Integral Education Sardar Patel Memorial Lectures 1988

Item

Title
Integral Education Sardar Patel Memorial Lectures 1988
extracted text
Sardar Patel Memorial Lectures 1988

Integral Education

by
Karan Singh

PUBLICATIONS DIVISION

August 1990 (Sravana 1912).

© Publications Division

OW?"?

- ioo

Price: Rs. 10.00.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CELL
326, V Main, I Block
Kotam- r.r 'a

/

Bangc!ore-56v034^/'
India

PUBLISHED BY THE DIRECTOR PUBLICATIONS DIVISION
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION AND BROADCASTING
GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
PATIALA HOUSE NEW DELHI-110 001

Sales Emporia

*

Publications Division

SUPER BAZAR CONNAUGHT CIRCUS NEW DELHI

110 001

COMMERCE HOUSE CURRIMBHOY ROAD BALLARD PIER BOMBAY 400 038
8 ESPLANADE EAST CALCUTTA 700 069
LLA AUDITORIUM 736 ANNASALA1 MADRAS 600 002
BIHAR STATE COOP. BANK BUILDING ASHOKA RAJPATH PATNA 800 004

PRESS ROAD TRIVANDRUM 695 001
10-B STATION ROAD LUCKNOW 226 001

STATE ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM BUILDING PUBLIC GARDEN HYDERABAD 500 004

Printed at Thomson Press (I) Ltd. Faridabad.

Preface
All India Radio instituted a series of lectures in 1955 in memory of
our illustrious leader, and architect of India’s political consolida­
tion, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was also the first Minister for Informa­
tion and Broadcasting in addition to Home and States Minister
and Deputy Prime Minister of Independent India. An annual
feature, the Patel memorial lectures are aimed at adding to the
body of knowledge to the subjects of public importance and
promoting awareness and generating discussion on contemporary
subjects.
In the current lectures the theme enlarged upon is the integral
approach to education. Education, in order to be effective, has to
cover four distinct dimensions of the human personality beginning
with the physical body, the development of intellectual and
aesthetic sensibilities, the development of socially desirable moral
values and finally, the inner dimension of spritual growth.

Dr. Karan Singh is a well known poet, writer and a scholar and
his life long devotion has been to the field of art, culture and
Indology. He was also Minister for Tourism and Civil Aviation,
Health and Family Planning, and Education and Culture in the
Union Cabinet.
Dr. Karan Singh was for many years Chancellor of Jammu and
Kashmir University as well as Benaras Hindu University, besides
being associated with many other cultural and academic institu­
tions. He has been awarded several honorary degrees including
doctorates from the Benaras Hindu University, the Aligarh Mus­
lim University and the Soka University, Tokyo. Dr. Karan Singh is
the author of over a dozen books including writings on political
science, philosophical essays, travellogues and poems in English.
Recently he founded the International Centre for Science, Culture
and Consciousness which is emerging as an important centre of
creative thought.

Integral Education
Part-I
Introduction

THREE MEN DOMINATED the last phase of our freedom
movement—Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel. Their roles were in a very extraordinary way
complementary, Mahatma Gandhi providing the moral and spir­
itual impetus and overall guidance; Jawaharlal Nehru the vision­
ary, the revolutionary mass leader; and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
the statesman, administrator, consolidator.

It is this trinity of leadership that was predominant in those
critical years, when after centuries British colonialism disappeared
and India emerged as a free sovereign country. Of course, there
were other leaders of great stature and talent also. There was
Maulana Azad, who for so many years was President of the Indian
National Congress and our first Education Minister; there was Dr.
Rajendra Prasad, our first President; there was C.
Rajgopalachari—“Rajaji”—the first Governor General; there
was Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the father of the Constitution and so on.
But the way in which the movement finally came to its culmina­
tion, found these three people playing the critical roles.
The Sardar’s role in our modern history was of crucial import­
ance. During the freedom movement he was the pillar of strength
to Gandhiji. In fact from the Bardoli Satyagraha, where he first
gained the title of Sardar or leader, right upto the achievement of
freedom, Sardar Patel was Gandhiji’s right hand man as far as
organisational matters were concerned. His unwavering fortitude,
his tremendous courage, his tireless perseverance and organisa­
tional skill made him absolutely indispensable in the many ups and
downs of our freedom movement.
Delivered at National Museum Auditorium, New Delhi on December 15 and 16,
1988 and later broadcast by All India Radio.

1

After freedom Sardar Patel lived for only three years. He was
Deputy Prime Minister, Home Minister, and Minister of Informa­
tion and Broadcasting, and he tackled the immense task of
building a shattered nation. Let us not forget the situation that
actually existed in 1947. With the partition of the sub-continent,
millions of people had been uprooted and one of the largest mass
migrations in human history was taking place. Hundreds of
thousands of people on both sides of the border were being killed,
and in that tremendously volatile situation Sardar Patel and
Jawaharlal Nehru strove tirelessly to put the new born nation on
its feet. Despite their temperamental difference, they had the
highest regard and respect for each other, and made a team which
was unique at that particular juncture.

The main achievement after independence for which Sardar
Patel will be remembered, of course, was the integration of the
Indian States, a saga in itself into which I cannot possibly go. It has
been extensively documented. I was looking through some books,
and I saw a parallel drawn between Bismark’s unification of
Germany in the 19th century and Sardar Patel’s unification of
India. But the Sardar's task was far more difficult because in size,
diversity and complexity, the Indian situation was much more
difficult than the German situation a century earlier. It needed a
leader who combined firmness, tact, a deep knowledge of human
psychology, administrative and legal acumen, and capacity for
untiring work. As Gandhiji wrote to someone during that period,
there was not another man in India at that time who could have
done what Sardar Patel achieved.
The integration of India must rank as one of the great achieve­
ments in world history and, as I see it, free India itself is a
permanent memorial to Sardar Patel. I must also add, although it
may not be fashionable to do so that the peaceful integration of the
States was a tribute to the good sense and patriotism of the Indian
Princes themselves. They did not have very much of an alterna­
tive, but nonetheless they were also patriotic Indians and they
coordinated and cooperated with Sardar in this important task of
national integration.
2

Coming as I do from what at one time was the largest princely
States in India, and certainly the most complex and complicated. I
had the privilege of coming in touch with Sardar Patel at a very
early age. I have written about this in my autobiography so I will
not go into details, except to say that while Pandit Jawaharlal
Nehru was dealing directly with Jammu and Kashmir, it was
Sardar Patel who carried on the correspondence with my father
which ultimately led to a smooth political transition in Jammu and
Kashmir. In fact the first volume of the collected correspondence
of Sardar Patel edited by the late Lala Durgadas is entirely about
Kashmir, and contains many letters written by him to my father,
my mother, and to me.
If I may strike a personal note, I owe him a deep debt of
gratitude for three particular matters. Firstly, for insisting that I be
sent abroad for treatment. I was ill at that time and confined to
bed, and I do not think my parents would have sent me abroad had
Sardar Patel not, on one of his visits to our home in Jammu, very
clearly told my father and my mother particularly (I was an only
child and she was very attached to me) that if they did not send me
abroad for treatment I would probably remain in bed for the rest
of my life. I was confined to a wheelchair and it was Sardar Patel
who insisted that I go abroad and was good enough to organise the
plane and other arrangements for my treatment in New York. The
fact that forty years later I am fit and standing here talking with
you is, in a way, the direct result of the Sardar’s intervention.
The second point for which I will remain grateful to him is the
fact that it was he who suggested a matrimonial alliance with
Nepal. I will not go into details except to say that my wife was the
grand-daughter of the last Rana Prime Minister and Sardar Patel
thought that a matrimonial alliance with Nepal might be a good
idea. The alliance took place and by God’s grace, is going strong
even today.

Finally, he was also responsible for smoothening my appoint­
ment as Regent of the State. It was a complex issue and there were
acute problems with my father. But Sardar Patel tackled them with
3

great finesse and dignity and as a result at the age of eighteen 1 was
appointed Regent and then went on to become Sadar-i-Riyasat,
Governor and so on.
1 had the privilege of being his guest for three weeks in
Dehradun in April. 1949. Mani Ben was there at the time, and she
looked after me with great affection. I remember that although the
Sardar was very ill. in fact he had gone to Dehradun to convalesce
on doctor's orders, he was always meticulous and very alert. We
had long talks about the situation in Kashmir and the various
personalities concerned with Kashmir problem, upon which he
gave me the benefit of his frank views and guidance.
I have taken a few minutes to pay my tribute to the Sardar as
this is an appropriate occasion to do so. Today happens to be the
15th December, the exact day upon which he passed away in 1950.
And so it is but fitting that 1 pay my homage to this great leader
today through the medium of All India Radio, which has always
been such a powerful and important mode of communications in
this country.
Having done this, I will now move on to the topic of my lecture.
I have chosen to speak on INTEGRAL EDUCATION. I think it
is important to define the term ’integral’. The dictionary definition
is “necessary to the completeness of. whole, complete”. Educa­
tion is. of course, the most important activity that any civilisation
can embark upon, because it is the medium through which a
civilisation renews itself and passes down to generations yet
unborn the quintessence of wisdom, the knowledge, and experi­
ence and the technology that it has received.

We in India are heirs to one of the most powerful, intellectual
and educational traditions in human history. 1 refer, of course, to
the first documented educational system in India, the VedicUpanishadic system. Although it may have been confined to a
rather small section of the population, it was an extremely
powerful and luminous system revolving around the method of
passing on wisdom from the RishilGuru to the S/tw/tya/Disciple.
The students used not only to listen, but to ask searching ques­
4

tions. If you read the Upanishads, you will find many questioning
minds. It was by no means a monologue on the part of the teacher.
There were questions by the disciples, and it was in response to
those questions that a lot of the teaching was given.
So, we have this very powerful tradition going back many
thousands of years, representing one of the high water-marks of
human intellectual endeavour. And then, of course, many streams
joined in this great tradition. The Buddhist stream followed with
the whole Buddhist system of education. Nalanda was one of the
greatest Universities that the world had ever known, and they had
their own system of teaching through the Sang'.a and through the
lay disciples. Later there was the Islamic influx, and the Christian
missionaries and their educational system. Then came the British
system of “modern” education sponsored by Lord Macauley. So,
our present educational system is the result of a long process of
many thousands of years, in which even today elements are visible
of all the various streams that came into our educational system.

I do not intend to undertake a detailed statistical study of our
educational system, because that has been done by others and this
is not really an appropriate forum to do that. What 1 will try to do
today and tomorrow is to share with you some observations and
perhaps some insights into the whole system, with emphasis on the
integral aspect of education. The whole meaning of an integral
education is that it must be able to cover the entire human
condition and the totality of the human personality. It is not
enough to look upon education simply as an academic endeavour
which enables young people to pass examinations and then get
gainful employment, or remain unemployed, as the case may be. It
is much deeper, a much fuller undertaking.

Now that we are living at a juncture when there is a paradigm
shift to a new holism, it is all the more important that our
education should become integral. Before I go on to various
dimensions of the educational system, I might perhaps dwell for a
moment on this paradigm shift. As you are aware, for the last
three or four centuries human thought has been dominated by a
5

dichotomous, materialistic philosophy, what I call the CartesianNewtonian-Marxist worldview based essentially on a dichotomy
between matter and spirit, between science and spirituality, be­
tween body and mind. It was a dichotomous system of looking at
the world and, by its very nature, involved conflict, competition
and a great deal of hostile interaction.
Now this way of looking at the world certainly brought great
achievements. There is no doubt that the achievements of modern
science, the tremendous growth of science and technology have
brought great gifts of economic progress, medicine, communica­
tions and a hundred other aspects of life. But at the same time this
way of looking at reality has brought about the most awesome
destructive power that the human race has ever known. The
nuclear age in which we now live came into being on the 6th
August, 1945. the day on which the atomic bomb was thrown on
Hiroshima. That atomic bomb, as you know, obliterated half a
million people. I happened to be in Hiroshima last year on the 6th
of August, where every year people assemble in the Hiroshima
Peace Park at the very spot where the bomb fell, and I gathered
some idea of the sort of destruction that took place. Today a single
nuclear warhead carries destructive capacity equal to one
thousand of the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima, and there are
at least fifty thousand such nuclear warheads now on planet earth.
Thus, although science and technology have given us tremendous
power, that power can be used both for good and for evil. The
equivalent of one trillion US dollars every year in all world
currencies is spent on weapons of mass destruction. There is
enough fissionable material today to destroy the earth and all its
inhabitants and all forms of life. Therefore, the old pattern of
thinking is now simply no longer adequate.
What we have to do is to move into a new. holistic paradigm that
stresses convergence rather than conflict, cooperation rather than
competition. And any educational policy to be effective today
must also be holistic. We can no longer divide education into
different levels or the human personality into various compart­

6

ments. It has to be holistic, and along with this there has to be
growth not stagnation.

In India we have had a constitutional directive to universalise
elementary education by 1960. We are now going on to 1989, but
we are nowhere near achieving even that basic target put forward
as a constitutional imperative by our founding fathers. There are
still vast disparities, submerged areas and communities and
although a great deal of growth has taken place, it is a lopsided
growth, it is not yet an integral growth which would cover all
areas, regions and classes.
Physical Aspect of an Integral Education System

As I said, what we need is an integral approach to education, and I
will deal with this in four different categories (the importance of
physical growth, the importance of intellectual growth, the import­
ance of social growth and the importance of spiritual growth) in
the context of the holistic view that I have put before you.

Let me start with the physical.

(Shareeramadyam Khalu Dharma Sadhanam)—The Vedas say
very clearly that the basis of all dharma is the body. Unless the
body is properly trained and looked after, no other development is
really possible. Our children have to be taught how to sit properly.
I go to schools and see children slouched all over their chairs. They
are not even taught how to sit properly, how to breathe properly,
how to walk. It may sound very simple, but it isn’t really. I
remember many years ago when I was in Health, we had worked
out a graded syllabus of Yoga for schools, so that we could
introduce simple Yogic systems into the school level at a very early
age. It is wrong to say that we need expensive equipment in order
to train the body. If we can introduce Yoga, proper posture,
proper breathing in schools at the grassroots level, we will find a
new development taking place.
7

Nutritional inputs and immunisation must be made part of the
school programme. The Integrated Child Development Scheme
(ICDS) was one such programme which was attempting this, but it
has still not fully taken off. When the child is at school, that is the
time to put in all the inputs that are required. You will be
astonished to learn that only two spoonfuls of Vitamin A a year
can prevent thousands of children from becoming blind. Sight is a
fabulous gift, and yet thousands of Indian children lose their
eyesight every year because we are not able to give them one
spoon of Vitamin A syrup twice a year.

Unless we are able to integrate the nutritional programme, the
body-strengthening programme into the school system, it is no use
talking about integral education. There is, of course, mass drill
and sports, PT and NCC, but there does not seem to be any
national commitment to physical fitness as such. We often lament
our poor performance in the Olympics although we are oneseventh of human race. The reason is that there is no commitment
to physical fitness as a people. I once said when 1 was looking after
Family Planning that in addition to birth control we need girth
control also.
Our food habits are often undesirable. We have a malign racism
in our food habits in our curious obsession with white rice, white
sugar and white bread, all three of which are weak from the
nutritional point of view. There is no reason whatsoever why in a
country like ours, which is still suffering from massive malnutrition
where nutritional inputs are amongst the lowest in the world, we
should have these absurd food habits and throw away precious
nutrients as a result of this strange desire for white edibles. This
may not appear to be directly connected with education, but from
the point of view from which I am talking it is relevant, because we
are aiming at developing the entire body. For this posture, sports,
Yoga, nutritional inputs, food habits are all important. And now
education regarding tobacco and alcohol, drugs and promiscuity,
also have to form part of the system if our younger generations are
to be spared these scourges that have become such a ghastly
menace in the West.

8

So, the first element of our integral education must be the
carefully structured programme of physical fitness and well-being.
And it must involve all the various dimensions that I have
mentioned including the education of the parents, because many
of these elements are to be found not only in the schools but in the
homes. When children go to school there must be some way of
ensuring feedback to the parents, so that they can get involved and
can also get educated in the process of the education of their
children.

Training of the Mind and the Aesthetic Sensibilities
The second element of our integral education is intellectual
growth. I am not here talking only of the purely academic area
where, as is well known, what is needed is the universalisation of
primary education, the vocationalisation of secondary education
and the rationalisation of higher education. Those are the three
tasks that we must set before us. Primary education has to become
universal, because we cannot talk of a functional democracy if
millions of Indian citizens are illiterate. This is a travesty, and with
the Eighth Plan set to begin very shortly it is to be hoped that
necessary provisions for this will be made.

As far as secondary education is concerned, we have got to
vocationalise it at some point of time. The ten-plus-two formula, I
am afraid, has not worked because the vocational stream that has
been brought into the plus-two is simply not enough to provide for
what the framers of that scheme has expected. The idea was that
after taking the vocational stream large numbers of students would
be siphoned off into vocations, and the aimless draft from school
to college would cease. This has not happened. As against an
expected fifty per cent of students who were supposed to be
siphoned off, hardly two per cent have taken up to vocational
institutions.
The present scheme has failed, and therefore, it has to be
reorganised. If we have to vocationalise, we must have at least a
three-year course after the tenth standard, so that the young men
9

and women who pass it can go into their vocations and this drift to
college can be prevented. And then in higher education also we
have to rationalise the whole system, because at present there is
aimlessness and lack of direction. I meet a number of young
people, and many of them feel that it is a waste of time when they
go to college because there is no serious commitment either among
the teachers or among the students. And one of the reasons is that
every one wants to drift into college. In the developed nations you
may be the son of the richest person there, you simply cannot get
into college unless you pass those entrance examinations. But
here, for want of anything better to do, everybody drifts to
college. Naturally, the atmosphere in the colleges is devoid of any
real commitment. These are some of the tasks we have in the
academic sphere, plus, of course, reorganisation of teachers’
education, strengthening adult education and reviving the library
movement by trying to encourage young people to read.

But more important than the academic elements are the
intellectual inputs. More important than what we learn, is whether
we are developing the capacity to learn or not. Most of what we
learn is often obsolete even before we leave college. All the
chemistry that I learnt at school, for example, the physics and
the mathematics, are out of date. The explosion of knowledge
is such that every five years a new generation of knowledge is
born.
So, the question is whether our education is able to develop
among our young boys and girls the quest for truth, the capacity
for awe and wonder at the marvels of nature, the capacity to
respond to the glory of the sunrise, and the grandeur of the starry
heavens on a moonless night. It does not cost anything to teach
children to look at a tree, or a flower, and realise the beauty that is
in those objects. How many of our children are taught simply to
look up at night at this starry firmament in which we live. Do we
tell tham that there are hundreds of billions of stars in our own
galaxy, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observed
universe? Do we give them any sense of the wonder at the sheer
mystery of being alive and conscious?
10

People talk about miracles. What greater miracle can there be
than that from the slime of the primeaval ocean four billion years
ago, a creature has emerged with a brain which can become aware
of itself, which can become aware of being. None of these things
are taught to our students. We de-mystify and uglify all our
knowledge, and put it into such a boring and unattractive format
that even the great insights of the human race are reduced to
common place things.
The point that I am making is that when we talk of integral
education we talk of the flowering of the intellect, and we have to
develop these intellectual capacities. We have a tremendously rich
heritage of music, of dance, of art, which can introduce students to
this aesthetic dimension. The study of the classics has unfortunate­
ly virtually disappeared. This study is extremely important, not so
much for the classics themselves as for the intellectual discipline
that they involve. Whether it is Sanskrit, Arabic, or Persian, the
classics had a very special role to play in framing the mind, the
sensibility. Once you have been exposed to a glorious language
like Sanskrit, for example, your aesthetic sensibility is refined.

The three-language formula again, like the ten-plus-two formula,
has not worked. I travel throughout the length and breadth of
India and I find it is not working. I have been suggesting that we
should give a fresh choice in the three-language formula. In the
Hindi speaking areas we should have Hindi, English and, as a third
choice, either Sanskrit or Urdu. And in the non-Hindi speaking
areas there is regional language, there is English, and along with
Hindi we should introduce Sanskrit, because it will make it easier
for the South Indian students to learn Hindi if they can go through
Sanskrit which is generally the base of their own language. These
are important elements in the development of the mind, because if
you cannot communicate you cannot grow, and how you can
communicate except through language. One of the great tragedies
in India today is that language is now looked upon just as common
currency. There has been a devaluation of language. The concept
of the sacred word, the Logos, the Shabda Brahma has dis­
appeared, and language is now used in the most horrific ways.
11

The need to recapture the inner beauty of language, of
reinstituting the elements of intellectual inquiry and of intellectual
thought is very important. 1 am not so worried about language our
people learn, but about whether or not they have learnt to develop
their minds. Because if one thing is predictable, it is that
everything is going to change. In our own lifetimes we have seen
human civilisation change beyond our wildest dreams. I remember
when I was in school, if an aeroplane flew over we would all run
out of our rooms and eagerly look up. hardly able to believe that
there was such a thing as an aeroplane. Television did not exist at
that time. Within our lifetimes there have been these multiple
revolutions, and how do we know what else will happen in the
decades to come. Therefore, the youth of India had to be
prepared, intellectually, to deal with the new knowledge that is
developing.
We have the capacity to do so. If you go to the United States,
Indian nuclear scientists, computer engineers, medical profession­
als and other intellectuals are at the top of the ladder. The Indian
mind is second to none in the world, in fact we have this continuing
intellectual heritage of many centuries which is quite unique. What
we have to do is once again to reorient our inner perceptions. We
are so obsessed with the outer that we have neglected the inner,
intellectual re-orienting, without which there cannot really be any
substantial and sustained growth.

Today, 1 will leave with you these thoughts regarding the
physical and intellectual elements in an integral approach to
education. Tomorrow, I will talk about the social implications of
education, which are extremely important, and then culminate in
the dimension of spiritual growth which, to my mind, is the most
important adventure that any human being can undertake.

12

Development of Socially Relevent
Moral Values
Part-11
WE SPOKE YESTERDAY about the physical and the intellec­
tual aspects of an integral education system. Today, I will turn to
two other aspects which are equally important, and I will begin
with aspect of social integration. But before I come to actual social
values, I would like to point out the dimensions in which we must
now consider this problem. Humanity is in the throes of a
transition more fundamental than any of the earlier ones it had
undergone, in some ways more important than the transition from
the caves to the forests, from the forests to nomadic living, from
the nomadic to agricultural civilisations and from there to
industrial and then to the post-industrial society.
What is happening now is that we are transisting into a global
society. We may be too close to the event to realise the immensity
and the magnitude of the change, but the fact is that humanity is
entering an entirely new kind of civilisation. It is global in many
ways. Politically, there is no longer any such thing as bilateral
issue. Every issue in the ultimate analysis becomes multilateral, as
has indeed become very clear in the last few months. Even the
most difficult bilateral issues ultimately become internationalised,
because the world in fact has become one. Even though there may
still be a hundred and fifty different nationalities, the world is very
much becoming one unit politically. For several years now there
has been a world economic order. Economic decisions are no
longer taken by individual countries. There is a vast global
economic network which functions with its own inner momentum.
and what price a developing nation is going to get for a particular
primary product no longer depends upon that nation but upon
decisions taken thousands of miles away.

13

Similarly in communications we have entered a new era. The
advent of television has been one of the most revolutionary
changes in human civilisation since the advent of agriculture. The
fact that today, simply by switching on a television set, people
from any part of the world can simultaneously see and hear an
event that is taking place thousands of miles away—whether it is a
political or a sports event, a music or a dance festival—is
something that has never happened before in human history, and
this has knit the whole human consciousness together in an
extra-ordinary manner. Space travel, the use of satellite technolo­
gy, all this has developed only in the last few decades.
Even in culture, there is a trend towards globalization. Certainly
there is a cultural diversity in this world, but as I travel constantly
around the globe 1 find that young people today are dancing to the
same rhythms, whether it is Bombay or Beijing, Moscow or
Madras, New Delhi or New York. They tend to wear the same sort
of clothes, their food habits are beginning to converge. So what is
happening is a globalization of consciousness. And, therefore,
when we talk of social integration, we must remember that every
Indian child is also a global citizen. Let us not get caught up in the
old Chauvinistic trap. Certainly we have a very great culture, and
we are proud of it. But we are now very clearly part of the
emerging world culture, and that is why when I talk of social
values 1 will start with the family which is the basic unit of social
life, then the village or the urban community, then the city, then
the State, then the nation, but not stop at the nation but go on to
the entire world.

No amount of mere individual development is sufficient to
create a viable and dynamic society. Human beings are essentially
social beings, and it is only if socially desirable values are
transmitted at an early stage in the educational system that we can
hope for a peaceful and integrated society. We live in an age of
unprecedented social turmoil and violence. The last forty years in
India have seen the emergence of vast sections of society which
previously remained virtually submerged. The old basis of Indian
society under British rule, which was largely feudal and hierarchic­
14

al, has collapsed and in its place new class and caste alignments
have thrown national life into a continuing turmoil. Some of this,
of course, is to be expected and even valued, because an equitable
social system can never emerge unless there is a vast democratisation of national consciousness. And certainly our democracy in the
last forty years has brought political consciousness to the mind of
every Indian citizen regardless of where he or she lives. Today in
the remotest hamlet of Ladakh, Bastar or Lakshdweep, people are
aware and alert. But in this turmoil, the one fact which stands out
starkly is the rapid erosion of what are called moral and social
values.

The traditional value system has collapsed, but its place has not
been taken by any viable alternative. This is the tragedy.
Traditional systems have to change. I am not at all making a plea
for the reintroduction of outmoded traditional values. That is not
possible or desirable, because as we move towards a global society
we will have to move into a new set of values, a new dynamism
which would enable us to survive in this nuclear age. But
unfortunately, with the collapse of the traditional values no
coherent value system has taken its place. In the result, the nation
has been reduced to a moral wasteland, in which personal greed
and sectarian interests take precedence over the larger social
good.
I know that there are a large number of people in this country
who are working selflessly. But by and large, it is now generally
accepted that corruption has become a sort of way of life, no
longer something which is out of the usual. And the result is that
the value system up on which our whole society has been based has
begun to erode. It is here that the Indian educational system has
registered its greatest failure. Despite the fact that our national
movement was led by such outstanding and creative thinkers as
Sri Aurobindo and Lokmanya Tilak, Rabindranath Tagore and
Maulana Azad, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, our
education has totally failed in making the ideals of these great
visionaries relevant to the consciousness of post-independence
India.
15

This is a very curious phenomenon. In no other national
movement have there been people of such high moral, spiritual
and intellectual qualities as they were in the Indian national
movement. And yet, for some strange reason, those values have
not even remotely been translated into our educational system.
Whether it was Sri Aurobindo's flaming patriotism or Gurudev
Tagore's aesthetic humanism, Gandhiji's stress on non-violence
and moral values or Jawaharlal Nehru’s deep concern for the
welfare of the oppressed and the backward, none of these seem to
have had the slightest impact on our educational planners.
Gandhiji and Gurudev, as you know, set up institutions to test
their educational ideas—the Nai Talim movement and the Vishwa
Bharati movement. But these have languished and whatever
innovative thinking was done has been lost amid the dreary desert
sands of inertia.

We find ourselves in a situation where socially desirable values
and compassion find no place in our system. Despite a series of
high level recommendations over the last three decades for the
introduction of moral education starting from the Sri Prakasa
Committee and coming right down to the Kothari Commission, we
seem to be totally incapable of incorporating any concrete
elements into our curriculum. Even such an elementary matter as
obliging students to keep their institutions clean is not accepted.
The usual quota of Safai Karamcharis is inevitably introduced,
thus accentuating class and caste divisions instead of overcoming
them. Despite Gandhiji's stress on the dignity of labour, to which
we all pay lip service, hardly anything is actually done to introduce
elements of socially beneficial activities in our educational
structure.
Let us remember that social and moral values will not come to a
child automatically, the child will either learn these through
example or they will have to be taught. The best way, of course, is
to teach by example—as the Gita says, whatever great people do,
the example they set, will be followed by others. So either you
teach by high moral example which has now become rare indeed,
or through our educational system.
16

Now what are the sort of values in which we are interested?
Cleanliness is a very basic and very important value. Individually
we are a very clean people, we constantly bathe at every possible
opportunity. But collectively we are one of the dirtiest civilisations
on earth, because while we have been taught individual cleanliness
we are not taught the social value of cleanliness. We will take the
dust and the refuse from our compound, and throw it on to the
road. As long as we are clean, it is all right, it does not really
matter if the road is dirty. This sort of attitude is something which
has to be changed.

Then there is punctuality. We are supposed to be very punctual,
because our tradition is that in the ‘Mohoortam’ not even one
second can be changed. And yet in this country we seem to live in
the eternal. There is no idea of time. I remember when I came to
Delhi twenty years ago and I used to go to functions on time, there
was often hardly anybody there, because there was a tradition that
a Minister will necessarily arrive at least 45 minutes late. This is an
absurd situation. It is against all the norms of our own cultural
tradition, and even of the western tradition where punctuality is an
extremely important element.
Then take politeness. What does it cost to be polite? Nothing.
Japan is a country of several small islands, very heavily populated.
Every time I visit Japan I am astonished at the politeness with
which the Japanese greet each other. They are constantly bowing
to each other, greeting each other and smiling at each other,
because they are taught from childhood that this is the way that
you should treat others. Here to get into an airlines, far less a bus,
is a traumatic experience. And with all our much vaunted
commitment to the dignity of women and looking upon them as
Durga and Shakti, the way women are treated in crowded
enclosures is something which is disgraceful.
These are all matters which have to be taught to our children.
Respect to teachers, parents and elders is not a feudal virtue. Even
in China today, the elderly are respected. Then there is helpful­
ness. I remember in my childhood I was a member of the Boy

17

Scout Movement and we had to perform one good deed everyday.
That is a very good idea. Children must be taught to help the
less-favoured, weaker ones. If a child falls other should come and
help him get up, not adopt the attitude that we simply look after
ourselves and it does not matter what happens to the others. This
is the sort of social environment that we have to create, and we
cannot create it unless these are taught in our educational system.

The family has its importance, the parents have their responsi­
bility. the teachers have their responsibility. But the educational
system has also to impart a social ethic, a work ethic. There is a lot
of talk about the ’Protestant' work ethic which is supposed to have
been responsible for the development of western civilisation, or
the Japanese work ethic. The Japanese work so hard that one has
to force them to take leave. We also have a work ethic in India:-

(Yogah Karmasu Kaushalam)-—Yoga is skill in works, that is the
definition of Yoga in the Bhagwadgita and the work should be
‘Suchir Dakshah'—neat, clean and perfect. We have the ethic, but
do we live up to it? Do we reflect this ethic in our educational
system? Are our children even taught of these values that are
embedded in our cultural background?

When we talk of socially desirable values, we have to take a
positive decision to introduce them into the schoolroom, either
through direct teaching of moral education or indirectly. Let us
remember that no nation can become great unless it has a coherent
dharma, a fairly clear scale of values to which it is committed. In
India this has now become confused and diluted. The early
impetus of the freedom movement has evaporated, leaving us in a
sort of intellectual wilderness from which there seems to be no
escape. Certainly there has been tremendous economic growth in
the last forty years, but whether as a nation our moral fibre and
intellectual calibre has really risen is open to serious doubt. If it
has not risen, the responsibility for this is squarely upon our
educational system.

18

One of the reasons for this is a distorted and anti-religious view
of secularism. Secularism has never meant that we should banish
all moral or spiritual values from our country. Secularism means
the total freedom of all religions in the country, the total equality
of all religions and the fact that the State as such has no religion.
But it does not mean, and should not be taken to mean, that any
value which is desirable but also happens to be a religious value
should, therefore, be neglected. I think the time has now come
when we must rethink this whole issue and see what we can do to
re-establish certain moral principles in our educational system.

We have before us the examples of Germany and Japan, two
nations which forty years ago had literally been flattened after
their defeat in the second world war. In Berlin there was not one
single structure standing at the end of the war after the bombing.
How is it that within these four decades they have so rebuilt their
nations that today they are in the very forefront of development?
How did their civilisations produce the discipline, dedication and
capacity for sustained work, whereas we with all our great cultural
heritage have failed to do so? Why is it that in India we always go
for soft options; we want all the advantages of democracy but are
not prepared to accept the discipline and responsibility that this
involves. Why do we speak constantly about fundamental rights
but conveniently forget that fundamental duties are also part of
the Constitution? Our rights of course we want, fair enough, it is a
democracy and we should have our rights. But why do we forget
that rights and duties are two sides of the same coin, and that
ultimately if we keep insisting on our rights and keep forgetting
our obligations and duties, we will get into an extremely difficult
situation?
The answer to these questions is complex, but surely a large part
of the problem lies in the total collapse of any value orientation in
our educational system. Unless this dimension receives urgent and
effective consideration, we will not be able to pull ourselves out of
the negative syndrome into which we seem to have fallen, and we
will not be able to build the India of which Sardar Patel and other
great leaders dreamed. Therefore, as my third point in this

19

presentation, I would like to stress the prime necessity of
reintroducing social and moral values in our educational system. It
can be done if there is clear cut desire to do so, and in a manner
which will not offend anybody and which, I am sure, will be widely
welcomed throughout the country.

The Inner Dimension of Spiritual Growth

Finally, I come to what is perhaps the most fundamental
dimension of any educational system, the spiritual dimension,
involving the inner recesses of the human personality and the
highest reaches of human consciousness. I am aware that this is
generally looked upon as the preserve of the individual or the
family rather than part of the educational system itself, and it is
true that under our Constitution it is neither possible nor desirable
for the public education system to undertake direct religious
education. Nonetheless, the system must at least provide some
introduction to our vast and varied religious heritage. The Father
of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi, and the framers of our Constitu­
tion, were by no means anti-religious. As I said, what secularism in
the Indian context really means is that there is no state religion and
that there is no discrimination on the basis of religion. It does not
mean that the religious and spiritual values should be outlawed
from our educational system. It means equal respect for all
religions, not equal neglect of all religions.
I think this is an important point that we have to understand and
we have to work on this. Let me give you some examples of
universal values drawn from the Vedanta which could, in their
own way, be incorporated into our educational system. I will give
you five concepts from Vedanta. The first is the fact that this entire
universe, not only the tiny speck of dust which we call the earth
but the billions upon billions of galaxies of which I spoke, all of
them are permeated by the same indivisible force. This is
something now which the scientists are also beginning to accept.
After the Eienstinian revolution, with Heisenburg’s Uncertainty
Principle, quantum mechanics, extra-galactic cosmology and other

20

dramatic developments, scientists are now looking for that one
unifying principle. They now realise that the dichotomies between
matter and energy are artificial, not inherent in the nature of
reality. And they are now beginning to veer round the view,
expressed many thousands of years ago, by the Rishis, that there is
only one power that permeates the entire universe.
Then take the Vedantic concept of the divinity of each
individual, that the Lord resides in the heart of every individual.
Individuals are referred to in the Upanishads as ‘Amritasya
Putrah'—Children of Immortality. What a great, noble concept
this is. If God exists, of course God is divine, there is nothing
unusual about it. But our Rishis had postulated the inherent
divinity of each individual, hence the dignity of each individual,
hence the fact that each individual has got to be respected and
given the freedom to develop, to fan that spark of divinity within
him into the blazing fire of spiritual realisation.
Let us move onwards from that to the concept of ‘Vassudhava
Kutumbakam', the world as family, Parliament is our highest
forum. On the first gate when you enter Parliament the great
Shloka is written.
fast:

This is mine, this is yours, the divisive view is a small and narrow
way of looking at reality. But for those of the greater conscious­
ness, the world is a family. What a marvellous concept this is for
global society that is emerging. These are the sort of values that we
have, inherent in our culture.

I will give you another example, the essential unity of all
religions.

The Rig Veda says that the truth is one, although the wise may call
it by many names. I take part now in many inter-religious,
inter-faith dialogues. I come myself from a Muslim majority state,
-

n.,

C-J/O ' ' 1

COMMUNITY HEALTH CELL
326, V Main. I Elock
Ko.am.r.gnln
Bangui ore-560034

India

have worshipped at Muslim shrines from my childhood and have
been educated in Christian schools. As a neighbour of the Punjab,
I have worshipped at the Golden Temple ever since I can
remember. I have visited many of the great churches of the world.
It cannot ultimately be that all these great places of worship are
devoted and dedicated to different divinities. Religions may have
developed at different periods in humanity’s history, but if one
believes in an all—pervasive divinity, ultimately the goal has to be
one.

Today when in the name of religion hatred is being preached,
divisiveness is being preached, walls are being built to separate
man from man, we must go back to the source of our tradition
which tells us that these are all different paths to the same goal. In
the same way as rivers and rivulets arise from different parts of the
globe but flow ultimately into the same ocean, so do all the great
religions of the world have different origins but ultimately move
towards the same goal. This is borne out if you look at the mystic
teachings, whether they are the seers of the Upanishads or Muslim
sufis like Maulana Jallaluddin Roomi, great Christian mystics, like
Meister Eckhort and William Blake, or the great Gurus of the
Sikhs, they all sing of the same all-pervasive power, of love and of
compassion.

That is what we should teach our children. We are so afraid of
talking about religion now, that we have allowed the leadership of
religion to go into the hands of essentially backward-looking and
fundamentalist people. What we have to do is to recapture the
spirit of religion to re-interpret religion in the light of the nuclear
age, and to place before our younger generations the glory and
wisdom of our ancient wisdom. That is the role that our
educational system has to perform.
And a fifth concept of the Vedanta that I want to put before you
is ‘Bahujana Hitaya, Bahujana Sukhaya'—the welfare of all
sections of society. There are some philosophies which preach the
implaceble conflict between one class and another class, others
preach conflict between one religion and another religion, or one

22

caste and another caste. But Vedanta preaches the welfare of all
beings.
yfta-t: 77^ 77^ 777J Pkih-mi; I
5:73 vnr ■q^Tji

■‘raf&T raq nt

May everyone be happy, may no one suffer, that is the depth of
compassion in our scriptures. And the Buddha and Mahavira have
gone one step further, compassion not only for human beings but
for all living creatures.

We talk today of environmental values, of the destruction of
wild life and our eco-system. We have been taught in our heritage
that the earth is sacred, the rivers are sacred, the forests are the
abodes of the devas, because it is ultimately those forests that
capture water for us and make civilisation possible. So through
such great ideas and ideals, surely we can teach our children
desirable values. These are not values which are dependent on or
confined to any particular religion, these are universal values.
Therefore let us not be so afraid of our heritage that we refuse to
touch it. By neglecting the beauty and power of those thoughts we
deprive our younger generations of any impact of such ideas.
Today it is possible for a child to study from the primary to the
Ph.D level-18 years of education—and not once to be exposed to
these great ideas at any level. Are we justified in doing this? I
would like to ask this question to my distinguished listeners,
wherever they may be. Are we justified in imposing this sort of
intellectual and spiritual deprivation upon our younger genera­
tions? It is because of this distorted view that we have taken of
moral and spiritual values, that we find ourselves today, forty
years after independence, struggling in this wasteland.
These, then, are the four dimensions that we have to incorpo­
rate into any integral system of education—physical wellbeing in
the widest sense of that term; intellectual development along with
the development of aesthetic sensibilities; social integration
starting from the family and going outwards in widening concentric
circles until we cover the entire globe; and, finally, nurturing that
spark within us, the divine, which really makes us unique being
23

and which enables us to fulfil our destiny. It is only if these four
elements receive adequate attention in our educational system that
we can begin to call it integral, and that it can begin to face up to
the tremendous challenges that we face today.
Forty years is a tiny span when we look at the vast millcnia of
our history stretching back into the mists of antiquity. But in this
nuclear age time has telescoped and the growing aspirations of vast
millions threaten to overwhelm us and our unimaginative struc­
tures. What is needed not only in education but in all spheres of
national life is the capacity for clear and coherent thought, leading
to a carefully interlocking series of policy decisions aimed at
meeting the multiple challenges that we face. And education,
dealing as it does with the very texture of human consciousness, is
surely an area which must receive top priority.

Concluding Remarks
Let me conclude by saying that an integral education developed in
India can, in fact, become a model for other countries if it succeeds
in integrating science and spirituality, the inner and the outer.
With our unique heritage in both these areas stretching back into
the very dawn of history, we are in a unique position to develop
this synthesis and present it to the rapidly emerging global
community. That would be a lasting contribution, not only to the
free India that Sardar Patel and his colleagues strove so hard to
create, but to the broader world community of which India will
always remain an integral part.

24

PUBLICATIONS DIVISION
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION & BROADCASTING
GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
Media
2257.pdf

Export

Not viewed