According to Osho, education should not teach 'values' as fixed morals or belief in God; authentic education is value-free and aims to draw out each person’s innate potential. Its foundation is intelligent doubt, inquiry, and firsthand experience, not imposed creeds. By refusing to mold minds into patterns, education nurtures independence, clarity, and truthfulness—allowing genuine understanding and responsibility to arise from personal discovery rather than borrowed beliefs.
Education should help you think and discover for yourself, not tell you what to believe or which morals to follow.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, recently, in a radio address, president reagan urged parents to get involved in their children's education by insisting schools teach ethics, morality and values along with the three r's. He said, "to me, a value-free education is a contradiction in terms." addressing students, reagan said, "you are not only studying for yourself, but for your family, your community, your country, and your god." Osho, is this what education is all about? Would you kindly share with us your vision of education?
My idea of education is that it should help you get rid of all beliefs, because all beliefs are hindrances in your journey towards truth. You should be freed from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. By the time you come out of the university you should be simply a human being, responsible to yourself and to the whole universe. But Ronald Reagan would not like that, that you are responsible towards the whole universe, because the universe includes the Soviet Union too. The universe includes Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans. No, to him the fundamentalist Christians are the only people who know the truth; everybody else is wrong. So when he talks about values, hidden behind the beautiful word "values" he wants every educational system to teach you the values that fundamentalist Christians think are right. Certainly I don't think Ronald Reagan will teach vegetarianism. In his values, vegetarianism cannot be included. I…
Osho, are you in favor of negative education? By negative education we mean that one should keep analyzing oneself so that one can understand both poles.
When we hand over ready-made conclusions, we deprive him of the opportunity to think. We kill him. One to whom freedom is dear will teach coming generations negation, atheism, doubt. And I hold that if doubt is brought to completion, from doubt itself one arrives at the place where faith is born. If there is truth in life, I will certainly be able to deny the false—how could I deny the true? And when all that is false has been denied, truth remains—the truth that is. It remains when the false has been cut away—the remaining. That which I cannot deny, which I try in every way to deny and find it cannot be denied—when all denials fall and such a truth appears that there is no way but to accept it, which stands self-evidently accepted because all denials collide with it and return—no denial can cut it. By denial,…
The aim of an authentic education must be to teach this art, to teach the art of becoming one with God. The goal of education must be life itself, not merely providing instruction in how to earn a livelihood. In itself this means nothing. It is often mistaken as the aim of education, but this is tantamount to saying that man does not eat to live but lives to eat. Yet, considering the status of modern eduction this kind of conclusion is unavoidable. Is this the only failing of the present form of education? If I were to say so, it would be the same as saying that everything is just fine in the body of a dead man except that life is absent. Today's system of education is just such a body. It is totally without life.
Do we not want to break this vicious circle? Will this teaching of discipline stop only after the nuclear war? But after the nuclear war there will be no such necessity because there will neither exist the discipline-giver nor the disciplined. For the future of humanity there is more danger from the disciplined people than anybody else, because they know only how to obey commands. Those obedient people are ready even to use nuclear weapons. This world would have been totally different had intelligence been taught instead of discipline, had thinking been taught instead of obedience. Education is not meant for teaching discipline, but for developing one's own intelligence. Whatever discipline results from intelligence, that alone can bring goodness and benediction, because such discipline cannot be exploited. It cannot be made an instrument for violence and war in the hands of priests and politicians.
Osho, what is your idea of true eduction?
Education has to serve revolution. But ordinarily it serves the government and the priest and the church. In a very subtle way, it prepares slaves -- slaves for the state, slaves for the church. The real purpose of education should be to subvert outmoded attitudes, beliefs and assumptions which no more serve growth and man, and are positively harmful and suicidal. An interviewer once asked Ernest Hemingway, "Isn't there any one essential ingredient you can identify which makes a great writer?" Hemingway replied, "Yes, there is. In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in shockproof, crap detector." And that's what my idea of true education is. The children should be trained, disciplined, so that they can detect crap. A really intelligent person is a crap detector. He immediately knows, the moment he says something, whether it is significant or just holy cowdung. The evolution of…