Flashes from Swami Vivekananda - 4

Philosophy of Education - 2

The Cask of Glass

The Light Divine within is obscured in most people. It is like a lamp in a cask of iron: no gleam of light can shine through. Gradually, by purity and unselfishness, we can make the obscuring medium less and less dense, until at last it becomes as transparent as glass. Sri Ramakrishna was like the iron cask transformed into a glass cask, through which can be seen the inner light as it is.

You cannot teach a child any more than you can grow a plant. The plant develops its own nature. The child also teaches itself. But, you can help it to go forward in its own way. What you can do is not of a negative nature but positive.

You can take away obstacles, and knowledge comes out of its own nature. Loosen the soil a little, so that is may come out easily. Put a hedge round it, see that it is not killed by anything. You can supply the growing seed with the material for the making of his body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air that it wants. And there your work stops. It will take all that it wants by its own nature.

It so is with the education of the child. A child educates itself. The teacher spoils everything by thinking that he is teaching. Within man is all the knowledge, and it requires only an awakening, and that much is the work of the teacher. We have to do so much for the boys that they may learn to apply their own intellect to the proper use of thier hands, legs, ears and eyes.

Free Growth

The system which aims at educating our boys in the same manner as that of a man who battered his donkey, being advised that it could thereby be turned into horse, should be abolished. Owing to undue domination exercised by parents, our boys do not get free scope for growth. In every one there are infinite tendencies which require proper scope for satisfaction. Violent attempts at reform always end by retarding reform. If you do not allow one to become a lion, one will become a fox.

Positive Ideas

We should give positive ideas. Negative thoughts only weaken men. Do you not find that where parents are constantly taxing their sons to reread and write, telling them that they will never learn anything, and call them fools and so forth, the latter do actually turn out to be so in many cases?

If you speak kind words to them and encourage them, they are bound to improve in time. If you can give them positive ideas, they will grow up to be the best men and women. In language and literature, in poetry and arts, in everything we must not point out the mistakes, but how can they do it better. The teaching must be modified according to the needs of the taught.

Past lives have molded our tendencies. Take every one where he stands and push him forward. We have seen how Sri Ramakrishna would encourage even those whom we considered worthless and change the very course of their lives thereby! He never destroyed a single man's special inclinations. He gave words of hope and encouragement even to the most degraded of the persons and lifted them up.