Education must enable a person to discriminate between light and darkness. It must foster and promote the precious wealth of moral strength and spiritual victory, and purify the inner impulses of man. Mere mastery of books does not entitle a man to be known as ‘educated’. Without the mastery of the inner instruments of emotion, no man can be deemed to be educated. The latent has to be cleaned so that the patent can flourish. Experience is essential for the confirmation and consolidation of what is learned from books. We do not see any sign of this in the present educational system. There is no attempt to awaken the divine in man, no awareness of the possibility of rising to the psychic plane.

The ideal that is held before the student in our educational institutions is different. They are engaged in a mechanical process of turning out young men and women who detest work that soils the hand and disturbs the folds of their dresses. They instil the passion for profit in their hearts. They ignore the urge to sympathise and to serve. Education must result in wisdom and character as its products.

It can be acquired only by hard living, by spending days of toil with no respite for even sleep. But present-day education makes those who undergo it mere bonded slaves to their senses. They do not know how to avoid bondage. The educated revel in envy, greed, and egoism. What the country expects and demands from the educated person is, however, that he should set the example of honest labour, lighting the lamp of knowledge.

Courtesy Sai Institute of Education West Indies, St Michael, Barbados. Visit them at www.siewi.org [1] or https://www.sathyasai.org/about-us/education [2] or email siewibb@saibarbados.org [3].