We have all been prepared by education and environment to seek personal gain and security, and to fight for ourselves. Although we hide it with nice phrases, we have been educated by the various professions, within a system based on fear, exploitation and acquisitiveness.
Such an education must inevitably bring confusion and misery to ourselves and to the world, because it creates in each individual those divisive psychological barriers that keep him apart from others.
Education is not a mere matter of training the mind. Training contributes to efficiency, but does not generate integration.
A mind that has only been trained is the continuation of the past, such a mind can never discover the new. Therefore, to find out what true education is, we will have to investigate the whole meaning of living.
For most of us, the meaning of life as a whole is not of primary importance, and our education accentuates secondary values, making us experts in some branch of knowledge.
Knowledge and efficiency are necessary, but placing a fundamental emphasis on them only results in conflict and confusion.
There is an efficiency that, inspired by love, goes much further and is greater than the efficiency of ambition.
And without love, which brings with it an integrated understanding of life, mere efficiency breeds cruelty. And this is what is currently happening all over the world.
Our present education is adapted to industrialization and war, its main purpose being to develop efficiency; and we find ourselves caught in this machinery of cutthroat competition and mutual destruction.
If education leads us to war, if it teaches us to destroy or be destroyed, this means that education has completely failed.
In order to give rise to true education, it is obvious that we must understand the meaning of life as a whole, and for that we must be able to think, not consistently, but directly and truthfully.
A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks according to a routine.
We cannot understand existence in an abstract or theoretical way. Understanding life is understanding ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.
Education is not just about acquiring knowledge, collecting data and correlating them; education is to see the meaning of life as a whole.
But the whole cannot be approached through the part, which is what governments, organized religions, and authoritarian political parties try to do.
The object of education is to create integrated and therefore intelligent human beings. We can acquire titles and be efficient from a mechanical point of view, without being intelligent for that reason.
Intelligence is not just information; it is not taken from books nor does it consist of witty self-protective responses and aggressive assertions.
A person who has not studied can be more intelligent than a scholar. We have made exams and degrees the standard of intelligence, and we have developed cunning minds that evade vital human questions.
Intelligence is the ability to perceive the essential, what is; and education consists in awakening this capacity in oneself and in others.
Education must help us discover authentic and lasting values, so that we do not simply cling to formulas or repeat slogans.
Education should help us break down our national and social barriers instead of accentuating them, because borders, whatever their kind, engender antagonism between human beings. Unfortunately, the current system of education makes us subservient, mechanical and profoundly thoughtless. Although it awakens us intellectually, internally it leaves us incomplete, stunned, and lacking in creativity.
Without an integrated understanding of life, our intellectual and collective problems will only deepen and widen.
The purpose of education is not to produce mere scholars, technicians and job seekers, but integrated human beings free from fear; for only between such human beings can there be lasting peace.
In understanding ourselves, fear comes to an end.
If man is to approach life from moment to moment, if he has to deal with its complications, misfortunes and sudden demands, he must be infinitely flexible and therefore free from theories and particular patterns of thought. .
Education should not stimulate the human being to conform to society or to oppose it, but should help him discover the true values that are revealed by impartial research and self-perception.
When there is no self-knowledge, self-expression becomes self-assertion, with all its ambitious and aggressive conflicts.
Education must awaken the capacity to know ourselves and, for that very reason, not merely indulge in rewarding self-expression.
It is useless for us to learn if in the process of living we destroy ourselves.
As little as we look around us, we realize that it is evident that there is something radically wrong with the way we educate our children.
Almost all of us realize this, but we don’t know how to deal with it.
Systems, whether educational or political, do not change by magic; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves. What is of basic importance is the human being, not the system; and as long as the human being does not understand the totality of himself, no system of the left or the right will be able to bring order and peace to the world.
The Page of Life
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