Education must expand your horizons
Question: Sadhguru, what should the role of the school be in educating children?
Sadhguru: Educating yourself—fundamentally—means broadening your horizons. From being limited, you want to broaden your horizons. Unfortunately, today, the form of education that is imparted, though it is broadening your information capabilities, it is also making you very narrow in terms of your perception, and in terms of including life around you.
If you have to live amidst people, you need an enormous sense of inclusion. Without that, you cannot live with people harmoniously. People used to live like this in the past, but now it is very uncommon. Still, there are a few families living like that, but slowly, with western education, people are becoming more and more individualistic. They are becoming exclusive instead of inclusive.
Our definition of family is shrinking. First we dropped uncles, aunts, and grandparents. Then we said family means me, my wife and my children. My parents are okay but wife’s parents—no, they are not family. Then we thought parents are too old, and they come in the way of everything we want and need. So family now means only me, my wife, and my children.
Slowly, as this type of education is playing a huge role in people’s life, even two people are not able to live together these days. They need separate homes. On weekends they can meet, but if they are together for more than a weekend, there will be a war. We are becoming exclusive, so exclusive that loneliness has become the biggest problem in the world today.
You know, the gypsies live a completely different kind of life. They have a very different attitude which is considered romantic and in some ways, very beautiful. Once a gypsy was scolding his son, “You good-for-nothing fellow, if you don’t learn some magic and jugglery and things like this to make a living, I am going to put you in the school and make you into an educated man, and then you will suffer from endless want.”
Unfortunately this is what education has done to people. Endless want! The more educated the societies are becoming, their wants are becoming unbelievable. The level of want that people are creating is such that everybody needs a separate planet for himself.
Unfortunately his has been the result of our education. Not because there is something wrong with the content of education, but there is something absolutely wrong with the way it is delivered. It is not information which damages people, it is the way you gather it and the way it is given, and with what context it is given.
Whether it is your own wife, your own mother, your own child, your ability to share and give is gone with education. Do you see, as societies are getting more and more educated, people don’t even want to have children any more? The entire aspect of inclusiveness is disappearing from a human being. The whole dimension of spirituality means ‘all inclusiveness,’ not exclusiveness. Inclusiveness is life. Exclusiveness is death.
Education has become just about survival. It should not be about survival only, it should be about broadening your horizons. Because people have become so consumed about their economic status, we have twisted education just as a way of milking money from the world. This has to change. If one keeps his intelligence uncluttered, wherever you put him, he will survive. You put him anywhere he will survive. We want to produce not just loving wonderful adults, but we want to produce very resilient adults. If you put him in hell, he will slowly convert it into heaven. That’s the kind of children we want to grow.
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