TEACHER'S DAY SPECIAL

A teacher has to generate that energy in oneself and handle it in one's work of educating the boys and girls that resort to him or her. A teacher has not only to instruct but also to inspire the students; he or she has to influence the life and character of his or her students, and equip them with ideas and values inspite of marks and percentage which will fit them to enter the stream of national life as worthy citizens. You have to do all these during the years they are under your influence after all “aap to GURU HO”

Let me tell you a short & simple story.

A father brought from the market two fruits for his two children at home; he gave one fruit to each child. The elder child (like my X-friend PRASHANT D SUPERSTUD) took the fruit, found it fine, straightaway went to his room, closed the door, ate the fruit, wiped his mouth, and came to the courtyard. The second child took the fruit (like my friend MANPREET SINGH), found it fine, straightaway went to his comrades in the courtyard and shared the fruit with all of them.

Between the two children, who is the truly educated one? The first one is very intelligent, but that intelligence has become mere cleverness due to being self-centered ; there you see just an individual, not yet developed into a person; but the second has achieved that growth into a person. He or she has spiritually expanded so as to think of others, care for others, and has developed the spirit of service. Here you can see the moral, ethical and humanistic development of the child. Every child must be 'helped to imbibe this kind of attitude, achieve this type of spiritual growth'.

The spirit of service is found so little in our society today. Go to any office; no one there expresses any concern for you; no one responds to you; you won't get what is your due, even your salary, or pension, for months together. Why? Because people dealing with the subject are not concerned about others; they have learnt to concern only with themselves and their self-interest. But in office of all foreign countries, I have seen this elementary virtue of the spirit of service; I have found a concern for others universally present. But, sadly, it is so little present in our country. The fault lies in our current education, narrowly conceived, as an instrument of mere individual ambition and advancement.

Our country will grow and develop; all this poverty and illiteracy will be removed, when we have more and more service-oriented people, people who are sensitive to the needs and problems of others, who respond to human problems naturally and spontaneously. This is the first great development that must come through education. We need to educate our children with the capacity to think for themselves; we have to instill into them the scientific temper and the humanistic temper.

Swami Vivekananda once said that,

"What we want is progress, development and realization. No theories ever made men higher. No amount of books can help us to become purer. The only power is in realization, and that lies in ourselves and comes from thinking. Let men think. A clod of earth never thinks; but it remains only a lump of earth. The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals.

 Increase of knowledge makes for increase of energy. Every student is guide towards knowledge; see that they do not confine that search to their mere text-books; stimulate them to go to the library, to study the original books, and acquire more and more precise knowledge, think over what is learnt, and discuss it with teachers and other students. The teacher, thus, not only teaches but also induces the student to seek knowledge by oneself. I met many foreign students, and what I realize is that these students doing this very thing; there is love of knowledge and the effort, to seek knowledge. And that is the meaning of the Sanskrit word for student: vidyarthi — arthi, seeker, of vidya, knowledge. That was the type of students and teachers that illumined Indian history, and created a rich and great culture, during the first 3,000 years of our history, before stagnation set in about a thousand years ago, from which we are now rescuing ourselves.

We have lost that hunger for knowledge at all levels of our system of education today; we have to capture it once again. There is at present only hunger for degrees and jobs.

Today, not only in our country, but in many foreign countries also, education is in a mess. Even American education, which has many good qualities, is in a mess, according to an American critic whose article I read few months ago;

'Education is 'that mysterious process whereby information passes from the lecture notes of the professor on to the notebook of the student, through his pen without entering the mind of either!'

As soon as I read it, I said to myself: I don't know whether it’s true in case of America, but it is absolutely true of our country! That is what we have been doing in the name of education. But today, we are a free nation. We must say goodbye to all this. We must 

have that kind of national awareness, citizenship awareness, which says to oneself.

'I salute the Guru who opens the eyes of one who is blind with the cataract of ignorance, by applying the collyrium knowledge.'

The teacher, the guru. That self-respect, and faith in oneself and in one's work, must come once again to our teaching profession. It is unfortunate that teachers in India lost faith in their own profession before our society lost faith in them. They must now regain that faith: 'I am doing a national work; I am engaged in nation-building, man-making; mine is a noble profession.' Once that faith in your own work comes to you, the nation also will recognize your dignity and worth and accord to you the honor that you deserve in society. That is why I stress this point that the national responsibility, the national role, of our teachers is of tremendous consequence to our country; and I hope all of you will re-educate yourself, and elevate yourself, to play that role effectively. I have used the word re-educate. In the whole of India today, we have many educated people, and most of them need a re-education by which they will become free and responsible citizens of free India, and a source of strength to our infant democracy.

So much more to say, but I’ll save it for another day.