Mystic Mantra: Schools should also teach compassion

Student stabs teacher over holiday homework” — Recently, this strange headline in a newspaper was most disturbing and shocking, and made me worried. I started thinking about the problem: What made the 16-year-old boy do this? This student in a private school stabbed his teacher in some village near Sonepat when she asked him for his homework. The teacher told the police that the student had not done his homework and when she asked him for it, he took out a kitchen knife from his bag and attacked her. She was stabbed at least three times in her stomach.

This is not the only case of violence between a student and a teacher. Such cases are happening in many schools and colleges where the students come to learn to transform themselves into educated and evolved human beings — that is naturally the main purpose of these institutes. But we need to understand that the atmosphere in most of these institutions is not very loving. A certain atmosphere of sacredness is required, and that is missing. What is encouraged in the name of education is competitiveness and ambitiousness, something very unhealthy for the human heart, though good for the mind and ego. Because of too much emphasis on competitiveness and ambitiousness, the whole world has become very violent and unliveable. Educational institutions are mainly responsible for this sad state of affairs. A young student is not being taught the necessary ways of love and compassion. He or she feels inferior to other students who are brighter. And the brighter students become the chosen few and many other students live
with a heavy feeling of not being worthy. The feeling of unworthiness creates hatred towards oneself, jealousy and anger towards others. Such students become unable to love themselves. And anybody who cannot love himself, cannot love others — a deprived person cannot give something to others if he or she does not have it.

This important aspect of education is missing in all schools, colleges and various institutions of learning. The solution to this problem is simple: Let teachers learn something that creates a sacred atmosphere in which the teachers are loving and compassionate and the students have reverence for their teachers. It could happen if both the teachers and students learn the art of meditation — meditating together should become a priority. If in ancient gurukuls, meditation did create this sacred atmosphere, it can create it today as well.

Osho suggests: Give your children meditation as well as thinking. Thinking will help them to be successful in the world, and meditation will help them towards success in the divine. Give them thought to sharpen their intellects, and give them meditation to nurture the sacred in their hearts. The most important phenomenon in the world happens where the sacredness of the heart meets the activeness of the intellect.

The enlightened mystic concludes: If we can help children to be meditative we can change the whole world — its energy, its consciousness.