Learn from your mistakes

[Guest guest]

Education should be a means of encouraging, not forcing the development of wisdom. It should not protect children from the consequences of their mistakes, says Swami Kriyananda

 

Asuccessful businessman was once asked the secret of his success. He replied, "I allowed those under me to make mistakes, and to learn by them." How many businessmen, by contrast, will even dismiss a subordinate for merely making a mistake. Ruthless leaders are notoriously intolerant of error in those serving under them. The consequence is that those people, fearful of stumbling, become stiffly unnatural in everything they do and lose altogether any tendency they may have had to be creative. Why should we be honest, and not dishonest? Truthful, and not untruthful? Self-controlled, and not self-abandoned? Concentrated in our thinking, and not scattered? Kind and not callous? Cooperative, and not over-competitive? Why? Not because anyone holds out these expectations of us, but simply because the positive side of each of these equations gives us, in the end, what we really want from life. It isn't scripture, or the government, or society, or anyone's personal convenience that dictates our need to live rightly. Natural law itself — the law of our own being — is so set up that only by harmonizing ourselves with it can we, in the long run, find our real needs served —even, if you like, our selfish needs. But refusal to harmonize ourselves with that law invariably proves disappointing to us in the end. That, of course, is what makes wrong action wrong in the first place: It is culpable, not before God, not before the law, not before our fellow human beings, but before the inner court of our own selfawareness. Education should be a means of encouraging, not of forcing the development of wisdom. It should work with nature in its inherent system of punishment and reward, and not protect children from the consequences of all their mistakes. At the same time, it should try to ease them into the discovery of these consequences in such a way that they don't lose heart, but come to realize that such, simply, are life's realities.