Education

The pedagogues: Modern education and its faults, and Osho’s vision of a new education

Existing education is based on memory, hence it produces only learned computers.

Education should be based on intelligence, which is totally different from memorizing. Memory can deal only with the answers fed into it. Intelligence deals with new situations and has to respond spontaneously – it can’t rely on readymade answers. Hence no computer can have intelligence. And the brain as such is only a computer produced by biological evolution.

Intelligence needs a totally different kind of atmosphere to grow. It depends more on meditation than on mind. Meditation clarifies the vision, allowing you to see directly. And it gives a quality of responding moment to moment, not depending on the past. Intelligence functions in the present, in tune with the moment. So it is essential that meditation become part of education.

Up to the age of twenty-one, education should be a preparation for livelihood and for living a life with joy, love, and fearlessness. In short, it should create an individual. At present, education only creates a personality, which is a completely different thing. My insistence is on individuality.

After the age of forty-two, the second layer of education should start. The first was the art of living, the second is the art of dying. Here the focus would be on going beyond individuality into the state of nobody-ness.

The first stage is for sharpening the intelligence, the second is for dissolving oneself into the whole – learning how to pass through death with a dance. The present education system all over the world is missing the highest peak of life. It has nothing to say about death. And unless one knows how to die blissfully, one cannot live blissfully either. Because a life surrounded by the fear of death cannot be a life of joy and rejoicing.

All cultures and civilizations have prevented the second part of education because they don’t want anyone to go beyond fear. One who is beyond fear naturally becomes a rebellious spirit. He cannot be exploited, oppressed, enslaved. So all cultures and civilizations have been detrimental to the ultimate flowering of man.