Education is a central part of human society. We get educated for several decades early on in our life when we have the most energy. Enabling us to shape our future while preparing us to shape the world’s future. 

To do all this, education needs to remove the two things that impede us internally: misconceptions and impurities. Misconceptions prevent us from knowing what to do, and impurities prevent us from doing what we know we should do. Thus, education needs to remove ignorance and restore innocence. Innocence here refers essentially to purity, the state of the soul in its pristine state, the state where our natural virtues manifest for our and others’ well-being.

Unfortunately, today’s education does the opposite: it removes innocence and reinforces ignorance. While getting educated in universities, students often get exposed to a hyper-sensual culture that fills them with impurities. In conspicuously concupiscent campus cultures, even students who come from pious backgrounds get entangled and degraded.

Further, today’s education often indoctrinates students with materialism. Whereby they end up believing that they’re just blobs of protoplasm that somehow came to life, being sandwiched between two infinities of non-existence. Even those who don’t get indoctrinated into such fanatical materialism still end up becoming lulled and dulled into functional materialism. Wherein this world becomes their be-all and end-all. And the other world, if it is at all believed to exist, is relegated to irrelevance amid their ever-expanding to-do lists.

Significantly, the Bhagavad-gita (13.12) asserts that real knowledge is that which fosters spiritually conducive virtues. Thus acknowledging the centrality of life’s spiritual dimension, which helps students ultimately find their soul.

Even if mainstream education fails to fulfill our best interests, the Gita stands ready to fulfill it – its potent wisdom can remove ignorance and restore innocence.

 

Think it over:

  • What two things is education meant to remove?
  • How does today’s education remove innocence?
  • How does today’s education reinforce ignorance? 

 

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13.12  … Accepting the importance of self-realization; and philosophical search for the Absolute Truth – all these I declare to be knowledge, and besides this whatever there may be is ignorance.

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