EDUCATION AS IT OUGHT TO BE ... 1

EDUCATION AS IT OUGHT TO BE ... 1

Intellectual education does not make a man. He merely becomes more proficient in executing his plans and programmes, his character which is the resolution of his mental tendencies having not been touched by such surface gleaning of data and their analysis thereof. Thus, a good man becomes better by mere intellectual education and a bad man becomes worse. 

Education needs to go deeper to be able to touch and transform the core personality of a human being and give it a divine direction. By 'divine' is not being meant religious but a truly universal spiritual order of existence that is higher than the material world of necessity and selfishness and is free of all such limitation. Man being a compound of three entities, the physical, the psychological and the spiritual, his education also must include deep references to all three. Thus far the physical and the psychological elements of education have been stressed upon generally and the spiritual has been almost entirely neglected. Here again one must not confuse religious education -- which for most parts is purely physical and psychological in its doctrinaire teaching -- for spiritual education as the latter stands distinct from all such theological dogma that draw man deeper into the mire of material existence with fear of hellfire and promise of Paradise. Spiritual education must free the human spirit of all superstition even as material education frees the human body from the rigours that Nature imposes.

It is difficult, virtually impossible, in the present state of the world to bring about such a system of spiritual education but the effort must be made till in millenia hence, perhaps, the world en masse will accept this new orientation of its being. Till then, labour on but never in vain.

Written by Sugata Bose