True education liberates

From ignorance, darkness, despair. But in this commercial world of education, as everything else, is geared towards preparing students as money making machines. It is further poisoned by instilling ambition, competition and comparison in their formative years. The need to succeed in exams puts so much stress on children that they are committing suicide around that time.

Recently, parliamentarians cutting across party lines expressed serious concern over education and examination system in the country. They demanded a re-look at exam policies. Asserting that there should be a change in the system.

Their concern is valid because the number of Indian children committing suicide is the highest in the world! Osho has talked about the faulty education system and has suggested some radical changes to nurture a healthy foundation of humanity. The first and foremost is: examinations should be abolished as they have proved to be killers, and are no criterion to assess anyone's intelligence. How can you judge somebody in three hours?

Another drawback is that exams emphasise students' memory, not their intelligence. Now, as the computer is doing the job of storing memory, human beings need not burden the brain with unnecessary information. The energy locked in memory can be freed and used for growing higher intelligence.

Examninations have made education goal-oriented, which is certainly not the true motive of education. What you are learning now is not important, what is important is the day of the judgment that will come a year or two years later.

It makes the future important -- more important than the present. It sacrifices the present for the future. And that becomes your very life-style; you are always sacrificing the moment for something which is not present. It creates a tremendous emptiness in life.

There should not be any kind of examination as part of the learning process, but every day, every hour observation by the teachers; their remarks throughout the year will decide whether you move further or you remain a little longer in the same class. But the most important thing is, nobody fails, nobody passes. It is just that some people are fast learners and some are slow learners. The idea of failure creates a deep wound of inferiority, and the idea of being successful also creates a complex, that you have to be successful all the time.

And the last but not the least, examination breeds competition. Any type of competition is violent, and creates unloving, unsympathetic people. Their whole effort is to be achievers -- of name, of fame, money. That makes the inimical to each other. How can such education liberate?