May 14, 2020
Founder’s 90th Anniversary
On the 90th anniversary of the birth of Vijayadev Yogendra, the Founder of The School of Total Education
“There is a tremendous amount of beauty in ‘just being’ – where you have withdrawn from automatically reacting, responding to, and suffering other’s reactions.”
Vijayadev Yogendra – Overcoming Negative Feelings 1995
As this quote illustrates, the life work of the school’s founder was an education in the art of living. How to live a life of peace while engaging in full with one’s duties and life involvements. This work can be seen in the legacy of the institutions he created including the school, the Centre for Healthy Living and New Horizons for Health, which continue today. It can also be seen in the pithy statements, the essays and the books he wrote exhorting the reader to reflect and adjust, as well as in the lives of the many thousands of people he helped.
In our school, there is a subtle emphasis on being settled, understanding one’s self and through that knowledge and state developing the concentration needed to focus, to apply one’s self and to create. All parties are drawn into this learning, the students as the focus of the school, and the parents and teachers who are refining themselves as they constantly build, adjust and rebuild the scaffold for the students’ development.
In a single day of the life of a teacher and parent, the opportunities to ‘react, respond and suffer’ the children’s actions and reactions surely run to the tens if not hundreds. This gives rise to the real education of the children, that of self management. The capacity to not to be drawn into anger, and through that ‘just being’ responding instead with love through showing patience, tolerance or forgiveness, thus giving us the space to redirect and guide.
What a gift it is that we can give the children, this example of self management, self control and the personal strength they attain as a result to know they can manage themselves no matter what life throws at them. So what a gift it is that we have been given by the school’s founder whose 90th birthday we acknowledge today.