Total Education
Discourse date: Fri, 21 January 1968 00:00:00 GMT
This discourse was given to teachers at Poddar College.
Of the misfortunes that have befallen mankind, the greatest are the ones which we have been regarding as blessings. Because of regarding them as benedictions, as blessings, it has not been possible to avoid those misfortunes, or to change them, and nothing has been done to be free of them; rather, on the contrary, we have been watering them at their roots. As a result, born out of this is the man who is in front of us, and created out of it is the society which is all around us.
What has been going on in the name of education I consider the greatest of all those misfortunes.
Certainly you will be surprised to hear this, because education is thought to be a blessing. But are you aware that education has not given man balance and health? On the contrary, it has taken away all the balance from human life. And it was bound to be so, because there are some basic mistakes in what we have so far been thinking education to be.
The first basic mistake is that we have taken man to be only intellect. There can be nothing more false and wrong than this. Man is not intellect alone and the education being given is only of the intellect. The rest of the man remains untouched and incomplete; the rest of the man remains undeveloped, only the intellect develops. It is just as if someone's whole body shrinks and wastes, only his head goes on becoming bigger. That man will be only an ugliness, and that man will be unable to walk. It will be difficult for him to live, because his big head will not be in balance with the rest of his body. And this is exactly what has happened in the name of education.
We decided that man is only intellect, and then for the past three thousand years we have been doing everything only to develop man's intellect. The intellect has developed but the rest of the man is left far behind; the rest of the man is left three thousand years behind, and his intellect has gone three thousand years ahead. The tension, the gap that is created between the two is what is killing us. This has given birth to an inverted crippledness.
A man has all parts of his body intact and only his eyes are missing; then we say one part of his body is crippled, undeveloped. If a man has all his parts but his two legs, we call him crippled. An opposite type of crippledness is also possible of which we are not aware - a man having only two legs and nothing else. This man is an inverted cripple.
Education has not made man healthy, it has crippled him. Only his intellect has developed and all the remaining parts of his body have remained undeveloped. The intellect has become bigger and bigger, and his connection with all the sources of life have been cut off.
What do we teach? What do we give in the name of education? Do we offer any education of life?
Do we give any education in living? Do we teach the art of life? Not at all. We teach some words; we teach some mathematics, some language, some chemistry or physics, some history or geography.
But what do we really teach through all this teaching? Just some words.
Words are not life. Words have their utility in living life, but mere education of words is not the education of life. Then what happens is that there is a great pile of words.... An educated man ends up having no other wealth than that of words. He is as idiotic as any uneducated person. There is only one difference between them, and that is that in addition the educated man falls into the illusion that he is not an idiot. He remains just as ignorant about all other dimensions of life as any tribal man from the jungles. He has no understanding whatsoever about the art of living, he has no idea of the paths along which to live life. He has no acquaintance with life at all. What do libraries and books have to do with life? There is no need to commit the mistake of thinking that one who is familiar with a classroom is familiar with life. And it is necessary to keep in mind that life may not even give a clay medal to one who has won a gold medal in the university.
The education of words, mere accumulation of words, mere wealth of words, certainly becomes a weight on the brain but neither does it make the brain free, nor alive, nor thoughtful, nor does it provide any originality in looking at life, nor does it give the art of living or teach ways of living. So far, this is what we have been calling education! The sick, insane and ill man we see today is the result of this education.
Do you know that as his education grows, man goes on becoming more perverted? The uneducated man had a kind of balance and health which is missing in the educated man. The aboriginals of the forests had a kind of beauty, a kind of music, a bliss. There was a meaning and purpose in their life which is missing in the educated man.
It is really amazing. Are we becoming educated at the cost of losing bliss? Is our capability and fitness to experience bliss declining? Are we breaking contact with the roots of our life? If we look at the educated man with unbiased eyes - which is difficult because we are also educated men, so it is with great difficulty that we are able to see an educated man's diseases. Where there is the same disease prevalent all over the place, it is very difficult to recognize it.
We are all educated, not only educated but we are also the educators; we are the people who spread and impart that same education. It will be very difficult for us to see... very difficult for us to think that what we are spreading is not making man healthy. But those who have eyes and those who have not lost their entire intelligence in going through this education - those people may be able to see a few things.
America is the most educated country, but the largest number of mad people is also in America. Is there some relationship between the two, or is it just accidental? The countries which are becoming more and more educated, the mental tension of their people is growing in the same proportions.
Are we aware of these statistics or not? The more educated a country becomes, the more cases of suicide it has. In America itself, every day some 1.Date: Fri, 5 to 3 00:00:00 GMT X-Location: million people seek treatment for mental
ailments. These are government statistics, and we know well that government statistics are never correct. If 1.Date: Fri, 5 to 3 00:00:00 GMT X-Location: million people are seeking mental treatment every day, then we know that it is not
because of some individual difficulty, rather some collective disease is entering man's mind.
In New York thirty percent of people cannot sleep at night without taking sleeping pills. And the scientific investigations and researches there say that within fifty years not a single man there will be able to sleep without taking sleeping pills. Are these the symptoms of a progressing man? And what to say about New York - even Bombay will not stay behind for too long. We are also standing shoulder to shoulder in this progress, in this race; India will not stay behind. India, which has been the world teacher in every field, will not stop before becoming the world teacher in madness as well.
We cannot avoid it; we are moving fast in this direction. Our leaders are making every effort so that we are not left behind.
The black shadow of mental tension and restlessness that has descended on the West - what is the reason for its birth? The people who have tried to make the West educated during the past three hundred years, they are the good people with good intentions whose hands are behind it. Perhaps they did not know about the total nature of life; perhaps they had the notion that man will become happy if his intellect alone can be developed. Certainly intellectuality should grow, intellect should grow, but in proportion to all the limbs of life, in a balance. It should grow hand in hand with health, with heart, with being. If it grows alone, it is bound to create danger.
Intellect has no heart. The life, the world created by intellect will also be heartless. Intellect has mathematics, not love. Intellect has calculations and statistics, not feelings. Intellect thinks in terms of figures and logic - life reaches beyond logic and figures and mathematics.
Life is very mysterious; no mathematics is able to explain it. No figures, no statistics are able to solve life. But intellect does not accept the existence of any mystery; intellect thinks everything is simple and straight like two plus two making four. It is this non-mysterious, heartless approach of intellect towards life which has given life a mechanicalness. Every day man goes on becoming more and more machine-like. But when a man becomes like a machine, we call him efficient, skilled.
A machine is always more efficient than man. And if our emphasis remains only on the efficiency of the man, one day man will become efficient like machines but will have lost his soul. Man commits mistakes, machines don't. We are trying for a man who does not commit mistakes, who is absolutely efficient, who moves on the unfaltering lines of mathematics.
Moving on the unfaltering lines of mathematics is like a train running on the railway tracks. But the rivers of life do not run on tracks, they run on unknown, unfamiliar paths. The river of life has a freedom which cannot be contained in the fixed structures of intellect - but this is what we have been trying to do till today.
So the first thing I want to say to you is that education of only intellect is not intelligent and wise.
There are other aspects of life too, and they are more significant than the intellect, because man does not live by intellect. The sources of man's living are much deeper than the intellect. Neither do we love through intellect, nor do we get angry through intellect, nor do we hate through intellect.
Neither do we recognize beauty through intellect, nor do we read song and poetry through intellect, nor are any deeper experiences of life attained through intellect. It is not surprising if the education of mere intellect deprives and cuts life off from all the deeper experiences. But we have been imparting an education only of intellect.
This education has given birth to a very unbalanced man. This unbalanced man goes on doing just anything; just anything is happening through him, any trouble. And these troubles are absolutely bound to happen, because when a man becomes unbalanced from within, his outside behavior also becomes unbalanced. Then there is no movement, no clear goal, no music, no rhythm in his life.
This is the first of our misfortunes - that we have understood education as the education of mere intellect - not of a total life. The education of a total life will have other meanings.
In my vision, too much weight of intellect completely stops a few things from growing within man. We start sending five-year-olds to school. Their intellect comes under such a load that their bodies, their hearts, their feelings - all capacities in their life for deriving bliss and enjoyment - get destroyed. All juices of life are taken away by the intellect and the rest of the life dries up.
These children grow up heartless, without feeling, empty of any love, machine-like. Their value is only one: how much higher position they can reach, how much salary they bring back home, how efficiently they work. Is man born for this? Is man born only for this, that he gets a bigger salary or sits on a higher chair? Or does man come in life to search for some other wealth of bliss? But in order to search for that wealth, it is necessary to develop some other things.
In my view - it will appear very strange to you when I say this today - until the whole of mankind comes to this decision, if not today then tomorrow, that there should be no weight on the child's intellect up to the age of twelve or fourteen years of age.... The weight on the child's intellect should come only after fourteen years of age. Up to fourteen years of age, all efforts should be made for the growth of the child's body and feelings.
The first fourteen years in the child's life are the most formative years. As the child attains sexual maturity, only after that is the right development of his intellect easy and appropriate. Before that, there are other precious parts of his life which should develop. The child's health should develop, the child's feelings should develop, the child's capacity to love should develop, because the child whose capacity to love does not grow in childhood, even if he grows to old age there will not be any growth of love in him.
Childhood is the most pleasant and amazing opportunity for love to grow in children. But we waste and destroy that time in teaching them mathematics and teaching them geography and the foolishnesses of history. What is the purpose of it all? If the child does not know much of geography, there is no great harm in it, and if the child does not learn the names of mad people like Akbar and Napoleon and Alexander, it makes no difference at all. If the child does not learn the statistics of which people have killed how many people, that makes no difference. And to teach them the nonsense of which emperor was born in what year and died in what year - neither is there any meaning nor any significance in it. But all those moments in the child's life which were for developing love get wasted in teaching him all these stupidities.
Are you aware that all your love after childhood becomes false and empty and deceptive? There is a basic difference between the love you felt for someone in your childhood and the love you felt for someone when you had become adult. That sacredness of childhood love, once it is lost - if that innocence is once lost - to regain it in life becomes very arduous almost impossible.
The whole capacity of childhood should be devoted to the development of love, not to the development of intellect, because the palace of life that is erected on the foundations of childhood love, only that can attain to bliss. Bliss has no relationship whatsoever with intellect. But we put intellect in the very foundation, then the building that arises is not a temple but a factory. If man's life is to be made into a factory, the building should arise on the foundation of intellect. And if man's life is to be made into a temple, the foundations should be laid in love.
All of childhood should be given to the development of the heart, all efforts should be made for the development of the heart. And for the development of the heart quite different opportunities are to be sought, not the opportunities we seek in the schools and colleges. For the development of the heart it is necessary that the child be under the open sky, near the trees, under the shelter of the moon and stars, at the river banks and sea shores, in contact with the soil, the earth. The closer the child to the vast, the more love will grow in him, and the sense and meaning of beauty will develop.
The crime that is being done against small children sitting within closed walls in front of blackboards - the sin that is happening this way, someday, if not today then tomorrow, mankind will take account of it and we all will be declared guilty.
Before they have hardly gathered any consciousness, in the name of education we imprison children within closed rooms and walls, in prisons. And what do we teach them there? What values of life do we teach them there? Then the wonderful moments of childhood, when the contact with life could have been established, are lost.
Rabindranath has written, "I was being imprisoned in the schools. The birds would be singing songs outside and I had to go on looking at the blackboard. The sounds of the birds would be wonderful, but I had to listen just to the monotonous voice of the teacher and learn geography. If my ears and my being reached out to the birds, I had to undergo punishment."
Then, when Rabindranath started his school for the first time in Shantiniketan, who would give their children to him to spoil? Rabindranath himself could not get any degree in any university. Fortunate was he; otherwise the world would have been deprived of a great poet. Blessed was he that his parents could not succeed and took him out of the school. Had his parents been successful the world would have suffered a great loss. And how many losses this world has suffered throughout the history of man cannot be assessed because there is no way to know how many Rabindranaths would have been lost in the schools.
When Rabindranath opened his school for the first time, who would send his children there to be spoiled? If I open a school, would you send your children? No, you would not. Who would send their children to be spoiled? But still there were some such children of Rabindranath's friends whom it was not possible to spoil anymore - they were sent to Rabindranath's school. They were at the extreme border, now there was no hope for them to be spoiled any further. Ramanand Chatterji, the editor of MODERN REVIEW, had also sent his son; he was fed up with him.
Any children who have even a little intelligence, parents certainly get troubled with them. Parents like non-intelligent, idiotic children, without any genius, very much, because they sit down wherever they ask them to sit down, and stand up when they ask them to stand up. They neither have any soul of their own, nor any being of their own.
So Ramanand also had sent his son. After three months Ramanand went to see what the condition was there, how the school was run. He had no hopes that the school would be running, but what he saw there amazed him even more. Rabindranath was sitting under a big tree, some ten to fifteen children sitting around him, and study was going on. Coming closer Ramanand discovered that ten to fifteen were sitting under the tree, and ten to fifteen were sitting up in the tree. What kind of class was this?
To Rabindranath he said, "I had my doubts in the very beginning! What is going on? Is this a class?
I feel sad to see this - the boys sitting up in the tree."
Rabindranath said, "I also feel sad: the fruits have ripened, and I am amazed at the children who are sitting under the tree! I also feel sad. I have become old; otherwise I also would have been in the top of the tree. The fruits have ripened, the winds have brought the fragrance of the fruits, the tree is calling, and if children don't climb it, who else will? The tree has sent the invitation - these children who are sitting under the tree have already become old. They are not receiving the invitation; the message is not reaching their nostrils that the fruits have ripened. The tree is giving the call to come!
Sad will be those who have become old and unable to climb, but these children have not yet grown old! This is what I was thinking, sitting here. Have these children already become old? Have they not felt the challenge of the tree? Have they not received the message?"
We make the children old in their very childhood. And then if the youth, the freshness disappears from life, who is responsible? As I see it, too much misconduct is happening, too much oppression is happening. Much wrong is happening.
The moments of childhood are so wondrous that they will never again come back into life. The matters of mathematics and accounts can be taken care of later on - the whole of life is lying ahead - but some precious matters of life can be passed on only in the childhood, which can never be passed on later.
The children who do not become close to nature, those children will not be able to become close to God either - this we must understand - because nature is the door to God. Those who have not experienced in the childhood the one who is present there - that presence of God there, under the sky, in the sun, on the sands of the ocean, near the trees - will worship in the temples until their old age, will bow down in front of the stone statues, will learn the GITA, the KORAN and THE BIBLE by heart; but they can have no connection with God whatsoever. They have already missed the very door, they have already wandered off the very path.
The first necessary thing to know about right education is that we should be able to provide children closeness to nature, not bringing them close to the man-made houses but to all that is created by the energy of life, because it is through this that they will be able to come close to God; it is through this that they will be able to come to love; it is through this that they will be able to understand the secrets of prayer and then their life will arise out of that.... Love should come to them first, mathematics later, because no mathematics can deceive a man who has learnt love.
Somebody asked Saint Augustine, "What shall we do that no evil is done by us?"
Saint Augustine said, "Do not ask this. I know only one thing, that if you know love, then whatever you will do it cannot be evil."
Augustine said not to bother about how not to do evil; that is not the question. If there is no love within you, then whatever you do will be evil; and if there is love within you, then whatever you do it cannot be evil.
But what education of love, what initiation in love have we given? What certificates of love have we conferred? And then if in three thousand years man has become completely loveless, murderous and violent, who is responsible for it? None other than our education can be held responsible for it.
But the teachers need not feel offended by this, because putting this responsibility on education means I am giving lots of honor to education; I am saying education is the center of life. Hence the teacher should be ready to bear the main responsibility; tomorrow the main honor too can be his. Tomorrow, if life is transformed, it is education which will receive the honor. And today if life has become polluted and poisoned, then the educationist should be prepared to accept the main charge and responsibility also. This is indicative of education being central. What I am saying is very respectful - that education is central. Neither the politicians nor the religious leaders are as responsible as the teacher is.
But the coming world will also only bestow honor on the teacher if he is able to lay down some basis for changing life. If you are not able to change it, tomorrow, children themselves will start changing it.
A friend of mine has just returned from a trip to Holland and Belgium. He told me that the high- school boys and girls there have started refusing to study any further. They have big youth centers, they have big unions, and what they say is, What will come out of studying any further? They ask their parents, "You are very educated and what has happened in your lives? So why unnecessarily force us through the same machine, passing through which you have not attained anything?" And parents have no answer for it.
If your children also ask you what you have attained by being educated, what answer have you got? Will you show them your coffers? Will you show them your big houses? Will you show them your chairs you have obtained in Delhi? What will you show to the children? Do you have anything you have attained by being educated? Can you say with great certainty, "My self-confidence is great"? Can you say with great certainty, "My gratitude towards life has grown"? Can you say, "I have become blessed"? You cannot.
So children are going to ask you, if not today then tomorrow, and if you don't have the answer, I must tell you children are going to refuse to go to your factories of education. They have already started refusing in highly educated countries, and their refusal is right. But before they refuse, can't we change our whole way of thinking about life?
Up to the age of sexual maturity, until the child has ripened from the point of view of sex - be it a boy or a girl - till then the central education of the child's life should be of love and heart - because later the whole of life will come out of that. The child will become a wife or a husband, the child will become a mother or a father - all the emotional relationships of their lives then will be the relationships of love and heart, not of mathematics or geography or history.
No mother can become a better mother because of studying history; nor can a father become a better father by studying geography. Something else is needed that can give birth to a better mother, a better father; something else is needed that can give birth to a better wife, a better husband. Today, neither are there mothers in the world nor fathers, neither wives nor husbands: there are pseudo- relationships in these names. Have you ever looked at the person you call your wife? It is possible that you may have loved someone you don't call your wife, but never the person you call your wife.
The person a wife calls husband - has she ever loved him, respected him? Has her being ever loved him, prayed for him? Has she ever taken any step to make his life rich and musical? Not at all. Rather, his wife scatters as many thorns for him as possible, or creates as many obstacles as possible. And the husbands also do the same, parents also do the same. They say that they love their children; but we have not known love - how will we love children?
If we were loving our children, there could not have been so many wars in the world. Who is the parent who will send his children to war? If we were loving our children the world could not have become so ugly. If we were loving our children, I go as far as to say, we would not have given birth to children... because which loving parent will be ready to give birth to their children in this ugly and dirty world? They will excuse themselves, saying, "How to bring our children into such a world?
Tomorrow, when we face them, we will feel so ashamed in front of them that we gave birth to them in this world. How to send them out into this ugly world full of immorality and darkness?" Parents would have refused to give birth to children if they had love in their hearts.
But no, they go on giving birth to children. They have no concern at all for the children. They go on raising their children; they go on raising their children as the fodder for the guns and the cannons.
They go on getting their children butchered in the cause of everchanging names and new tricks - in the name of India, in the name of Pakistan, in the name of China, in the name of communism, in the name of democracy. Parents are ever ready to get their children murdered in the name of any big slogan. These names and slogans are too big for them - the children are too small!
If in this world there was love in the hearts of parents for their children, a different world would have been born in which there could be no wars - because every child is some mother's child, some father's son. Who would have agreed to send their children to war? We would have said, "Let Pakistan perish, let India perish, but the children cannot go to war! Whether China is saved or not, whether Russia is saved or not, whether America remains or not, no mother is ready to send her son to war. The wars would have vanished from the world, as well as politics, politicians and nations.
But nobody loves their sons, we simply do not know love. We simply have no acquaintance with love. We simply have not come across love. The moments that could have been the moments of meeting with love we have wasted in learning numerous useless things.
So in my view, the foundation of education should be love, not intellect. Intellect is only a means.
If there is love within, then the intellect becomes just a means to spread and develop love. And if there is no love within, then the intellect becomes a means for spreading lovelessness.
Truman gave the order to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Next morning, I have heard, the journalists surrounded Truman and asked, "Could you sleep peacefully last night?"
Truman said, "Very peacefully. As I heard that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been turned into ashes, and that Japan would surrender, immediately I went to sleep peacefully for the first time."
None of those journalists even asked, "One hundred and twenty thousand people have been killed and you could sleep peacefully? Are you a human being or something else?" But that man's name is: True man, the real man!
Our education is giving birth to just such true men, in whom there is no humanness, in whom there is no energy for life, no compassion; who have no waterfall of love. Those who have no waterfalls of love can be computers; they can be machines for calculations, not human beings. The first symptom of a human being is the love in him. The greater the love, the greater the man. The greater the love, the greater that man's closeness to God.
Therefore I want to say only one basic thing: The first steps of education need to be the steps of love.
And in order to take the steps in love closed walls are not needed but the open sky, birds, trees and stars and the moon. The basic education should not be of geography but of beauty. Basic education should not be of science but of art. Basic education should not be of tension but of relaxation and peace.
If we can arrange the education of children up to fourteen years of age this way, then later on it is difficult to spoil these children, then they can be sent to any school or any university whatsoever.
Then they can be taught anything, there will be no danger from it in any way. If a sword is put in the hands of these people, there will be no harm from that sword. If an atom bomb is given to them, there will be no harm done through it. Then even the greatest of power in the hands of love becomes creative.
Science has discovered the greatest power for man, but education has not been able to give him a loving heart. Great power is dangerous in the hands of those who have no love.
Nadirshah was coming towards India. He asked an astrologer if to sleep too much was very bad: "I sleep too much. Is it really a bad thing to sleep for too long?"
The astrologer said, "No, if people like you sleep twenty-four hours a day it is much better. If bad people fall asleep forever, it is better. Good people's waking is good and bad people's sleeping is good."
It is said that Nadirshah had that man beheaded. But he had said a very true thing. It has remained an old custom to behead truth-sayers. He had said the right thing: it is good if the bad man sleeps, and it is good if the good man is awake.
Similarly, I say, a loving man being powerful is good; a loveless man being impotent, powerless, is good. If power is in the hands of loving persons, then life grows; and if power is in the hands of a loveless person, then life will become only a graveyard and nothing else - and this is what we have been doing. It is necessary to contemplate on this.
I have come to request and urge the teachers only this - that they think; that they think about how the heart can be developed. And if it is necessary - and it feels to me this way - if for a hundred years all the colleges and universities of the world are closed down and man's mind is left completely uneducated, then too there will be no harm compared to the harm that is going to happen in continuing the current education for the coming hundred years.
Man was uneducated for thousands of years. Those people, those uneducated people also have known bliss, known song, known love. They too created a world. In their lives there was also happiness and smiles - more than in us, much more than in us. We have lost everything.
It is necessary to bring back man's naturalness.
I do not say that education should be abolished, I am saying that the foundation of education should be changed. And if only this education is to continue, if there is no other alternative, if this education is the only alternative, then I say let this whole education be stopped and man go back to the jungles.
Then too we will not lose anything.
But I feel there is an alternative. Education can be made total. And if only one thing gets added to it:
if its foundations become that of love, of feeling, of heart, of compassion and kindness, if we develop man's heart first and then his intellect, if the heart leads and the intellect becomes its follower, then this education can become the right education.
I have not lost hope. If I had lost hope I would not say these things to you. I say these things to the teachers in the hope that they will think. There is a great power in their hands. Today or tomorrow the world will hold them responsible if something goes wrong. It is appropriate to reflect before that happens.
If I come back again among you, I will be able to talk to you about how to impart the education of love. Today, if only your attention can be drawn to it, if only this much attention can be drawn to the fact that the house of education based on the foundations of intellect can make a factory but not a temple, I will consider my talk complete. If the temple of life is to be created, the foundation will have to be laid upon love.
Childhood - the period up to fourteen years of age - is a wonderful opportunity for the growth of love. If we miss at that time, we miss it forever. Then there remains no way that we can bring about any change in it. And to bring about a change during the childhood, nothing is needed to be done - the streams of love were eager to flow. We knowingly stopped them, we did not allow them to flow.
If we can only become an opportunity for their streams of love to flow, we will be able to give birth to a totally new kind of man. And a new man is absolutely needed.
Neither making more and new hydrogen and atom bombs is needed as much, nor is it needed as much that we build sputniks and spaceships to reach to the stars and the moon, nor is it needed as much that we measure the depths of the oceans, nor is it needed as much that we build very big factories, bridges and highways. All these will be useless if man goes wrong. They will all be useless.
At this time, there is only one urgent issue and that is: How do we create the right man? Man is wrong: how to create the right man? Think in this direction.
I said these few things to you, you listened to me with such love and silence - I am very grateful.
Finally, I offer my salutations to the god residing within all of you, but which you are unaware of.
Please accept my salutations.