PROUT College: Window to a new tomorrow PDF Print E-mail
Education
Written by Dada Vedaprajinananda   

What is the connection between a new academic co-operative in Australia, a co-operative research programme in Venezuela, a co-operative training programme in Croatia, community-based skills sharing groups scattered across the globe, eco-villages in the USA, yoga and meditation retreats across the world, a global network of community service and sustainable development programmes, and environmental and animal rights activism across the world?

The answer is people who are inspired to be active participants in their societies to look after the physical, mental and spiritual welfare of the administrators and the administered of their societies as a whole. And their inspiration comes from PROUT, a social movement based on spiritual culture, a model of an ideal socio-economic system, a vision of the good society, and the PROUT practice.

PROUT College (www.proutcollege.org) is a new virtual academic co-operative hosted in Australia. The PROUT College started running its first subjects this year. The members of the co-operative are the teachers Sohail Inayatullah, Michael Towsey, Ivana Milojevic and Marcus Bussey and the administrator Jake Karlyle, all of whom have been involved with PROUT and/or futures education for many years.

“The co-operative members are the ones who have made efforts in the last few years to make the college a reality,” explained Jake Karlyle. “And, the members of the academic faculty are responsible for designing and teaching all the courses. The project is the fruit of Jennifer Fitzgerald’s initial groundwork in Australia in the 1990s. Inspired by PROUT, she worked to create the tertiary college. After Jennifer passed away in 2000, Stephen Gunther continued the project.
The PROUT vision continues to provide the inspiration for PROUT College and we warmly acknowledge the invaluable contributions made by Jennifer Fitzgerald and Stephen Gunther.”

“The Certificate in PROUT Studies can be studied full-time or part-time,” said Sohail Inayatullah. “As always, the person who learns the most from any course is the one who teaches... thus I love the two and three-day foresight workshops I run. Interestingly, the participants teach in the last session. We use PROUT’s vision to look at social reality and then use other theories to look at PROUT, all with the intent of promoting knowledge pluralism and transformative action. An inner spiritual dimension is also developing in the course.”

“We can do something about the future; the future is there as a potentiality,” said Marcus Bussey. “Education that generates rather than consumes energy has the potential to return hope and creativity to the human experiment. If we infuse education with spiritual energy drawn from the practices, values and commitments of the great spiritual traditions, we produce a system that channels powerful creative forces into the future.”

He further says, “PROUT with its neo-humanist frame of thinking can inspire towards sustainable futures and create platform that will enable policy making that sustains the economic, environmental, social, personal and collective aspects of our ways of living.”

This semester is the first one with enrolled students and the subjects for this semester include: Introduction to PROUT (epistemology and methodology; neo-humanism; alternative economics, macro-history, and
glo-cal governance) taught by Sohail Inayatullah and Michael Towsey.

Macro-history and World Futures (comparative macro-history, scenarios of the world futures) are being taught by Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic, and
Education for Liberation (pedagogy for transformation, educational futures, spiritual education) by Marcus Bussey.

PROUT College offers eight units that, when taken together, are intended to be part of humanity’s response to the global challenge faced – the units are intended to help people move from survival to ultimately bliss. Prout has five pillars:
1) spiritual practice,
2) Neo-humanism,
3) the social cycle,
4) governance, and
5) socio-economy.

Spiritual practice means that there is an interior dimension to the external world. In a successful Proutist society, meditation and other practices are central and the inner dimension flows through the other aspects of PROUT.

Neo-humanism is both equal opportunity legislation and inner mindfulness.

The social cycle provides a theory of Macro-history and future. There are four stages of history and four ways of knowing – the worker, the warrior, the intellectual and the merchant. History is cyclical. We, however, are not doomed to the cycle. There is a way out. At the centre of the cycle are sadvipras – ideal leaders who can access these four potentials and ensure that the cycle becomes progressive. And, it is in this regard that PROUT College is trying to help people to move from survival to bliss so that each wave of change continues the rotation of the cycle but at higher levels.

PROUT works as a federalist world system with a sadvipra informal social system (the network of policy boards that inform and guide the formal system).

PROUT thus reconciles the two grand traditions in political theory: democracy and wisdom, structure and agency. Prout focuses on the co-operative socio-economic model (along with private small-scale enterprises and state-run public utilities).

A Proutist society provides a safety net with incentives for innovation. PROUT in this way seeks a third way, progressively beyond the existing ones.