EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE

barney · February 14, 2004

EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE

SHANTI PAATH OF THE UPANISADS

The `Peace chant ' reads:

Om, Sahanavavatu; sah nau bhunaktu;

saha viryam karavavahai;

Tejaswinavadhitamastu; ma vidvisavahai.

Om shantih, shantih, shantih.

`Om. May Brahman (the one divine Self in all) protect us both (student and teacher); may Brahman nourish us both; may we both acquire energy (by this education); may we not hate each other. Om. Peace, Peace, Peace.'

This peace invocation contains many beautiful sentiments which have inspired Indian education - secular and religious- for a few thousand years.

TEACHER AND STUDENT ENGAGED IN THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE AND EXCELLENCE OF CHARACTER IS EDUCATION.

The invocation expresses the idea of education as the achievement of knowledge and excellence of character in the context of a harmonious relationship between teacher and student. The giving and receiving of knowledge, leading to the making of man, depends on the stimulus of such teacher-student relationship. The teacher gives and the student receives, not only ideas and information, but inspiration as well. In all the true education, teacher and student are not mere individuals, but personalities. Education, according to the Indian sages, is the lighting of one lamp from another lamp.

`MAY WE ACQUIRE ENERGY' says the verse. Every step in education helps man to reach out to newer and newer energy resources within him. All energy is within man, says Vedanta. But they lie in deeper and deeper layers. 'Atmana vindate viryam'- `By the knowledge of the Atman, man gets infinite energy,' says the Kena Upanisad. Education helps man to secure access to the greater and greater energy resources within him. An uneducated rustic youth, timid and helpless, changes, through a few years in school, into a youth with a measure of fearlessness and self-confidence. His education continued further, helps that youth to develop a sense of his own individual identity.

It is this RISING TO THE STATUS OF THE INDIVIDUALITY FROM THE STATE OF THE PRE-INDIVIDUAL MASS MAN that gives man the capacity to take independent decisions, the courage to stand by them and take the consequences, and the ability to deal with the world, and his position in it, as a mature human being. THIS PSYCHIC MATURITY IS ONE OF THE IMPORTANT CRITERIA OF EDUCATION; and it comes only from an education THAT TRAINS THE MIND AND NOT MERELY STUFFS THE BRAIN.

The mental immaturity of a large number of people world-wide is a big problem. It is here that the failure of many education systems is writ large. It does not impart that psychological maturity to many.Swami Vivekananda referred to all such as MOUSTACHED BABIES! They are physically very mature, but mentally they are like babies- dependent, weak, demanding, and bereft of the sense of personal dignity and responsibility. . They have not developed that human energy resource that can identify human problems and rise above them themselves and take their society also with them.

Behind these immature traits in all such people lies the lack of that luminosity or enlightenment which the Upanisads present as the second fruit of true education as mentioned in the peace chant.: TEJASVINAU ADHITAM ASTU- `may we be enlightened by this study, by this education'.

This is the significance of knowledge being compared to light. The logo or the emblem of our society depicts books plus JNANA-DIPA, the light of knowledge. The Upanisads describe the Atman, the Self, as JNANA-SVARUPA or CHIT-SVARUP, of the very nature of knowledge, of the very nature of consciousness. All awakening to knowledge, to consciousness, is, therefore, the manifestation of the Atman, in varying degrees.

This spiritual growth into personality is what twentieth-century biology calls the psycho-social evolution of man. It is man rising above organic evolution, to the spiritual and cultural levels.

This is what Swami Vivekananda calls MAN-MAKING EDUCATION