Examinations

 

 

The education will be complete, but it has to be at both the ends -- the beginning and the end. Each university should have a double structure: one for the young people who are going to enter into life, and the other for the old people who are going to enter into the unknown world of death.

The first part of education will be of many dimensions -- all sciences, all arts, all kinds of crafts. Somebody is a great carpenter, somebody is a great shoemaker, somebody is a great scientist, somebody is a great moneymaker -- they are all contributing whatever their potential allows them to life, with totality, not holding anything back. Naturally they should have equal opportunity to grow, and they should have equal respect. Just because a man is a president of a country does not mean that he should have respect and the man who makes perfect shoes should not. Both are fulfilling certain needs of the society; both should have the same honor and the same dignity.

This equal opportunity, equal respect will begin from the very world of education. And for education to make all these changes, education will have to go through many changes itself.

 

For example, examinations should be dissolved, because examinations emphasize people's memory, not their intelligence. Memory is not a great thing; particularly in the future it is not going to be of any importance. You can carry your small computer in your pocket which will have all the memories that you need, and any time... immediately the computer will supply. There is no need to fill your head with unnecessary rubbish.
 

The computer is going to replace the whole system of education which has depended up to now on memory. Whoever can memorize more comes first class, gets a gold medal, tops the university. But have you ever thought about what happens to these gold medalists in the world? They don't show anywhere any genius. Somebody is just a head clerk, somebody is just a stationmaster, somebody is a postmaster -- what happened to their gold medals? What happened to the great respect that their university paid to them?

In fact the university paid respect to their memories and memories are of not much use in actual life. In actual life you need intelligence. And the difference should be made clear to you. Memory is a ready-made answer. But life goes on changing, it is never ready-made -- so all your ready-made answers are lagging behind life.
 

Life needs a living response... not a ready-made answer, but a spontaneous response this moment; it needs intelligence.

Up to now education systems have not been creating intelligence at all. Intelligence needs a totally different kind of structure. Examinations are for memory, they are a memory test of how much you can memorize. But if questions are asked which you have not memorized, you are at a loss. You don't have the intelligence to respond to a new question for which the answer has not been memorized before.

 

The whole system of examinations is futile. A different structure should be created: each student, every day, should get his credit marks from the teacher to show if he is behaving intelligently, if he is answering things intelligently -- not just a repetition of the textbooks, but something original.

 

Originality should be respected and honored, not repetition -- not being a carbon copy. And there is no need to wait for one year; if a student can get enough marks within six months, he should pass into a higher standard. There is no question of anybody failing or anybody passing. Just as you start getting closer to the standard beyond your standard... there is no examination. Just with your teachers watching your responses and your intelligence, you will be moving on. Somebody may come one month later, somebody may come a few months later, but there is no question of a fixed year program. I have been a teacher in the university and I know.... There were students who were so talented that they could have passed the whole course set for one year in two months; now ten months are wasted. Who is responsible for that? And there were retarded students; even one year was not enough for them.

 

I have seen one person failing ten times in his matriculation examination. You will ask what happened the eleventh time? -- he did not appear in the examination. Enough is enough! He was the most experienced matriculate, although he never passed in ten years continuously. People who had been colleagues with him became his teachers and he was still there -- ready, stable and permanent.

 

Each individual should be given credit for his own intelligence. There should not be any time limit, because that time limit wastes the more talented, the more genuinely intelligent, the geniuses, and waits for the retarded, for the idiotic and the stupid. It is an ugly system.

 

Of course with genetic engineering the idiots and the stupid will not be allowed to enter into life. Move somewhere else! -- there are fifty thousand planets in the universe where life exists -- why bother us? Move on, go somewhere else where people are still idiots and still listen to the priests and go to the churches. This planet is no more for you.

 

The classroom will have a totally different form. It will not be the classroom where the teacher teaches you; although he knows more and you know less, his knowledge is out of date. He has learned everything thirty years ago, when he was a student. In thirty years everything has changed. It is such an insane structure that people who are teaching in the universities are all out of date. What they are teaching is no more relevant.

 

According to me, the library can be the only classroom. The teacher can only be a guide to help the students to find the latest, the recentmost researches in every subject. In the library the students should be there, and the teacher should be there just to help them, because he is more acquainted with the library, he has been longer in the library, he knows about the new discoveries and the latest inventions which have arrived. His function should be that of a guide to lead the students to the up to date knowledge.

 

This can be facilitated very easily with computers, with television sets. In the twentieth century you need not teach people geography with a map when television can bring you exactly to the place you are learning about -- New York or London or Peking -- you need not bother yourself looking at maps, looking at pictures, descriptions. On the television screen you can be instantly in New York, and what is seen is remembered more easily than what is heard, than what is read.

 

The future belongs to the televisions, to the computers, because they are the memory systems. The teacher will have a totally new function that will not be of teaching but only of guidance -- where you can find the right book in the library, where you can find the right video in the library, where you can find the right information in the computer.

 

Teaching becomes more alive, more colorful, more real. And the day is not far away when television will be three-dimensional. Then it will seem exactly as if people are walking and may come out of the television set any moment. Only two three-dimensional films were made, then the idea was dropped because they were too costly. But they will come back. With better techniques they will not be that costly.

 

I have seen one of the films. It was a strange experience. A man throws a spear -- and the whole audience in the movie hall gives way, because it is as if that spear is going through the hall. It is three-dimensional; it is as realistic as any actual spear can be. A man comes running on his horse and people shriek and divide to give way to the horse... it is just entering into the hall. It never enters! Slowly they become accustomed, by the end of the film: "Don't be worried. Just sit tight in your seat. Nothing is coming out of the screen. It comes only up to the screen and stops."

 

When things can be taught in three-dimensional televisions and films, when everything that you need to memorize can be done by a small computer... It can be connected with the national computer, which carries all the knowledge that has been found since man started coming down from the trees. You can get every information, information which will be very difficult to remember.

 

For example, if I ask you -- and you are all educated people here -- "On what day was Socrates married?"... Now, how educated are you? You cannot remember the date Socrates was married; it was such a great date that he suffered his whole life, and you don't even have compassion enough to remember the date! But your computer can remember all that you want. It can contain whole libraries immediately at hand.

 

The future of education, if scientifically worked out, is going to be a tremendous adventure. Up to now it has been a kind of enforcement; students have to be forced, bribed.

 

Education can become so colorful, so actual, so real that you will not need to say to the students, "Be attentive!" They will be attentive automatically.

 

And the same for the second part of education. All scientific technology can be used to give you experiences very close to death. You can be taught meditations, you can be taught relaxation, you can be taught how to go deeper in your sleep. Hypnotism will play a great role in the second part of education, because you can be hypnotized so deeply that you can almost touch the territory of death.

 

-Osho, "The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here, #28, Q1"