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Revolution in Education
"Never for a single moment let the person feel that he has been condemned. On the contrary, let him feel that he has been loved" -Osho, "The Invitation, #25"
"Never, even by your gestures, make the other person feel guilty. That is the greatest crime humanity has been committing: making people guilty." -Osho, "The Golden Future, #33"
Osho's Vision for Education- I divide education into five dimensions -
Question 1 Osho, What would be the form of education in the new commune?
The education that has prevailed in the past is very insufficient, incomplete, superficial. It only creates people who can earn their livelihood but it does not give any insight into living itself. It is not only incomplete, it is harmful too -- because it is based on competition.
Any type of competition is violent deep down, and creates people who are unloving. Their whole effort is to be the achievers -- of name, of fame, of all kinds of ambitions. Obviously they have to struggle and be in conflict for them. That destroys their joys and that destroys their friendliness. It seems everybody is fighting against the whole world.
Education up to now has been goal-oriented: what you are learning is not important; what is important is the examination that will come a year or two years later. It makes the future important -- more important than the present. It sacrifices the present for the future. And that becomes your very style of life; you are always sacrificing the moment for something which is not present. It creates a tremendous emptiness in life.
The commune of my vision will have a five-dimensional education. Before I enter into those five dimensions, a few things have to be noted. One: there should not be any kind of examination as part of education, but every day, every hour observation by the teachers; their remarks throughout the year will decide whether you move further or you remain a little longer in the same class.
Nobody fails, nobody passes -- it is just that a few people are speedy and a few people are a little bit lazy -- because the idea of failure creates a deep wound of inferiority, and the idea of being successful also creates a different kind of disease, that of superiority.
Nobody is inferior, and nobody is superior. One is just oneself, incomparable.
So, examinations will not have any place. That will change the whole perspective from the future to the present. What you are doing right this moment will be decisive, not five questions at the end of two years. Of thousands of things you will pass through during these two years, each will be decisive; so the education will not be goal-oriented.
The teacher has been of immense importance in the past, because he knew he had passed all the examinations, he had accumulated knowledge. But the situation has changed -- and this is one of the problems, that situations change but our responses remain the old ones. Now the knowledge explosion is so vast, so tremendous, so speedy, that you cannot write a big book on any scientific subject because by the time your book is complete, it will be out of date; new facts, new discoveries will have made it irrelevant. So now science has to depend on articles, on periodicals, not on books.
The teacher was educated thirty years earlier. In thirty years everything has changed, and he goes on repeating what he was taught. He is out of date, and he is making his students out of date. So in my vision the teacher has no place. Instead of teachers there will be guides, and the difference has to be understood: the guide will tell you where, in the library, to find the latest information on the subject.
And teaching should not be done in the old-fashioned way, because television can do it in a far better way, can bring the latest information without any problems. The teacher has to appeal to your ears; television appeals directly to your eyes; and the impact is far greater, because the eyes absorb eighty percent of your life situations -- they are the most alive part.
If you can see something there is no need to memorize it; but if you listen to something you have to memorize it. Almost ninety-eight percent of education can be delivered through television, and the questions that students will ask can be answered by computers. The teacher should be only a guide to show you the right channel, to show you how to use the computer, how to find the latest book. His function will be totally different. He is not imparting knowledge to you, he is making you aware of the contemporary knowledge, of the latest knowledge. He is only a guide.
With these considerations, I divide education into five dimensions. The first is informative, like history, geography, and many other subjects which can be dealt with by television and computer together. The second part should be sciences. They can be imparted by television and computer too, but they are more complicated, and the human guide will be more necessary.
In the first dimension also come languages. Every person in the world should know at least two languages; one is his mother tongue, and the other is English as an international vehicle for communication. They can also be taught more accurately by television -- the accent, the grammar, everything can be taught more correctly than by human beings.
We can create in the world an atmosphere of brotherhood: language connects people and language disconnects too. There is right now no international language. This is due to our prejudices. English is perfectly capable, because it is known by more people around the world on a wider scale -- although it is not the first language. The first is Spanish, as far as population is concerned. But its population is concentrated, it is not spread all over the world. The second is Chinese; that is even more concentrated, only in China. As far as numbers go, these languages are spoken by more people, but the question is not of numbers, the question is of spread.
English is the most widespread language, and people should drop their prejudices -- they should look at the reality. There have been many efforts to create languages to avoid the prejudices -- the Spanish people can say their language should be the international language because it is spoken by more people than almost any other language.... To avoid these prejudices, languages like Esperanto have been created. But no created language has been able to function. There are a few things which grow, which cannot be created; a language is a growth of thousands of years. Esperanto looks so artificial that all those efforts have failed.
But it is absolutely necessary to create two languages -- first, the mother tongue, because there are feelings and nuances which you can say only in the mother tongue. One of my professors, S. K. Saxena, a world traveler who has been a professor of philosophy in many countries, used to say that in a foreign language you can do everything, but when it comes to a fight or to love, you feel that you are not being true and sincere to your feelings. So for your feelings and for your sincerity, your mother tongue... which you imbibe with the milk of the mother, which becomes part of your blood and bones and marrow. But that is not enough -- that creates small groups of people and makes others strangers.
One international language is absolutely necessary as a basis for one world, for one humanity. So two languages should be absolutely necessary for everybody. That will come in the first dimension.
The second is the enquiry of scientific subjects, which is tremendously important because it is half of reality, the outside reality. And the third will be what is missing in present-day education, the art of living. People have taken it for granted that they know what love is. They don't know... and by the time they know, it is too late. Every child should be helped to transform his anger, hatred, jealousy, into love.
An important part of the third dimension should also be a sense of humor. Our so-called education makes people sad and serious. And if one third of your life is wasted in a university in being sad and serious, it becomes ingrained; you forget the language of laughter -- and the man who forgets the language of laughter has forgotten much of life.
So love, laughter, and an acquaintance with life and its wonders, its mysteries... these birds singing in the trees should not go unheard. The trees and the flowers and the stars should have a connection with your heart. The sunrise and the sunset will not be just outside things -- they should be something inner, too. A reverence for life should be the foundation of the third dimension.
People are so irreverent to life.
They still go on killing animals to eat -- they call it game; and if the animal eats them -- then they call it calamity. Strange... in a game both parties should be given equal opportunity. The animals are without weapons and you have machine guns or arrows.... You may not have thought about why arrows and machine guns were invented: so that you can kill the animal from a faraway distance; to come close is dangerous. What kind of game is this? And the poor animal, defenseless against your bullets....
It is not a question of killing the animals; it is a question of being irreverent to life, because all that you need can be provided either by synthetic foods, or by other scientific methods. All your needs can be fulfilled; no animal has to be killed. And a person who kills animals, deep down can kill human beings without any difficulty -- because what is the difference? And there are cannibals....
Just a few days ago in Palestine, the people demanded that the government allow them to eat human flesh, because there was not enough food -- so why waste a dead body? Whether it has died naturally or has been destroyed by the terrorists or has been in an accident, it is good food! And the surprising thing is that the government of Palestine has agreed -- they had to. Food is short, and people cannot be left hungry. Today they will be eating the naturally dead or the accidentally dead, or those killed by terrorists; but this is not going on forever. Soon they will start finding ways to kill people -- to steal children, because their flesh is thought to be the most delicious.
A great reverence for life should be taught, because life is God and there is no other God than life itself, and joy, laughter, a sense of humor -- in short a dancing spirit.
The fourth dimension should be of art and creativity: painting, music, craftsmanship, pottery, masonry -- anything that is creative. All areas of creativity should be allowed; the students can choose. There should be only a few things compulsory -- for example an international language should be compulsory; a certain capacity to earn your livelihood should be compulsory; a certain creative art should be compulsory. You can choose through the whole rainbow of creative arts, because unless a man learns how to create, he never becomes a part of existence, which is constantly creative. By being creative one becomes divine; creativity is the only prayer.
And the fifth dimension should be the art of dying. In this fifth dimension will be all the meditations, so that you can know there is no death, so that you can become aware of an eternal life inside you. This should be absolutely essential, because everybody has to die; nobody can avoid it. And under the big umbrella of meditation, you can be introduced to Zen, to Tao, to Yoga, to Hassidism, to all kinds and all possibilities that have existed, but which education has not taken any care of. In this fifth dimension, you should also be made aware of the martial arts like aikido, jujitsu, judo -- the art of self-defense without weapons -- and not only self-defense, but simultaneously a meditation too.
The new commune will have a full education, a whole education. All that is essential should be compulsory, and all that is nonessential should be optional. One can choose from the options, which will be many. And once the basics are fulfilled, then you have to learn something you enjoy; music, dance, painting -- you have to know something to go inwards, to know yourself. And all this can be done very easily without any difficulty.
I have been a professor myself and I resigned from the university with a note saying: This is not education, this is sheer stupidity; you are not teaching anything significant.
But this insignificant education prevails all over the world -- it makes no difference, in the Soviet Union or in America. Nobody has looked for a more whole, a total education. In this sense almost everybody is uneducated; even those who have great degrees are uneducated in the vaster areas of life. A few are more uneducated, a few are less -- but everybody is uneducated. But to find an educated man is impossible, because education as a whole does not exist anywhere.
-Osho, "The Golden Future, #23, Q1"
The child's soul has to be brought out
I am all for civilization, but this is not civilization. That's why I am against it. I would like a man really civilized, really cultured, but that culture can only grow it cannot be forced from the outside. It can come only from the within. It can spread towards the periphery, but it should rise, it HAS to rise, at the center.
This civilization is doing just the opposite: it forces things from the outside. There is a non-violent preaching all over the world -- Mahavir, Buddha, Jesus, they all teach non-violence. They teach non-violence because they have enjoyed non-violence. But followers? -- they have never enjoyed any moment of nonviolence. They know only violence. But they are followers, so they pretend to be non-violent, they force a non-violence upon themselves, they create a character. That character is just around them. It is an armour. Deep down they are boiling like volcanos ready to erupt. And on the surface they smile the false smile, the plastic smile.
This is not civilization. This is a very ugly phenomenon. Yes, I would like the non-violence to come from within, not to be cultivated from the outside, but helped. That is the root meaning of the word'education'. It is almost like drawing water from a well: education means to draw out; that is the root meaning of the word'education'. But what has education been doing? It never draws anything out -- it forces in. It goes on forcing things in the head of the child; it is not worried about the child at all, it does not think about the child. The child is just used as a mechanism into which more and more information has to be fed. This is not education!
The child's soul has to be brought out. That which is hidden in the child has to be brought out. The child has not to be patterned; his freedom should be left intact, and his consciousness has to be helped to grow. More information is not more education! More awareness is education, more love is education. And education creates civilization.
This civilization is false; its education is false. That's why I am against it. I am against it because it is not really a civilization.
- Osho, "The Tantra Vision, Vol 1, #4"
We will teach them to be open and vulnerable
If this earth is ever going to be really religious then we will not teach Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism: that is one of the greatest crimes committed. We will teach prayer, we will teach meditation, but not sects. We will not teach words and beliefs, we will teach a way of life, we will teach happiness, we will teach ecstasy. We will teach how to look at the trees, how to dance with the trees, how to be more sensitive, how to be more alive and how to enjoy the blessings that God has given...but not words, not beliefs, not philosophies, not theologies. No, we will not lead them to a church or to a temple or to a mosque, because these places are the sources of corruption. They have corrupted the mind. We will leave the children to nature; that is the temple, the real church.
We will teach children to look at the floating clouds, at the rising sun, at the moon at night. We will teach them how to love, and we will teach them not to create barriers against love, meditation, prayer; we will teach them to be open and vulnerable, we will not close their minds. And we will of course teach words but simultaneously we will teach silence, because once words get into the base, silence becomes difficult.
- Osho, "The Empty Boat, #9"
Let him feel that he has been loved
The job of the teacher is not just to teach little things - geography and history, and all kinds of nonsense. His basic function is to bring the students to a better consciousness, to a higher consciousness. This should be your love and your compassion, and this should be the only value on which you judge any action as right or wrong.
But never for a single moment let the person feel that he has been condemned. On the contrary, let him feel that he has been loved -- it is out of love that you have tried to correct him. [....]
Just don't be serious! Don't think that you are a teacher so you are in a very serious job. Look at life with more playful eyes... it is really hilarious! There is nothing to judge -- everybody is doing his best. If you feel disturbed by somebody, it is your problem, not his. First correct yourself.
I have my own way of looking at things.... I was a teacher for nine years, and I never judged a single student. I have never examined a single examination paper
- Osho, "The Invitation, #25"
Osho on Education
"This i call education: to make people more intelligent."
- Osho, "The Secret, #3"
“To educate means to draw out; whatsoever is hidden in the individual has to be drawn out. The individual has to flower — that is the original meaning of education.”
- Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, #6"
“Education is a trust in yourself and in existence, allowing whatsoever is hidden in you unfoldment; bringing whatsoever is in, out.”
- Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, #6"
“Education is religious if it makes you courageous enough to accept yourself, and live your life, and become an offering to God in your own way, in your own unique way.”
- Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, #6"
“The natural man needs no morality. Easy is right. To be natural, to be spontaneous is right...and transcendence comes on its own. The people who are split against themselves -- that biology is something to be transcended, that body is something to be fought, that mind is something to be dropped -- anybody who is entangled in all these conflicts will never transcend. One should go more easy. It is not a war field. Your life is an autonomous growth. The first need is of a total acceptance with no reluctance, no unwillingness, no subtle condemnation anywhere in your mind.”
- Osho, "The Golden Future, #33"
“To me, authentic religiousness means a childlike innocence, playfulness, and a wholehearted capacity for laughter. Then each moment becomes so precious that you will not sing the song of freedom, you will live it. You will not talk about truth, you will know it. You will not worship God, you will find him wherever life is -- all over existence.”
- Osho, "The Golden Future, #34"
“Education is termed as the propagation of knowledge. It certainly should be the propagator of knowledge -- but if education is propagating bondages, it cannot be a propagator of knowledge. Knowledge is where the mind is free. Where the mind is in bondage, how can there be knowledge? Knowledge itself is liberation. [....]
Education teaches fear. Education teaches greed. Education teaches jealousy and competition. Education initiates the fever of ambition. How can such education be the propagator of knowledge? How can such education be liberating? It is a propagator of deadly diseases. Friends, this is not the propagation of knowledge, but the propagation of ignorance.”
- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"
"Education should be free of the outside imposition of discipline; it should awaken the dormant intelligence of individuals. Such intelligence becomes self-discipline. In such a life there is neither suppression nor heaviness. Such a life is simple and natural like flowers. When life is progressing through the light of one's own intelligence, there is no possibility of chaos and licentiousness. Where there is no suppression, there is no possibility of an explosion of chaos and licentiousness."
- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"
"Education can definitely lay foundations which can make man free. We do not want a disciplined man any more, we want a man who is rooted in freedom and intelligence. In him there is hope and there is a future."
- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"
“My idea of education is very clear. All institutions should be free from politics, from religion. And religion should be allowed to have educational institutions, because they are destroying people’s minds. Educational systems should be free from any pressure — either from politics or from religion. They should have an autonomous, independent existence. They should decide themselves what has to be done so that every child who enters the world of education blossoms to his full potential. He is not to be molded, he is not to be ordered. He has to be awakened.”
- Osho, "From Death to Deathlessness, #28"
"My idea of education is that it should help you get rid of all beliefs, because all beliefs are hindrances in your journey towards truth. You should be freed from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. By the time you come out of the university you should be simply a human being, responsible to yourself and to the whole universe."
- Osho, "From Death to Deathlessness, #28"
“The new education, the true education, has not only to teach you mathematics, history, geography, science; it also has to teach you the real morality: aesthetics. I call aesthetics the real morality: sensitivity to feel the beautiful, because God comes as beauty. In a roseflower or in a lotus, in the sunrise or in the sunset, in the stars, the birds singing in the early morning, or the dewdrops, a bird on the wing…. True education has to bring you closer and closer to nature because only by coming closer and closer to nature will you be coming closer and closer to God."
- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2, #10"
“My love tells me only this, that all those who are born in the world after me should surpass me in every way; that they should build such a new world that we could not have even imagined; that their souls should be brighter and their thinking purer; that their eyes may encounter those truths which we could not, and their feet travel on unknown paths which were not known to us even in our dreams. Love can wish and pray for only this. I would not like to bind my children by my knowledge or by my experiences; I would like to make them free. Love always frees. Love that binds is not love, but violence. Education should be future-oriented, not past-oriented. Then only is development possible. Any creative process can only be future-oriented.“
- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"
“Religions teach fear – fear of hell, fear of sins and fear of punishment. Society teaches fear – fear of dishonor. Education teaches fear – fear of failure. Simutaneously there is greed attached greed for heaven, greed for fruits of virtue. and greed for respect, position, reputation, success and rewards, All greed is the other side of the coin of fear. In the present system the consciousness of a person becomes full of fear and greed. The fire of jealousy and competition is aroused. The fever of ambition is created. It is no wonder if, in all these circular motions, life is wasted.
- Osho, "Revolution in Education, #2"
“Our whole education is rotten. It certainly makes you clerks, stationmasters, postmen, police commissioners. It gives you a livelihood, but it does not give you life, and it does not give you love.”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #21"
“One-third of our education should be concerned with livelihood; one-third of our education should be concerned with our well-being — body, health, ways to stay younger and live longer. And one-third — the last and the most important — should be concerned with love, with death, and the secrets of life itself. Only then will we have a wholesome education. And through that education, we can create a man and a society which will be healthy, youthful, loving, soulful, overflowing with joy, always ready to share with anyone — because nobody is a stranger on the earth; the whole earth is one family.”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #21"
“Even a man who is well educated... but all education remains part of the mind; it does not make you more alert, more conscious, it simply fills you with information. It treats you like a computer, and it is now well known that computers also can go crazy."
- Osho, "The Rebel, #23"
"The society’s whole interest is in how to exploit you, how to enslave you, how to use you in a more efficient way, almost like a machine. It gives you all the education just for these hidden, secret aims. It prevents you from knowing anything about meditation.”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #23"
“This is what our education goes on teaching… our education is immensely destructive. In the name of education, it is mis-education. It needs to be completely changed and transformed. Things like ambition, success, comparison, have to be completely taken out of the human mind — and it is possible. Rather than teaching these ugly things, education should give people better ways of life, how to live more totally and more intensely; better ways of loving, better ways of beautifying existence — without any comparison with others — just for your sheer contentment.”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #25"
“Your education teaches you to imitate, your religions teach you to imitate. Nobody says to you: “Just be yourself — that’s where your paradise lies.” They go on saying to you, “Follow this, imitate that.” They give you ideals: “Become a Gautam Buddha, or a Jesus Christ.” But never, even by mistake, do they say to you, “Just be yourself; relax and enjoy your being, and bring your potential to its maximum unfoldment.””
- Osho, "The Rebel, #25"
“A sannyasin has to be both: the peace, the silence, the light, the qualities of his inner being, and a rebel against all injustice, against all inhumanity. But for a creative purpose, to materialize a dream of an authentic human society which will be able to give equal opportunity to all, freedom to all, education which is nonviolent, education which is not only informative but also transformative, an education that will make you more of an individual and bring the best in you to its flowering.”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #31"
“Education is not bringing peace and silence and blissfulness to people. There is something missing in it; it is only education in subjects which do not touch your interior being at all. They may make you doctors, engineers, professors, but they do not give you the insight that can create a Gautam Buddha in you. The true meaning of the word “education” is “to draw out.” But all that your so-called education does is to force in. From outside, borrowed knowledge is being forced into the minds of innocent children.
In my vision, education is nothing but another form of meditation. All that usually goes on in the name of education is secondary. The priority should be given to meditation — education of the inner. Unless you become acquainted with yourself, all your knowledge is useless.
So before education I would put meditation. Education is trivia: geography, history, arithmetic. It is good as far as the mundane world is concerned, but it is not good as far as your interiority is concerned. You go on accumulating degrees and inside you remain empty. Your degrees can befool people, may even befool yourself, but you cannot have the joy, the blissfulness, the peace, the silence, the compassion of a Gautam Buddha. And unless education has two wings, it cannot fly in the sky in total freedom. Right now it has only one wing; the other wing is missing. Why is it missing? Because the priests don’t want you to become meditators. [....]
To me, charity first means the education of the inner; and only secondarily, it means education of other things. “Know thyself” must be the most precious education, and then you can become acquainted with everything else. A man who knows himself will never misuse his education in the outer world. Otherwise, when you don’t know yourself, you are going to use your education to exploit people, to create poverty.“
- Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #1"
“Education is certainly needed; but before education, meditation is needed. Anybody who becomes a graduate — either an engineer or a doctor or a professor — should not be able to have his degree unless he also passes his examinations in meditation. Each university and each college should have classes for meditation for the students — and for people from outside also; they may not have been able in their youth to learn meditation, but now they can learn.”
- Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #1"
“We just have to create people who are evidence of right education. An education is complete when it is inner and outer both. And we have to create people who can change this whole exploitative structure with love and compassion in a democratic way. There is no need for any violence. The poor just have to be made aware: It is time for you to wake up; everything belongs to you.”
- Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #1"
“We have to find a human kind of education in the world; the education that exists is very inhuman. We have to find ways so that children can play in the sun and still learn a little arithmetic. That can be done — once we know that arithmetic is not so important as playing in the sun, once that thing has been decided, then we can find ways. A little arithmetic can be taught, and a little is needed. Everybody is not going to become an Albert Einstein. And those who are going to become Albert Einsteins, they won’t bother playing in the sun — their joy is arithmetic, that is their poetry. Then it is different, then it is totally different; then the growth is not hindered and guilt is not created.”
- Osho, "The Revolution, #6"
“Our whole education system is based on giving ready-made answers. Because of those ready-made answers you never develop your intelligence; there is no need. You ask the question and a computer teacher answers them.”
- Osho, "Satyam Shivam Sundram, #21"
“Education is a bridge between the potentiality and the actuality. Education is to help you to become that which you are only in a seed form. And this is what I am doing here; 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 here. Parmar has asked this question because the Indian government is not ready to accept my work as education. It is natural. They cannot accept it as education, because I don’t create clerks and stationmasters and deputy collectors. I am creating new human beings. For them that is dangerous. If this is education, then they cannot allow it to happen. It is rebellion. I am teaching you to be yourself. I am teaching you to be fearless; I am teaching you not to yield to the social pressure; I am teaching you not to be a conformist. I am teaching you not to hanker for comfort and convenience, because if you hanker for comfort and convenience, the society will give them to you, but at a cost. And the cost is great: you get convenience, but you lose your consciousness. You get comfort, but you lose your soul.
This I call education: to make people more intelligent. And that’s what I am doing here. If this fire spreads, then this old, rotten society cannot survive. It survives on your unconsciousness, it lives on your unconsciousness. So it is natural, Parmar, that the government will not recognize this place as a place of education. For them, it is one of the most dangerous places.
- Osho, "The Secret, #2"
“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.”
- Osho, "The Secret, #5"
“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.”
- Osho, "The Secret, #10"
“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.”
- Osho, "The Secret of Secrets, Vol 2, #1"
“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.”
- Osho, "Be Still and Know, #3"
“Give your children your love, but don’t give your ideologies. Don’t make them Catholics and communists; that is poisoning them. Don’t make them Hindus and Jainas and Buddhists; that is very destructive. Give your love, give your loving nourishment, and give them strength enough to inquire who they are, what this reality is all about. Give them every support so they can go on in life with an adventurous spirit. Then you are helping them; then you are really educating them. Ordinarily, whatsoever exists in the name of education is nothing but mis-education. Real education is helping the person to be himself. It is possible only if you love the person for his own sake, for no other motive. If there is a motive, your love is contaminated. Then you are not a real father or a real mother.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9, #7"
“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.”
- Osho, "Christianity: The Deadliest Poison and Zen: The Antidote to All Poisons, #5"
“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. [....]
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….
You can paint in two ways. You can paint to compete with other painters; you want to be the greatest painter in the world, you want to be a Picasso or a Van Gogh. Then your painting will be second-rate, because your mind is not interested in painting itself; it is interested in being the first, the greatest painter in the world. You are not going deep into the art of painting. You are not enjoying it, you are only using it as a stepping-stone. You are on an ego trip.
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #5"
“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. You have closed his doors and windows. Now he will live an encapsulated existence. He will live in his inner darkness, surrounded by all kinds of stupid theories, systems of thought, philosophies, ideologies. He will be lost in a jungle of words and he will not be able to come out of it easily.“
- Osho, "Ah, This!, #8"
“You will be surprised to know that your education is against intelligence. Society needs imitators. It wants you to be good in memorizing, not in becoming intelligent. It wants you to become good machines, not beautiful people; efficient machines, but machines all the same. It needs you to function well, but it does not want you to be more conscious. Then you would start saying no to many things; you will not be so obedient.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9, #5"
“If this goes on for as long as it does — in schools children are sitting for five or six hours — by and by they are dulled, their intelligence is lost. Every child is born intelligent and almost ninety-nine per cent of people die stupid. The whole education dulls the mind.”
- Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines, #7"
“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.”
- Osho, "And The Flowers Showered, #9"
“The education that exists in the world is not true education. True education will be a help towards enlightenment because it will make you more meditative, more silent, more aware, more inward-looking. The education that exists in the world makes you more ambitious, outward-looking, more egoistic, more superficial. It gives you all kinds of wrong values. It is a kind of poisoning. It does not help you, in any way, to be yourself. It is destructive. It helps you to be somebody else, and that’s its very destructive foundation. It is a poisoning, but so slow that you never become aware. It begins the day you are born and it goes on slowly slowly destroying you, distracting you from your nature.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10, #12"
“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.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3, #4"
“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.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3, #3"
“The society is very much afraid of your reality. The church is afraid, the state is afraid, everybody is afraid of your essential person, your essential being, because the essential being is rebellious, intelligent. It cannot be easily reduced to slavery. It cannot be exploited. Nobody can use your essential being as a means; your essential being is an end unto itself. Hence 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.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #13"
“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.“
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9, #10"
“The word ‘education’ is beautiful. It means “drawing something out”: drawing out that which is within you. In fact, we should not use it for the ordinary education. It is wrong to use a beautiful word like ‘education’ for this rotten system of schools, colleges and universities. It is not education in the literal sense even, because instead of drawing out what is within you it forces things from the outside upon you. It is an imposition. Real education is like drawing water from a well, not pouring something into the well. Real education is drawing out your being so that your inner luminosity starts filtering through your body, through your behavior.“
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10, #12"
“D.H. Lawrence was very much against your so-called education — it is not education, it is mis-education. Real education can only be based on love, not on knowledge. Real education cannot be utilitarian, real education cannot be of the marketplace. Not that real education will not give you knowledge; first, real education will prepare your heart, your love, and then whatever knowledge is needed to pass through life will be given to you, but that will be secondary. And it will never be overpowering; it will not be more valuable than love.
And whenever there is a possibility of any conflict between love and knowledge, real education will help you to be ready to drop your knowledge and move with your love; it will give you courage, it will give you adventure. It will give you space to live, accepting all risks, insecurities; it will help you to be ready to sacrifice yourself if love demands it. It will put love not only above knowledge but even above life, because life is meaningless without love. Love without life is still meaningful; even if your body dies it makes no difference to your love energy. It continues, it is eternal, it is not a time phenomenon.
To have a loving heart, you need a little less calculating head. To be capable of loving you need to be capable of wondering. That’s why, Nur, I always say that awe and childlike innocence are deeply related with the energy called love. In fact they are different names for the same thing.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 5, #6"
"The true education has to teach you the ways of the heart too. And the true education has also to teach you the transcendental. Mind is for science, heart for art, poetry, music, and the transcendental for religion. Unless an education serves all these things, it is not true. And no educational system has yet done it. It is not surprising that many young people are dropping out of your colleges, your universities - because they can see it is all crap, they can see it is all stupid.
No other institution can do it, only education can do it: universities should sow the seeds of revolution. They should sow the seeds of mutation - because a NEW man has to arrive on the earth. The first rays have already reached. The new man is arriving every day and we have to prepare the earth to receive him - and with the new man, a new humanity and a new world. And there is no other possibility except education to receive the new man, to prepare the ground for him. And if we cannot prepare the ground for him, we are doomed."
- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2, #10"
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.
- Osho, "Be Still and Know, #10"
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.
- Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #24"
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.
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #6"
Osho on Children
We go on forcing children to go to sleep when we think it is time. But sleep is not to be manipulated by time, sleep is something inner. When the child feels sleepy he will go to sleep, but mother and father go on forcing the child to go to sleep, as if sleep can be ordered. Children must think that you are foolish, they think that something has gone wrong in your mind. How can a child force sleep? He can pretend, so when you are there he can close the eyes and when you have gone he can open the eyes, because sleep cannot be forced. Nobody, not even you, can force sleep. If you don't feel sleepy how can you go to sleep? But this is how society destroys.
- Osho, "A Bird on the Wing, #6"
If there exists in the future any possibility of a real human society, the first thing, the basic thing that will have to be done is this: don't make children automatic. Even if it takes a little longer to make them efficient, make them efficient with awareness; don't make them machines. It will take longer, because two things have to be learned: the efficiency and awareness. A human society will give you awareness, even with less efficiency, but efficiency will come by and by. Then when you are alert you will be able to be efficient with alertness.
- Osho, "A Bird on the Wing, #11"
Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets -- one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity. By and by, we force wrong beliefs on them. By and by, we distract them. By and by, we make them more and more economical and political and ambitious.
- Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder, #4"
If you miss your youth, you will miss your old age also -- remember. So I am not saying become old while you are young. I am saying be whatsoever you are; let that moment be your totality. When a child, be a child; never enforce your wisdom on any child because that is a crippling thing. Don't try to make a child old before he is old, don't crush him. That's what has happened in the world: old people are dominating children, and they want to pull them out of their childhood faster than nature allows. They kill and they crush -- the child loses something forever. And when a child was not a child when he was a child, he will not be young when he is young. Something will always go on missing. He will always be late in life -- he will miss the train.
- Osho, "A Sudden Clash of Thunder, #6"
Children are careful watchers, observers of what is happening all around. Of course, their senses are very clear, unclouded. They see the truth immediately. You cannot cheat a child; he knows it immediately, intuitively. And he is so innocent that it is impossible for him to be formal. But he has to be formal to survive. And man's child is very helpless. It is because of man's child's helplessness that our whole civilization exists. We can manage, mold the child in every possible way, whatsoever way we want.
Children are not supposed to say things that they know. They know much more than they ever tell you. They pretend to be innocent because you don't want them to know more than is taught in the school, than is taught by the preacher, than is taught by you; and they certainly know more. They move in society, in life, with keen, alert senses. They are watching everything, whatsoever is happening all around. But they learn one thing sooner or later: that they have to be diplomatic -- with the grown-ups you can't be true, honest, sincere.
- Osho, "Ah, This!, #4"
In schools children are sitting for five or six hours -- by and by they are dulled, their intelligence is lost. Every child is born intelligent and almost ninety-nine per cent of people die stupid. The whole education dulls the mind -- and you can do it yourself also.
- Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines, #7"
The moment you are born, conditioning starts, from your very first breath; it cannot be avoided. The parents will condition you, the children you play with will condition you, the neighborhood will condition you, the school, the church, the state. And consciously not much conditioning is being done, but unconsciously the child goes on and on accumulating it. The child learns by imitating. So don't be worried. This is the normal situation in the world: everybody is conditioned. And everybody has to come out of the conditioning. It is difficult. It is not like undressing -- it is like peeling your skin. It is hard, it is arduous, because we have become identified with our conditioning.
- Osho, "Be Still and Know, #7"
That's why children look so beautiful: because they are yet full of hope, full of dreams, and they have not yet known frustration. Old people start looking very very dead. Hopes have leaked out, by and by, and only frustration -- a very bad taste on the tongue. Experience makes people bitter. Experience makes people lose their innocence, lose their hope, lose their trust. But it is not experience really -- because they wanted to make their dreams real, that's why. Otherwise you could remain as innocent to the very end of your life as in the beginning -- in fact, even more -- because the innocence that happens in childhood is just natural. It has not been tested against fire; it is very fragile. It has no crystallization in it. It is just a gift; it has not been earned. But when an old man is childlike, innocent, then nothing can destroy it. Then it has a solidity to it, then it is substantial; he has earned it.
- Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 1, #3"
Psychologists have come across a very significant fact: that if small children are left to themselves, they always choose the right thing to eat. You put everything around, you leave it on the dining table, don't force anything, and don't say what to eat and what not to eat. It has been a tremendous discovery that children eat only the right thing in the right time. If a child is suffering from something and a certain thing is needed which will be helpful for it, he will choose to eat it. By the time that suffering disappears he will stop eating that. We confuse them. We tell them to eat this and don't eat that. Then by and by, their natural instinct functions no more.
- Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 1, #4"
Children are trusting, but by and by there will be experiences in which they will be deceived, in which they will get into trouble, in which they will be opposed, in which they will become afraid. By and by they will learn all the tricks of the world. That's what has happened to everybody, more or less.
- Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 1, #8"
The children first have to be taught the physical joys. Help them to climb the trees, help them to run, help them to swim, help them to dance, help them to do physical yoga, hatha yoga, so they can have a feel of their bodies, so their bodies can be felt as alive phenomena -- not something dead around them, not something disconnected, not like a machine to be used -- so that they can have a respect for the body, love for the body, so their bodies can become sacred temples.
And then don't be in a hurry. The next step has to be taken very slowly. The movement from the body to the mind has to be very, very delicate, because you are moving from the gross to the subtle. And the movement cannot be very direct; it has to be very indirect. Slowly, slowly let the child know about music, poetry. Let the child know about great paintings, architecture. Let the child enjoy the exercise of his mind.
And then when the child is ready, when he has fulfilled his mind needs, help him to meditate. And nothing has to be done in haste. Let everything ripen, help everything to become mature. Just remember one thing: that the child should not get stuck anywhere. There are many who have become stuck at the body, the physical pleasure; then sex remains their center of life. There are many who have got stuck in the mind; then thinking, philosophizing, logic, and the joys of thinking and philosophizing and logic, remain for their whole lives. These people are half-grown people. Before the child gets stuck somewhere, push him to the further level, to the further plane. Help him to meditate
- Osho, "The Guest, #12"
When the child is surrounded by the mysterious all around, everything just a mystery with no answer, with no question, he is exactly at the point the sage ultimately reaches. Garimo, that's why childlikeness is compared again and again to meditation. Meditation would not have been needed if people had remained in their essential childlikeness.
- Osho, "Om Mani Padme Hum, #3"
Be respectful, be understanding
And I am not saying that the child has always to be allowed to disturb you. But out of a hundred times, ninety times you are unnecessarily disturbed. And if you don't disturb him those ninety times, the child will understand. When you understand the child, the child understands you -- children are very very responsive. When the child sees that he is never prevented, then once you say, "I am doing something please..." the child will know that it is not from a parent who is constantly looking to shout at him. It is from a parent who allows everything.
Children have a different vision. [....]
They have their vision, their understanding, their ways. Try to understand them. An understanding mind will always find a deep harmony arising between him and the child. It is the stupid, the unconscious, the non-understanding people, who go on remaining closed in their ideas and never look at the other's vision.... Children bring freshness into the world. Children are new editions of consciousness. Children are fresh entries of divinity into life. Be respectful, be understanding.
And if you are happy and alert, there is no need to be worried about how not to commit the same mistakes -- you will not commit. But then you have to be totally different from your parents. Consciousness will bring that difference.
- Osho, "Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind, #2"
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