Every-Minute Zen

Right Education

Education is a bridge between potential and actuality. Education is to help you to become that which you are only in a seed form. And this is what I am doing in DHC; this is a place of education. The thing that is being done in the ordinary schools and colleges and universities is not education. It only prepares you to get a good job, a good earning; it is not real education. It does not give you life. Maybe it can give you a better standard of living, but the better standard of living is not a better standard of life; they are not synonymous.

The so-called education that goes on in the world prepares you only to earn bread. And Jesus says, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” And that’s what your universities have been doing – they prepare you to earn bread in a better way, in an easier way, in a more comfortable way, with less effort, with less hardship. But all that they do is prepare you to earn your bread and butter. It is a very, very primitive kind of education: it does not prepare you for life.

My vision of education is that life should not be taken as a struggle for survival; life should be taken as a celebration. Life should not be only competition, life should be joy too. Singing and dancing and poetry and music and painting, and all that is available in the world – education should prepare you to fall in tune with it – with the trees, with the birds, with the sky, with the sun and the moon.

And education should prepare you to be yourself. Right now it prepares you to be an imitator; it teaches you how to be like others. This is miseducation. Right education will teach you how to be yourself, authentically yourself. You are unique. There is nobody like you, has never been, will never be. This is a great respect that God has showered on you. This is your glory, that you are unique. Don’t become imitative, don’t become carbon copies. But that’s what your so-called education goes on doing: it makes carbon copies; it destroys your original face. The word “education” has two meanings, both are beautiful. One meaning is very well known, although not practiced at all, that is: to draw something out of you. “Education” means: to draw out that which is within you, to make your potential actual, like you draw water from a well.

Real education will be to bring out what is hidden in you – what God has put in you as a treasure – to discover it, to reveal it, to make you luminous. Education is to bring you from darkness to light. That’s what I am doing in DHC.

This I call education: to make people more intelligent. And that’s what I am doing in DHC. If this fire spreads, then this old, rotten society cannot survive. It survives on your unconsciousness, it lives on your unconsciousness.

Our whole system of education is stupid. It prepares you for a world which is no more in existence and it does not prepare you for a world which is coming, arising, which is dawning – so you will remain a misfit. You will never be able to live rightly. If you follow your education you will feel yourself; out of date. If you follow the new world that is happening, then your education will not be of any help in it. You will be almost uneducated, and that hurts the ego.

In a better world children will be thrown upon themselves as fast as possible; the whole effort of the parents should be to make the child use his intelligence. And the whole effort, if education is right – if it is education and not MISeducation – will be to throw the child again and again to his own intelligence, so that he can function, so that he can use his intelligence. He may not be so efficient in the beginning, that is true – the teacher may have the right answer, and if the student has to work out his own answer the answer may not be so right – but that is not the point at all. The answer may not be so right, it may not correspond to the answers given in the books, but it will be intelligent. And that is the real crux of the matter.

Remember this: your whole education prepares you, makes you ready to fight. It does not prepare you for friendship and love, it prepares you for conflict, enmity, war.