As part of its offerings on the 150th birthday of Sri Aurobindo, earlier this year, Sri Aurobindo Center for Advanced Research (SACAR), Pondicherry launched a project titled “Sri Aurobindo: A Visionary Among World Thinkers”. 

Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, this project has two aspects – a series of conversations called Auro Talks with various scholars, and a scholarly book to be published by SACAR. The project explores Sri Aurobindo’s insights on various subjects like philosophy, psychology, political science, literature & language, and education, in comparative light of other renowned global thinkers in these fields.

Dr. Beloo Mehra was one of the scholars to be invited to contribute to this project, both in the Auro Talk Series as well as to submit a chapter for the proposed book. She chose the area of Education and conducted extensive research into the work of Maria Montessori in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s vision of Integral Education.

Delving deep into a comparative analysis of the educational philosophies of Sri Aurobindo and Maria Montessori she submitted a 35-page paper titled, “Makings of a Truly Learner-centric Education: Sri Aurobindo and Maria Montessori”. The book incorporating this paper will be published soon.

Following the review of the paper, she was invited for a conversation with Dr. V. Ananda Reddy, Director, SACAR. This 75-minute-long conversation highlights a few key ideas from Maria Montessori’s extensive work, and connects them to some of the essential ideas from the educational philosophy and thought of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

As the conversation flows, the focus remains on seeking for the commonalities or parallels between the two visions of education, with an objective to weave them together into one whole pattern. This helps the interested audience identify how one vision actually finds greater clarity when seen in the light of the other, bringing out a greater harmony between them, even though these two visions were emerging independently in two different corners of the world.

The book titled “Sri Aurobindo: A Visionary among World Thinkers” will be published soon. It will include the full paper by Dr. Beloo Mehra.