Let Education Shape a Global Mind

What is education in its broadest sense and what is its fullest scope for students in this volatile world? One cannot deny that the basic function of education is to impart the bulk of knowledge to learners and equip them with the skills which are vital for their survival in the contemporary competitive world. Without such educated professionals the ever-widening needs of society and the commercial world cannot be fulfilled. However, this cannot be the only or ultimate purpose of education. A holistic education, especially at school level, must strive to create a new mind which refuses to function in the narrow grooves of racial, nationalistic, linguistic, and sectarian sentiments. Can our education help students cultivate a mind that has a global perspective and is therefore not constrained by the stifling confines of caste, colour and creed considerations? If educational institutions fail to accomplish such a task, then they are merely training and instructing their students rather than educating them in the broader sense of the term.

Some of us with a narrow perspective on education may question the desirability of expanding the frontiers of education to such a lofty and sublime extent. Let us not forget that in the last century mankind went through the trauma of two world wars followed by a long spell of cold war during which we saw the ugliest faces of international diplomacy and murky politics. Equally traumatic and tragic were the regimes of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, proxy war and more recently militancy and terrorism. Where does all this ghastly disorder in the world emanate from? Certainly it is not the uneducated and illiterate simpletons among us who create this chaos in the world. All this mischief is the handiwork of the so-called educated and civilized humans—whether they are statesmen, bureaucrats or scientists. Apparently, man has been able to amass an enormous amount of knowledge about just anything and everything under the sun. Yet, as it turns out, the greater the amount of our knowledge about external things the deeper is our ignorance about our own ‘self’.

Unfortunately and ironically, our quest of external knowledge lends us a convenient escape from the painful task of knowing ourselves as we are. A great 20^th century educational thinker, the late J. Krishnamurti, rightly said, “Education is not merely gathering information from books; true education is learning about oneself by oneself.” It is this self-knowledge through self-awareness that can bring about a radical change in the thought and behaviour of a student. An educated person with such a self-illumined mind knows how to act (rather than react) in the most trying and challenging situations of everyday life. If our education cannot concern itself with fostering among students a profound sense of self-enquiry that leads to one’s total transformation, then it is futile to dream of a world as ‘a better place to live in’.

It is heartening to note that there is an increasing awareness of the need to make school education more comprehensive and holistic by integrating human values and practical life skills into the curriculum. Human values, based on the fundamental principles of humanism, inherently have a secular approach and they alone can create a truly disciplined member of society as well as a law-abiding citizen of a country, who possesses a global outlook at the same time. Even if there is no formal provision for such a holistic curriculum in a given school, teachers with his/her own initiative and an innovative approach can find ways to inspire students to enquire into the deeper significance of life and gain a wider perspective on the whole panorama of human existence on this planet.