By Sri Aurobindo

EducationYour Highness and Gentlemen,

The subject on which I wish to address you this evening, andif you are sufficiently interested and have sufficient patience topursue the subject farther with me, for perhaps another eveningor two, is Education. Some of you may ask yourselves, why thissubject rather than another? It is not a new subject but ratherquite a threadbare one; you have already heard and read muchabout it and probably listened to much better lectures on thesubject than any I can give you; it has besides been handledby a great many men in high places of authority; most of all,it has been taken up by no less a person than Lord Curzonhimself and measures are to be formulated and perhaps carriedinto execution for the reform of what is defective in the presentsystem. “What more do you want,” you will perhaps ask, “orwhy should we trouble ourselves about it? The Government ofIndia will in its own good time reform the whole business and ofcourse when their new system is in force the Baroda Schools andColleges will assimilate themselves to it. Meanwhile it is quitesuperfluous for us to bother our heads about the matter.” Nowin answer to that attitude I have to say this that the Govern-ment of India is in the first place not the fit body to formulatethe necessary improvements and in the second place not thefit instrument to put them into force. It is not fit to formulatethem because it cannot realise and feel as we do where the shoepinches us and therefore in mending it [incomplete]

INTELLECTUAL

We now come to the intellectual part of education, which iscertainly larger and more difficult, although not more importantthan physical training and edification of character. The Indian EducationUniversity system has confined itself entirely to this branch and itmight have been thought that this limitation & concentration ofenergy ought to have been attended by special efficiency & thor-oughness in the single branch it had chosen. But unfortunatelythis is not the case. If the physical training it provides is con-temptible and the moral training nil, the mental training is alsomeagre in quantity and worthless in quality. People commonlysay that it is because the services & professions are made theobject of education that this state of things exists. This I believeto be a great mistake. A degree is necessary for service andtherefore people try to get a degree. Good! let it remain so. Butin order for a student to get a degree let us make it absolutelynecessary that he shall have a good education. If a worthlesseducation is sufficient in order to secure his object & a goodeducation quite unessential, it is obvious that the student will notincur great trouble and diversion of energy in order to acquirewhat he feels to be unnecessary. But change this state of things,make culture & true science essential and the same interestedmotive which now makes him content with a bad educationwill then compel him to strive after culture and true science. Aspractical men we must recognise that the pure enthusiasm ofknowledge for knowledge’s sake operates only on exceptionalminds or in exceptional eras. In civilised countries a generaldesire for knowledge as a motive for education does exist but itis largely accompanied with the earthier feeling that knowledgeis necessary to keep up one’s position in society or to succeedin certain lucrative or respectable pursuits & professions. We inIndia have become so barbarous that we send our children toschool with the grossest utilitarian motives unmixed with anydisinterested desire for knowledge; but the education we receiveis itself responsible for this. Nobody can cherish disinterested en-thusiasm for a bad education; it can only be regarded as a meansto some practical end. But make the education good, thorough& interesting and the love of knowledge will of itself awake inthe mind and so mingle with & modify more selfish objects.The real source of the evil we complain of is therefore some-thing different; it is a fundamental & deplorable error by we in this country have confused education with the acquisitionof knowledge and interpreted knowledge itself in a singularlynarrow & illiberal sense. To give the student knowledge is nec-essary, but it is still more necessary to build up in him the powerof using his knowledge. It would hardly be a good technicaleducation for a carpenter to be taught how to fell trees so asto provide himself with wood & never to learn how to preparetables, chairs & cabinets or even what tools were necessary forhis craft. Yet this is precisely what our system of education does.It trains the memory and provides the student with a store offacts & secondhand ideas. The memory is the woodcutter’s axeand the store he acquires is the wood he has cut down in hiscourse of tree felling. When he has done this, the Universitysays to him “We now declare you a Bachelor of Carpentry; wehave given you a good & sharp axe and a fair nucleus of woodto begin with. Go on, my son, the world is full of forests andprovided the Forest Officer does not object you can cut downtrees & provide yourself with wood to your heart’s content.”Now the student who goes forth thus equipped, may becomea great timber-merchant but unless he is an exceptional geniushe will never be even a moderate carpenter. Or to return fromthe simile to the fact, the graduate from our colleges may be agood clerk, a decent vakil or a tolerable medical practitioner,but unless he is an especial genius, he will never be a greatadministrator or a great lawyer or an eminent medical specialist.These eminences have to be filled up mainly by Europeans. Ifan Indian wishes to rise to them, he has to travel thousands ofmiles over the sea in order to breathe an atmosphere of liberalknowledge, original science and sound culture. And even thenhe seldom succeeds, because his lungs are too debilitated to takein a good long breath of that atmosphere.The first fundamental mistake has been, therefore, to confineourselves to the training of the storing faculty memory and thestorage of facts and to neglect the training of the three greatmanipulating faculties, viz. the power of reasoning, the powerof comparison and differentiation and the power of expression.These powers are present to a certain extent in all men above thewww.holybooks.com360On Educationstate of the savage and even in a rudimentary state in the savagehimself; but they exist especially developed in the higher classesof civilised nations, wherever these higher classes have long cen-turies of education behind them. But, however highly developedby nature, these powers demand cultivation, they demand thatbringing out of natural abilities which is the real essence ofeducation. If not so brought out in youth, they become rusted& stopped with dirt, so that they cease to act except in a feeble,narrow & partial manner. Exceptional genius does indeed assertitself in spite of neglect and discouragement, but even genius self-developed does not often achieve as happy results and as free &large a working as the same genius properly equipped & trained.Amount of knowledge is in itself not of the first importance; butto make the best use of what we know. The easy assumption ofour educationists that we have only to supply the mind with asmattering of facts in each department of knowledge & the mindcan be trusted to develop itself and take its own suitable road, iscontrary to science, contrary to human experience and contraryto the universal opinion of civilised countries. Indeed the historyof intellectual degeneration in gifted races always begins with thearrest of these three mental powers by the excessive cultivationof mere knowledge at their expense. Much as we have lost asa nation, we have always preserved our intellectual alertness,quickness & originality; but even this last gift is threatened byour University system, & if it goes, it will be the beginning ofirretrievable degradation & final extinction.The very first step in reform must therefore be to revolu-tionize the whole aims & methods of our education. We mustaccustom teachers to devote nine-tenths of their energies tothe education of the active mental faculties, while the passiveretaining faculty, which we call the memory, should occupy arecognised & well-defined but subordinate place, and we mustdirect our school & university examinations to the testing ofthese active faculties & not of the memory. For this is an objectwhich cannot be effected by the mere change or rearrangementof the curriculum. It is true that certain subjects are more aptto develop certain faculties than others; the power of accuratewww.holybooks.comEducation361reasoning is powerfully assisted by Geometry, Logic & PoliticalEconomy; one of the most important results of languages is to re-fine & train the power of expression, and nothing more enlargesthe power of comparison & differentiation than an intelligentstudy of history. But no particular subject except language isessential, still less exclusively appropriated, to any given faculty.There are types of intellect, for instance, which are constitution-ally incapable of dealing with geometrical problems or even withthe formal machinery of Logic, and are yet profound, brilliant& correct reasoners in other intellectual spheres. There is in facthardly any subject, the sciences of calculation excepted, whichin the hands of a capable teacher, does not give room for thedevelopment of all the general faculties of the mind. The firstthing needed therefore is the entire and unsparing rejection ofthe present methods of teaching in favour of those which arenow being universally adopted in the more advanced countriesof Europe.But even in the narrower sphere of knowledge acquisitionto which our system has confined itself, it has been guilty ofother blunders quite as serious. Apart from pure mathematics,which stands on a footing of its own, knowledge may be dividedinto two great heads, the knowledge of things & the knowledgeof men, i.e. to say of human thought, human actions, humannature and human creations as recorded, preserved or picturedin literature, history, philosophy & art. The latter is coveredin the term humanities or humane letters, and the idea of aliberal education was formerly confined to these, though it wassubsequently widened to include mathematics & has again beenwidened in modern times to include a modicum of science. Thehumanities, mathematics & science are therefore the three sistersin the family of knowledge and any self-respecting system ofeducation must in these days provide facilities for mastery inany one of these as well as for a modicum of all. The first greaterror of our system comes in here. While we insist on passing ourstudents through a rigid & cast-iron course of knowledge in ev-erything, we give them real knowledge in nothing.

[What does anaverage Bombay graduate who has taken English Literature for

his optional subject, know of that literature? He has read a novelof Jane Austen or the Vicar of Wakefield, a poem of Tennyson ora book of Milton, at most two plays of Shakespeare, a work ofBacon’s or Burke’s full of ideas which he is totally incompetentto digest and one or two stray books of Pope, Dryden, Spenseror other, & to crown this pretentious little heap a mass of sec-ondhand criticism dealing with poets & writers of whom he hasnot studied a single line. When we remember that English is themain study of our schools & colleges, what a miserable outturnis this, what a wretched little mouse out of that mountain ofdrudgery from which the voice of the oppressed student is heardpainfully & monotonously repeating like Valmekie under hismound the lesson with which he has been crammed. But he is far more unfortunate than Valmekie, his mar mar mar hasnot been converted into Ram Ram Ram; for while he think she has been repeating the saving word which gives intellectual salvation, it has been unknown to him converted into a deathdealing word which causes intellectual sterility & impotence.] Mathematics for instance is a subject in which it ought not to be difficult to give thorough knowledge, for most of its pathsare well beaten and being a precise & definite subject it does not in itself demand so much & such various powers of originalthought & appreciation as literature & history; yet it is the in-variable experience of the most brilliant mathematical studentswho go from Calcutta or Bombay to Cambridge that after thefirst year they have exhausted all they have already learned andhave to enter on entirely new & unfamiliar result. It is surelya deplorable thing that it should be impossible to acquire athorough mathematical education in India, that one should haveto go thousands of miles and spend thousands of rupees in orderto get it. Again if we look at Science, what is the result of thepitiful modicum of science acquired under our system? At thebest it turns out good teachers who can turn others through thesame mill in which they themselves have been ground. But theobject of scientific instruction [incomplete]

1Passage bracketed by Sri Aurobindo in the manuscript. — Ed.