About education

Trying to make our children too smart, we make them too dead instead. Exponential growth in the volume of information leads to a natural, but incorrect desire to transfer it to the younger generation at the earliest possible stage of its personal development. The amount of knowledge – or what we are still willing to consider as such – is constantly growing, and the amount of available time remains strictly fixed. Hence comes the inevitable desire to start teaching our children at the earliest possible age. But children have their own natural logic of learning.

At the age when they should be the embodiment of movement, joy, dexterity, and grace – we lock them down around four walls and create a thousand and one “prohibited to do” rule (to run, to make noise, to play, to behave like a child). Having no childhood of our own, we form a prison for their childhood as well, and then, methodically and meticulously, lesson by lesson, year by year, we begin imprinting in their minds what seems unimaginably valuable to us – information that they will safely forget a few years later, or even earlier – simply because it will be unused by them. But what have we put into their souls?

Our entire modern educational system is so focused on the development of consciousness and mind that it has completely forgotten the real goal of these little beings coming to our world – the development of their souls and self-realization of their personality. We’ve become stuffed with junk information and completely spiritually dead. And at the same time, we still want to raise our children according to our own image and likeness! But each of these children’s souls has her own path and tasks in this world. But we don’t even want to help them remember.

How infinitely more for the development of the child’s soul would give a walk in the park with singing birds instead of cramming of information about the species of birds from thick and correct textbooks. How much more alive and closer would stars look through a telescope instead of silly educational astronomical pictures, how much more majestic and wondrous would space seem. How much more important it would be in the lessons of labor to make something really necessary for those around us instead of making faceless blanks. How much healthier and more joyful our children would be if the lessons were more often held in the open air instead of the prison of four walls. They would have loved school!

The teacher’s profession should, like the unquestionable authority of the Eastern masters, be one of the most revered in society, but the requirements for it must be one of the highest because it’s about working with the most valuable material – a human soul. Education in its true sense is, first and foremost, the education of a whole and valuable for the universe person, helping to reveal her inherent talents and noble qualities. Such individuals will, later on, find all the information they need on their own and bring new that others need through creativity and science. Such individuals – integral, with a solid inner moral core – will become the true engines of progress, not the modern creators of the illusion of its existence.

A society of noble and worthy people who have forgotten about the very concept of “crime” is a society of noble children who once grew into adults. The way we want to see the future of our world is the way we should see our children. And this path to infinity – or darkness – begins with our families and schools.