Osho Quotes on Education

1. My vision of a right education is to teach people how to grow the ego and how to be able to drop it; how to become great minds and yet be ready any moment to put the mind aside. You should be able to just put your personality, your ego, your mind, on and off, because these are good things if you can use them. But you should know the mechanism, how to put them off. Right now you know only how to put them on.

2. Give your children your love, but don’t give your ideologies. Don’t make them Catholics and communists; that is poisoning them. Don’t make them Hindus and Jainas and Buddhists; that is very destructive. Give your love, give your loving nourishment, and give them strength enough to inquire who they are, what this reality is all about. Give them every support so they can go on in life with an adventurous spirit. Then you are helping them; then you are really educating them. Ordinarily, whatsoever exists in the name of education is nothing but mis-education. Real education is helping the person to be himself. It is possible only if you love the person for his own sake, for no other motive. If there is a motive, your love is contaminated. Then you are not a real father or a real mother.

3. Education means drawing your inner being into expression in your living, your day-to-day life. Your honesty, your love, your compassion, should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures, not from rabbis and bishops and shankaracharyas and Ayatollah Khomeini.

4. A real education will not teach you to be the first. It will tell you to enjoy whatsoever you are doing, not for the result but for the act itself. Just like a painter or a dancer or a musician….

5. A real education will not teach you to compete; it will teach you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without any comparison with the other. It will not teach you that you can be happy only when you are the first. That is sheer nonsense. You can’t be happy just by being first. And in trying to be first you go through such misery that you become habituated to misery by the time you become the first.

6. In fact, the moment a child is perfectly conditioned by you, you are very happy; you call it “religious education.” You are very happy that the child has been initiated into the religion of his parents. All that you have done is you have destroyed his capacity to know on his own. You have destroyed his authenticity. You have destroyed his very precious innocence.

7. You will be surprised to know that your education is against intelligence. Society needs imitators. It wants you to be good in memorizing, not in becoming intelligent. It wants you to become good machines, not beautiful people; efficient machines, but machines all the same. It needs you to function well, but it does not want you to be more conscious. Then you would start saying no to many things; you will not be so obedient.

8. If this goes on for as long as it does — in schools children are sitting for five or six hours — by and by they are dulled, their intelligence is lost. Every child is born intelligent and almost ninety-nine per cent of people die stupid. The whole education dulls the mind.

9. There is nothing like education. All your education simply makes you capable of worrying about situations everywhere in the world, about everyone except you — about all the troubles that are in the world. They have always been there, they will always be there. It is not because you are here that troubles are there. You were not and they were there; you will not be soon and they will remain there. They change their colors but they remain. The very scheme of the universe is such that it seems that through trouble and misery something IS growing. It seems to be a step, it seems to be a necessary schooling, a discipline.

10. The education that exists in the world is not true education. True education will be a help towards enlightenment because it will make you more meditative, more silent, more aware, more inward-looking. The education that exists in the world makes you more ambitious, outward-looking, more egoistic, more superficial. It gives you all kinds of wrong values. It is a kind of poisoning. It does not help you, in any way, to be yourself. It is destructive. It helps you to be somebody else, and that’s its very destructive foundation. It is a poisoning, but so slow that you never become aware. It begins the day you are born and it goes on slowly slowly destroying you, distracting you from your nature.

11. In the coming century the whole education system is going to be totally transformed and changed because of the computer. It will be stupid to teach children history, geography — unnecessary, there is no need. All that can be done by a computer; the child can carry the computer. And my own observation is: the less you depend on memory, the more intelligent you become. That’s why it happens that in the universities you will not find very intelligent people. Professors, chancellors, vice-chancellors — I have seen many, but it is very difficult to find some intelligent person there. You can find more intelligent people in the farmers, in the gardeners, in the villagers. And the reason is clear: because they are not knowledgeable they cannot depend on the memory. They have to respond to reality, they have to respond to challenges, they have to bring their consciousness to respond — their consciousness remains more sharp. A farmer, a villager, is far more wise than a professor in the university. The professor can depend on the memory, the farmer cannot depend on the memory.

12. The basic education is missing. The first thing to be taught is meditation, the art of going in, because only out of that arises a discipline.

13. The society is very much afraid of your reality. The church is afraid, the state is afraid, everybody is afraid of your essential person, your essential being, because the essential being is rebellious, intelligent. It cannot be easily reduced to slavery. It cannot be exploited. Nobody can use your essential being as a means; your essential being is an end unto itself. Hence the whole society tries in every possible way to disconnect you from your essential core, and it creates a false, plastic personality around you and it forces you to become identified with it. That’s what it calls education. It is not education; it is mis-education. It is destructive, it is violent.

14. Society teaches you, “Become this, become that.” It teaches you becoming. Its whole education system is based on the idea of becoming. And what I am telling you here is just the opposite of it. I am talking about BEING, not about becoming. Becoming is an invention of the crafty politicians and the priests — and these are the people who have poisoned the whole humanity. They go on giving you goals. If you become tired of the worldly things — money, power, prestige — they are there to tell you about paradise, God, samadhi, truth. Again the whole process starts.

15. The word ‘education’ is beautiful. It means “drawing something out”: drawing out that which is within you. In fact, we should not use it for the ordinary education. It is wrong to use a beautiful word like ‘education’ for this rotten system of schools, colleges and universities. It is not education in the literal sense even, because instead of drawing out what is within you it forces things from the outside upon you. It is an imposition.Real education is like drawing water from a well, not pouring something into the well. Real education is drawing out your being so that your inner luminosity starts filtering through your body, through your behavior.

16. D.H. Lawrence was very much against your so-called education — it is not education, it is mis-education. Real education can only be based on love, not on knowledge. Real education cannot be utilitarian, real education cannot be of the marketplace. Not that real education will not give you knowledge; first, real education will prepare your heart, your love, and then whatever knowledge is needed to pass through life will be given to you, but that will be secondary. And it will never be overpowering; it will not be more valuable than love.

    And whenever there is a possibility of any conflict between love and knowledge, real education will help you to be ready to drop your knowledge and move with your love; it will give you courage, it will give you adventure. It will give you space to live, accepting all risks, insecurities; it will help you to be ready to sacrifice yourself if love demands it. It will put love not only above knowledge but even above life, because life is meaningless without love. Love without life is still meaningful; even if your body dies it makes no difference to your love energy. It continues, it is eternal, it is not a time phenomenon.

    To have a loving heart, you need a little less calculating head. To be capable of loving you need to be capable of wondering. That’s why, Nur, I always say that awe and childlike innocence are deeply related with the energy called love. In fact they are different names for the same thing.

Osho Quotes on Education

1. Our whole education is rotten. It certainly makes you clerks, stationmasters, postmen, police commissioners. It gives you a livelihood, but it does not give you life, and it does not give you love.
2. One-third of our education should be concerned with livelihood; one-third of our education should be concerned with our well-being — body, health, ways to stay younger and live longer. And one-third — the last and the most important — should be concerned with love, with death, and the secrets of life itself. Only then will we have a wholesome education. And through that education, we can create a man and a society which will be healthy, youthful, loving, soulful, overflowing with joy, always ready to share with anyone — because nobody is a stranger on the earth; the whole earth is one family.
3. All education remains part of the mind; it does not make you more alert, more conscious, it simply fills you with information. It treats you like a computer.
4. The society’s whole interest is in how to exploit you, how to enslave you, how to use you in a more efficient way, almost like a machine. It gives you all the education just for these hidden, secret aims. It prevents you from knowing anything about meditation.
5. This is what our education goes on teaching… our education is immensely destructive. In the name of education, it is mis-education. It needs to be completely changed and transformed. Things like ambition, success, comparison, have to be completely taken out of the human mind — and it is possible. Rather than teaching these ugly things, education should give people better ways of life, how to live more totally and more intensely; better ways of loving, better ways of beautifying existence — without any comparison with others — just for your sheer contentment.
6. Your education teaches you to imitate, your religions teach you to imitate. Nobody says to you: “Just be yourself — that’s where your paradise lies.” They go on saying to you, “Follow this, imitate that.” They give you ideals: “Become a Gautam Buddha, or a Jesus Christ.” But never, even by mistake, do they say to you, “Just be yourself; relax and enjoy your being, and bring your potential to its maximum unfoldment.”
7. A sannyasin has to be both: the peace, the silence, the light, the qualities of his inner being, and a rebel against all injustice, against all inhumanity. But for a creative purpose, to materialize a dream of an authentic human society which will be able to give equal opportunity to all, freedom to all, education which is nonviolent, education which is not only informative but also transformative, an education that will make you more of an individual and bring the best in you to its flowering.
8. Education is not bringing peace and silence and blissfulness to people. There is something missing in it; it is only education in subjects which do not touch your interior being at all. They may make you doctors, engineers, professors, but they do not give you the insight that can create a Gautam Buddha in you. The true meaning of the word “education” is “to draw out.” But all that your so-called education does is to force in. From outside, borrowed knowledge is being forced into the minds of innocent children.
9. In my vision, education is nothing but another form of meditation. All that usually goes on in the name of education is secondary. The priority should be given to meditation — education of the inner. Unless you become acquainted with yourself, all your knowledge is useless.
10. So before education I would put meditation. Education is trivia: geography, history, arithmetic. It is good as far as the mundane world is concerned, but it is not good as far as your interiority is concerned. You go on accumulating degrees and inside you remain empty. Your degrees can befool people, may even befool yourself, but you cannot have the joy, the blissfulness, the peace, the silence, the compassion of a Gautam Buddha. And unless education has two wings, it cannot fly in the sky in total freedom. Right now it has only one wing; the other wing is missing. Why is it missing? Because the priests don’t want you to become meditators.
11. To me, charity first means the education of the inner; and only secondarily, it means education of other things. “Know thyself” must be the most precious education, and then you can become acquainted with everything else. A man who knows himself will never misuse his education in the outer world. Otherwise, when you don’t know yourself, you are going to use your education to exploit people, to create poverty.
12. Education is certainly needed; but before education, meditation is needed. Anybody who becomes a graduate — either an engineer or a doctor or a professor — should not be able to have his degree unless he also passes his examinations in meditation. Each university and each college should have classes for meditation for the students — and for people from outside also; they may not have been able in their youth to learn meditation, but now they can learn.
13. We just have to create people who are evidence of right education. An education is complete when it is inner and outer both. And we have to create people who can change this whole exploitative structure with love and compassion in a democratic way. There is no need for any violence. The poor just have to be made aware: It is time for you to wake up; everything belongs to you.
14. We have to find a human kind of education in the world; the education that exists is very inhuman. We have to find ways so that children can play in the sun and still learn a little arithmetic. That can be done — once we know that arithmetic is not so important as playing in the sun, once that thing has been decided, then we can find ways. A little arithmetic can be taught, and a little is needed. Everybody is not going to become an Albert Einstein. And those who are going to become Albert Einsteins, they won’t bother playing in the sun — their joy is arithmetic, that is their poetry. Then it is different, then it is totally different; then the growth is not hindered and guilt is not created.
15. Our whole education system is based on giving ready-made answers. Because of those ready-made answers you never develop your intelligence; there is no need. You ask the question and a computer teacher answers them.
16. Education is a bridge between the potentiality and the actuality. Education is to help you to become that which you are only in a seed form. And this is what I am doing here; this is a place of education. The thing that is being done in the ordinary schools and colleges and universities is not education. It only prepares you to get a good job, a good earning; it is not real education. It does not give you life. Maybe it can give you a better standard of living, but the better standard of living is not a better standard of life; they are not synonymous.
17. The so-called education that goes on in the world prepares you only to earn bread. And Jesus says, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” And that’s what your universities have been doing — they prepare you to earn bread in a better way, in an easier way, in a more comfortable way, with less effort, with less hardship. But all that they do is prepare you to earn your bread and butter. It is a very, very primitive kind of education: it does not prepare you for life.
18. My vision of education is that life should not be taken as a struggle for survival; life should be taken as a celebration. Life should not be only competition, life should be joy too. Singing and dancing and poetry and music and painting, and all that is available in the world — education should prepare you to fall in tune with it — with the trees, with the birds, with the sky, with the sun and the moon.
19. And education should prepare you to be yourself. Right now it prepares you to be an imitator; it teaches you how to be like others. This is miseducation. Right education will teach you how to be yourself, authentically yourself. You are unique. There is nobody like you, has never been, will never be. This is a great respect that God has showered on you. This is your glory, that you are unique. Don’t become imitative, don’t become carbon copies. But that’s what your so-called education goes on doing: it makes carbon copies; it destroys your original face. The word “education” has two meanings, both are beautiful. One meaning is very well known, although not practiced at all, that is: to draw something out of you. “Education” means: to draw out that which is within you, to make your potential actual, like you draw water from a well.
20. Real education will be to bring out what is hidden in you — what God has put in you as a treasure — to discover it, to reveal it, to make you luminous.
21. Education is to bring you from darkness to light. That’s what I am doing here. Parmar has asked this question because the Indian government is not ready to accept my work as education. It is natural. They cannot accept it as education, because I don’t create clerks and stationmasters and deputy collectors. I am creating new human beings. For them that is dangerous. If this is education, then they cannot allow it to happen. It is rebellion.
22. This I call education: to make people more intelligent. And that’s what I am doing here. If this fire spreads, then this old, rotten society cannot survive. It survives on your unconsciousness, it lives on your unconsciousness.
23. Our whole system of education is stupid. It prepares you for a world which is no more in existence and it does not prepare you for a world which is coming, arising, which is dawning — so you will remain a misfit. You will never be able to live rightly. If you follow your education you will feel yourself out of date. If you follow the new world that is happening, then your education will not be of any help in it. You will be almost uneducated, and that hurts the ego.
24. In a better world children will be thrown upon themselves as fast as possible; the whole effort of the parents should be to make the child use his intelligence. And the whole effort, if education is right — if it is education and not MISeducation — will be to throw the child again and again to his own intelligence, so that he can function, so that he can use his intelligence. He may not be so efficient in the beginning, that is true — the teacher may have the right answer, and if the student has to work out his own answer the answer may not be so right — but that is not the point at all. The answer may not be so right, it may not correspond to the answers given in the books, but it will be intelligent. And that is the real crux of the matter.
25. Remember this: your whole education prepares you, makes you ready to fight. It does not prepare you for friendship and love, it prepares you for conflict, enmity, war.