~~ EDUCATION AND EGO ~~

“When a child enters the school he is far more intelligent than when he comes back from the university. Those twenty years will destroy much that was immensely valuable. The real diamonds will be lost and he will carry just words, jargon, theories, knowledge. He will have sold his intelligence and he will have brought home just dead knowledge, dead weight, dead wood, and he will live with that knowledge his whole life. Still, we don’t have an educational system which helps people to become intelligent.

That’s why all over the world in all the universities there is great ferment, great rebellion. It is a good sign: it simply indicates that the young people of the world are becoming more and more alert that what is called education is not education but a kind of conditioning, a hypnosis. The older generation tries to mold the mind of the new generation. The teacher is just an agent of the older generation. The teacher is respected by the older generation because he is the agent: he corrupts the minds of the new, but the corruption is done with such skill that you will not become aware unless you are really alert, watchful.”

“As a person grows old, he finds himself getting out of touch with the new generation that is growing. The fault is not of the new generation, the fault is of the old man who has nothing but memory, and memory belongs to the past and the past is no longer there. The new generation is more responsive to the present – that creates the gap. The old generation always wants old answers, old scriptures, old saints; the older they are the more true.”

“The old generation has not to teach what it has learnt; the old generation has to help the child to be more intelligent so that he can be capable of spontaneously responding to the new realities which will be coming. The old generation cannot even dream about them, what those realities will be.”