Leading Light | Education Is Not Equal To Information

Last Updated:September 08, 2025, 08:36 IST

Education should nurture intelligence, innocence, values, creativity, and freedom, fostering friendly, compassionate individuals

Education is not just stuffing the mind with information; it is nourishing innate virtues that impart total intelligence. (AI Generated)

God creates great brains, but it is with education that we put them to good use. The job of education is to empower our children to use their intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical capacities to their fullest, and here, our schools have a great role to play.

Education is not just stuffing the mind with information; it is nourishing innate virtues that impart total intelligence.

Good education has five important aspects to it. Often, we think information is education, but it is only one aspect of education; then comes the formation of concepts — they are the basis of all research and growth. You need to conceive to create. Children go through immense confusion as their concepts develop and break at each step of their journey, and they need guidance from the teachers when this happens.

Another integral aspect of education is cultivating the right attitude. The right attitude at the right time and place determines how fruitful your actions and behaviour will be. Then there is imagination, which is essential for creativity, and must be encouraged. And finally, there is freedom and free thought, which is our very nature. Only with freedom do joy, generosity, and other human values blossom in us.

Without freedom, attitudes become stifling, concepts become a burden, information is of no value, and imagination becomes stagnant. So we must see to it, the education we are giving our children nurtures all these five aspects.

Today, every parent wishes their children to grow up to be well-educated human beings with strong values, leading happy lives. But, somewhere down the line, the link between education, human values, and happiness is getting severed.

Look at a child, a baby, it has a beautiful smile. It exudes such joy and friendliness. But see the face of the same child by the time he passes out of school and college. Does it still retain that joy, that innocence, that beauty that it was endowed with as an infant?

We need to think of ways to retain this innocence. If we can achieve that, then we will have attained something really marvellous with our education. What is worth having on this planet is intelligence accompanied by innocence, and it does not destroy innocence.

Can we not introduce such values in our education system that every child learns to be friendly? In schools and colleges, if you ask the children how many friends they have, they’ll count on their fingers and tell you. If our children cannot make friends with the 40-50 in their classroom, how will they ever become friendly with the billions on the planet?

The need of the day is a broad-minded education accompanied by a warm heart. It is of no use if you acquire a good education and then begin to look down upon everybody else. A well-educated person is friendly and compassionate, who can be a “nobody” with everybody.

What really obstructs human values from blossoming is tension and stress, which prevent children from being themselves. If a child is tense, then his perception, observation, and expression suffer. And you have only two ways to get rid of this stress-lessen their burden of studies and other co-curricular activities or increase their energy levels.

We must teach children how to relax and breathe properly to release the stress and negativity from their minds and bodies, and have more energy and enthusiasm. Making music, meditation, pranayamas, yoga, and games part of our education is the way to do that. Children need to be taught how to handle negative emotions when they arise. We tell kids ‘don’t get upset’, ‘don’t be angry’, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’, but we don’t give them tools and techniques on how not to.

Similarly, we are all born with intuitive abilities, but nobody has ever taught us how to kindle them. In our Art of Living schools, kids learn how to enhance their intuition; how to make the right decisions, be innovative and creative.

The trouble in today’s world is not because of a lack of education but because education is being misused and misunderstood. Education is not just meant to process information but it should create such strong personalities, who spread harmony, love and compassion; bring progress in the society; it should help us become well-rounded individuals who can stand up to criticism and give constructive criticism, who can have a sense of belongingness, sense of caring and sharing, wherever we go; an education that nurtures both the mind (buddhi) and heart (bhav). Only then do we grow into complete human beings, and it is educationists who help us in this effort.

The author is a humanitarian leader, spiritual teacher and an ambassador of peace. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.

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Author: News18