a sentence as the sentence is the smallest meaningful unit in language.
6. Any tedious memory work which cannot be avoided should be taught in a song.
7. Do not teach grammatical terms. Just as we don’t need to know about the carburetor, when we learn to drive a car.
8. The course should be finished in two years by an average student according to Narendra. This may be a little optimistic given that we are a little out of the loop not living in India, which is still Sanskrit’s custodian. At present I would say it is going to be a three-year course.
9. Language learning must be playful. Use drama, song, computer games and other tricks to make learning enjoyable.
We have started on this course since September and it has certainly put a smile on our pupils’ faces, which makes a pleasant change. I now feel totally confident that we are providing your children with a thorough, structured and enjoyable course. Our students should be well prepared for the International Sanskrit Cambridge exam by the time they finish –age 14/15- at the end of second year. We will also teach them some of the timeless wisdom enshrined in various verses. At present we are teaching them: “All that lives is full of the Lord. Claim nothing; enjoy! Do not covet His property”- in the original of course.
Sri Aurobindo said “…at once majestic and sweet and flexible, ...
You have a valid point. All one can say is, there are far too many imponderables in life, and this could be one of them though of a very minor kind. My puzzle is however different: it is this author who is given a recommendation for rendering “valuable” services. Hypocrisy—that is all one can about it. There is nothing spiritual in it, and that causes pain. We seem to be hypocrites in our sleep also, to modify Hazlitt. ~ RYD
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and his doctrine.
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herself.
, he maps out the different stages from outer to inner being, Liberation and stages of ascent and descent beyond even that, culminating in what he calls ...