The ignorant man is not the unlearned, but he who does not know himself, and the learned man is stupid when he relies on books, on knowledge and on authority to give him understanding. Understanding comes only through self – knowledge, which is awareness of one’s total psychological process. Thus education , in the true sense, is the understanding of oneself, for it is within each one of us that the whole of existence is gathered.
What we now call education is a matter of accumulating information and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. Such education offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and like all escapes , it inevitability creates increasing misery. Conflict amd confusion result from our own wrong relationship with people, things and ideas, and until we understand that relationship and alter it, mere learning , the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction.
As society now organized, we send our children to school to learn some technique by which they can eventually earn a livelihood. We want to make the child first economic position. But does the cultivation of a technique enable us to understand ourselves?
While it is obviously necessary to know how to read and write, and to learn engineering or some other profession, will technique give us the capacity to understand life ? Surely technique is secondary ; and if technique is the only thing we striving for we are obviously denying what is by far the greater part of life.
Life is pain, joy, beauty, ugliness, love, and when we understand it as a whole , at every level, that understanding creates its own technique. But the contrary is not true : technique can never bring about creative understanding.
Understands continues...
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