Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 35

Fragment ID: 9468

Children in the Ashram [7]

X, who is sixteen or seventeen, can explain the Mother’s Conversations and Prayers but is ignorant of even elementary mathematics and other subjects which every normal person ought to know. Perhaps Ramakrishna would not consider it to be ignorance so long as the person is turned towards the Divine?

But it is an unnecessary ignorance not to know elementary mathematics. To be able to explain Conversations and Prayers is very good, but I don’t see why it should exclude the other. If one has a realisation like Ramakrishna, that is another matter altogether. These people who came too young to the Asram like X and Y refused because they are not forced as children are at home and in school to learn anything at all except what it pleases them to learn. I consider the result deplorable, the more so because they have a more than ordinary personality and intelligence and ought to learn more, not less than other children.

5 June 1935