Education

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT WOULD BE THE FORM OF EDUCATION IN THE NEW COMMUNE? Maneesha, the education that has prevailed in the past is very insufficient, incomplete, superficial. It only creates people who can earn their livelihood but it does not give any insight into living itself. It is not only incomplete, it is harmful too -- because it is based on competition. Any type of competition is violent deep down, and creates people who are unloving. Their whole effort is to be the achievers -- of name, of fame, of all kinds of ambitions. Obviously they have to struggle and be in conflict for them. That destroys their joys and that destroys their friendliness. It seems everybody is fighting against the whole world.

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…

Do you feel, Osho, that present institutions or universities can fulfill the aim of our education in love, nonviolence, and beauty?

Difficult. As things stand today—whether in universities or in schools—without changing the entire structure, it is difficult. Because that whole structure itself is part of the same game of cunning, hatred, ambition, violence, lust for position, inferiority, superiority. Our university is not something separate from our society. It is a small replica of our society. That is, the university is a factory that keeps reproducing society’s old structure in new children—nothing else. It is not truly a university; it is a factory whose job is to transplant the old social framework into fresh minds. There too the teacher is running in the same race in which the politicians are running. There too the vice-chancellor is afflicted by the same inferiority from which politicians and ministers suffer. The same race continues there. And it is these very people, caught in all this racing and madness, who are initiating the new children…

Do you suggest, Osho, any education that can so stimulate people's minds that they can give love or live in a state of love?

Certainly—absolutely! The way we have educated and “cultured” the person up to now, the kind of civilization we have taught—the whole of it, all civilization, all culture, all education—only makes him clever, makes him cunning. Cunning in the sense that the educated man learns how to turn other people into means. And the one we call educated is the one who can make the maximum number of people into means! The one who cannot make anyone into a means is labeled uneducated, rustic, illiterate. In this world, the more people a man can use as means, the greater he becomes—successful, a bigger politician, occupying higher posts—because he has turned more people into his instruments; he rides on them, on their chests, on their heads. All our education so far is education in cleverness, and all of it is education in ambition. Keep this in mind: a man filled with ambition…