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- My vision of a right education is to teach people how to grow
the ego and how to be able to drop it; how to become great minds and
yet be ready any moment to put the mind aside. You should be able to
just put your personality, your ego, your mind, on and off, because
these are good things if you can use them. But you should know the
mechanism, how to put them off. Right now you know only how to put
them on.
- In fact, the moment a child is perfectly
conditioned by you, you are very happy; you call it “religious
education.” You are very happy that the child has been initiated
into the religion of his parents. All that you have done is you have
destroyed his capacity to know on his own. You have destroyed his
authenticity. You have destroyed his very precious innocence.
- The basic education is missing. The first
thing to be taught is meditation, the art of going in, because only
out of that arises a discipline.
- A real education will not teach you to compete; it will teach
you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It
will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without
any comparison with the other. It will not teach you that you can be
happy only when you are the first. That is sheer nonsense. You can't
be happy just by being first. And in trying to be first you go
through such misery that you become habituated to misery by the time
you become the first.
By the time you become the president or the prime minister of a
country you have gone through such misery that now misery is your
second nature. You don't know now any other way to exist; you remain
miserable. Tension has become ingrained, anxiety has become your way
of life. You don't know any other way; this is your very style. So
even though you have become the first you remain cautious, anxious,
afraid. It does not change your inner quality at all.
A real education will not teach you to be the first. It will tell
you to enjoy whatsoever you are doing, not for the result but for
the act itself. Just like a painter or a dancer or a musician....
- All values imposed from outside never get to your center. The
only authentic values are those which come from your center and
spread outwards, not vice versa. That's exactly the meaning of
education: drawing the water out from the well.
Education means drawing your inner being into expression in your
living, your day-to-day life. Your honesty, your love, your
compassion, should come from your inner being, not from teachings
and scriptures, not from rabbis and bishops and shankaracharyas and
Ayatollah Khomeini.
- Society teaches you, “Become this, become
that.” It teaches you becoming. Its whole education system is based
on the idea of becoming. And what I am telling you here is just the
opposite of it. I am talking about BEING, not about becoming.
Becoming is an invention of the crafty politicians and the priests —
and these are the people who have poisoned the whole humanity. They
go on giving you goals. If you become tired of the worldly things —
money, power, prestige — they are there to tell you about paradise,
God, samadhi, truth. Again the whole process starts.
- There is nothing like education. All your
education simply makes you capable of worrying about situations
everywhere in the world, about everyone except you — about all the
troubles that are in the world. They have always been there, they
will always be there. It is not because you are here that troubles
are there. You were not and they were there; you will not be soon
and they will remain there. They change their colors but they
remain. The very scheme of the universe is such that it seems that
through trouble and misery something IS growing. It seems to be a
step, it seems to be a necessary schooling, a discipline.
- The child when he is born functions from the center; we teach
him how to function from the circumference. That is our whole
educational system all over the world: teaching the child how to
function from the circumference. We pull him away from his center,
we make him more and more accustomed to the circumference, to living
on the circumference... twenty-five years of conditioning,
education: good names we have given to ugly things. We call it
education -- it is not education, nothing can be a greater mis-education.
The very word 'education' means drawing something out, to draw
something out. When you draw water out of the well it is education.
Just like that, when something is drawn outwards from your center it
is education. But this is not what is going on in the name of
education; it is forcing things upon you. It is not bringing your
center to function. It is not sharpening your center; it is dulling
it, making it more and more sleepy, dozy. The society succeeds the
day your center goes into a coma and your circumference remains
functioning. Then you are a robot, a machine, no more a man.
- In the future, education will have that dimension. My own vision
is that each student should be given an opportunity to teach too.
The students who are reading and studying for their master's degree
should be allowed to go to lower classes to teach; those who are
working for their bachelor's degree, they should be allowed to teach
the lower classes. Every student should be a teacher also, and vice
versa. Every teacher once in a while should sit with the students
and start learning again. Each teacher once in a while should be a
student, and each student once in a while should be a teacher too.
This difference between the teacher and the taught has to be
dissolved; the teacher and the taught are part of one process.
- In the coming century the whole education system is going to be
totally transformed and changed because of the computer. It will be
stupid to teach children history, geography -- unnecessary, there is
no need. All that can be done by a computer; the child can carry the
computer. And my own observation is: the less you depend on memory,
the more intelligent you become. That's why it happens that in the
universities you will not find very intelligent people.
Professors, chancellors, vice-chancellors -- I have seen many, but
it is very difficult to find some intelligent person there. You can
find more intelligent people in the farmers, in the gardeners, in
the villagers. And the reason is clear: because they are not
knowledgeable they cannot depend on the memory. They have to respond
to reality, they have to respond to challenges, they have to bring
their consciousness to respond -- their consciousness remains more
sharp. A farmer, a villager, is far more wise than a professor in
the university. The professor can depend on the memory, the farmer
cannot depend on the memory.
- Twenty-five years of education -- almost one third of your life
you are being trained to be ambitious. How can you avoid politics?
The only way to avoid politics is to get out of your mind; that
means that unless mind is dropped totally, politics will go on
clinging to you. You can even be antipolitical but then that will
become politics.
- the whole society tries in every possible way to disconnect you
from your essential core, and it creates a false, plastic
personality around you and it forces you to become identified with
it. That's what it calls education. It is not education; it is mis-education.
It is destructive, it is violent. This whole society, up to now, has
been very violent with the individual. It does not believe in the
individual; it is against the individual. It tries in every possible
way to destroy you for its own purposes. It needs clerks, it needs
stationmasters, deputy-collectors, policemen, magistrates, it needs
soldiers. It does not need human beings.
We have failed, up to now, in creating a society which needs human
beings, simple human beings. The society is interested that you
should be more skillful, more productive, and less creative. It
wants you to function like a machine, efficiently, but it does not
want you to become awakened. It does not want buddhas and christs --
Socrates, Pythagoras, Lao Tzu. No, these people are not needed at
all by the society. If sometimes they happen, they don't happen
because of the society; they happen in spite of the society.
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