Sunday, July 09, 2006

repeating undigested stray bits of European brainwork

The education that you are getting now is not a man-making education, it is merely and entirely a negative education. A negative education, or any training that is based on negation is worse than death. The child is taken to school, and the first thing he learns is that his father is a fool, the second thing that his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all his teachers are hypocrites, the fourth that all the sacred books are lies. By the time he is sixteen, he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless. And the result is that fifty years of such education have not produced one original man in the three Presidencies. Every man of originality that has been produced has been educated elsewhere, and not in this country, or they have gone to the old universities once more to cleanse themselves of superstitions. Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library.... If education is identical with information, the libraries are the greatest sages in the world, and encyclopaedias are the Rishis. (III. 301 - 2)

The present system of education is all wrong. The mind is crammed with facts before it knows how to think. (VIII. 280).

Sitting down these hundreds of years with an ever increasing load of crystallized superstition on your heads, .... what are you? And what are you doing now? ... promenading the sea-shores with books in your hands - repeating undigested stray bits of European brainwork, and the whole soul bent upon getting a thirty-rupee clerkship, or at best becoming a lawyer - the height of young India's ambition... Is there not water enough in the sea to drown you, books, gowns, university diplomas, and all? (V. 10)

If you are to live at all, you must adjust yourself to the times. If we are to live at all, we must be a scientific nation. (VI. 113)

A lot more gems like this in - Proletariat! Win Equal Rights!

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