Education is an Instrument of Prosperity
By Karmayogi
When India became free, Nehru was looking for a programme that would
usher India into prosperity. Lenin devised soviets at the rural level
and said electricity and soviets would together bring communism to
Russia. Every new technology closes the gap between the high and the low
to some extent. Education is an institution that does so in a great
measure. When a new opportunity arises, not all sections of the
population take equal advantage of it. The more organised, the more
cultured get more out of the NEW. It may be a practical truth that at no
time will all members of the society be exactly equal. As days advance,
we also see the rich and the poor are less and less apart. Awareness,
awakening, new laws, new institutions and more so new technologies help
the less privileged rise in the scale of national prosperity. Recently
housing and education of better quality have been the right incentives
to the people to aspire to rise. Education abridges centuries into
years. Suppose there is no education. For a youth to acquire what the
society has acquired over 2000 years, it may take fifty or sixty years
or more. Education is a divine organisation. It takes the past
knowledge, extracts its essence discarding the superficial details,
arranges it into a curriculum and syllabus and offers it to the pupil in
an easily digestible form. As a result, the student in twenty years gets
the social wisdom of 2000 years.
The more educated a country or a community is, the more prosperous it
is. Now that the mind of the society is awake, educational methods
advance by leaps and bounds. The better the quality of education, the
greater is its effect. Education can be spiritual, in the sense that the
Spirit of the pupil awakens. There is the Spirit in the teacher. The
system of education itself has its own inner Spirit. The nation, the
community, the parents and the student have their own Spirit. When any
one of them is awakened, the progress is significant. A national
spiritual atmosphere comes into existence when all segments or most of
them awaken. In such a climate, poverty recedes and Prosperity
flourishes. Experienced educationists are in the privileged position to
devise a system of education which can almost close the gap between the
high and the low. It will be a golden age.