The Future School

= ne Future is not something out there; it is now—the very moment we are experiencing. From now, the future is born. It is the now that leads us into an infinite number of now movements—the myriad experiences that one has, all culminating into life experiences. All that is, is now; the rest is all the monkey mind, flittering in thoughts of past and future.

How we shall be tomorrow will depend on how we are today—what it is that we hold dear in our aspiration for tomorrow, our questions, our deliberations. The now is the womb, impregnated with a divine possibility of a conscious life and higher human expressions.

Life is lived in the present, and that is where our children love to stay—the joy of being in the present, doing what comes naturally without any predefined ends and goals, just the ananda of being one in thought and action. Learning is natural; it is need-based. One learns what one wants to learn, and what one wants to learn is something that one needs to learn.

Children carry in them future possibilities in alignment with their learning needs. There is no need—no need whatsoever—for an adult to intervene. Children grow moment to moment. There is an inner world that they live in—a world defined by their own imaginations, thoughts, ideas, excitements.

Learning is a play—a spontaneous expression that carries no ‘learning outcomes’ and doesn’t go beyond fulfilling this expression in the very moment. The seeker in the child seeks opportunities to experiment, to try things out, to know the world they live in and to know the world within. Let's call this the ‘seeking consciousness’—a lila of consciousness, if you will.

The ‘seeking consciousness’ is seeking itself in all that it does and experiences. The seeker and the seeking are one, integral expression. It seeks to know how things work; it seeks to know what makes the world the way it is. A child does not like to be told—to discover for oneself is profoundly more fulfilling than being told by a teacher or a textbook.

The assessment of what one has known and how ‘accurately’ one has known is subject to his or her own judgment and further knowing; it is a self-appraisal that does not need any validation by way of examination or marks by an ‘expert adult’.

A psychological and physical environment that enables this seeking is what we term as ‘the future school’—an environment that can be explored, experimented with, and not a place for examination, textbooks, curriculum, disciplined movement of children and adults, or the useless worry of the future. A place where one can play, where one can construct and deconstruct, where one can be the way one wants to be.

Whether climbing a ‘mud-hill’ or farming to see how seeds become food or a plant, or just randomly running because one wants to run, or getting wet in the rain because it’s fun— where one can sit quietly and listen to birds chirping —is what the future school is: a school without ‘schooling’ and without being ‘schooled’.

It is only when we allow freedom—freedom to be and freedom from predefined outcomes—that a child can truly blossom into an autonomous, spiritually resolved human being. The children of the future will need freedom in the present, and out of this present, we can create conscious futures for ourselves.