What kind of education should be given to girls?

Osho, in a statement a few days ago you said that girls should not be given the same education as boys, because if that happens girls also become like boys. The question is: then what kind of education should be given? What arrangements should be made? And who will determine that?

Good. What I said—that girls should not be given the same education as boys—does not mean that girls can be taught some different kind of chemistry or some different kind of mathematics. What I meant is that the entire bodily education of girls should be different from that of boys. The whole arrangement of girls’ clothing should be entirely different from boys’. In a girl’s life, what she has to take care of, where she has to expand life, the home she has to look after—there should be complete education for that. There should be education for becoming a mother, for becoming a wife, all of it. Because we leave precisely the important parts of life uneducated. A girl is never taught how to become a mother, how to become a wife. She just becomes a mother-wife. And then there is upheaval. What I meant was only this: either we…

And remember, by the age of four a child learns fifty percent of what he will learn in a lifetime. The remaining fifty percent he learns in the rest of life. By age four, he has become knowledgeable about half of the matters of life. The remaining half is learned thereafter. If he lives to eighty-four, what he learned in four years, he will learn as much more in the remaining eighty. And the first four years he must live watching mother and father. Their conflicts, their struggles, their hatred, their jealousy, their contempt, their tense faces, their sadness, their tears—all are absorbed by the child. He drinks it all. Later he repeats those very things. One may say he has become a built-in computer of his parents. Whatever they did until his fourth year has been installed; now he will repeat it.

In my view, all the education of man is education of means. Woman’s entire education should be of ends, not of means — so that she can complete man’s incompleteness, so that she can be a complement to man, so that she can fill the lack in man’s life. Man will erect factories — who will plant gardens? Man will raise great houses — but who will make songs resound within those houses? Man will create a world of machines — but amid those machines who will make space for flowers? And the education we are giving to women as well is education to make machines, to build houses, to lay roads. How to grow the flowers of life — there is no education of that with them. And why are we doing this?

A house can become a home, a building can become a dwelling, if at its center there is a woman. But if woman becomes like man, the house remains merely a house; a home cannot be created. Two people live together, but they are not husband and wife. Children are born, but the relationship is between nurse and children; there is no relationship between mother and son, or mother and daughter—because that which could become mother, that feminine being—we have done nothing for her growth. What are our schools and colleges teaching? What are they giving to women? The same degrees that are given to men. They put them through the same examinations men pass through. They drill them in the same exercises, the same games that men play.

Osho, you have called training a child’s intellect essential. But should training in meditation also be given simultaneously? Many sannyasins have families. What outlook should they have toward their children? Where should the emphasis be? Please shed light on this.

Jesus tells a very sweet parable—understand it. Jesus used to say, and because his whole emphasis was on love, the story is indicative. He said: A father had two sons. The father was very rich. One son was obedient; the other was rebellious. One increased the wealth; the other broke and wasted it. At last there was no way but to separate them. The father divided the wealth in halves. The elder stayed with the father, invested, bought fields, made orchards. The younger disappeared from the village as soon as he got his share. Soon news began to come that he had squandered everything in gambling, drank it away, lost it in the dances and songs of prostitutes—everything turned to dust. The father sent word: come back home. The younger, who had left, a gambler and drunkard, could not believe that after wasting everything his father could still call him…