Education as ‘Learning to Do’ and ‘Learning to Be’

Learning to Be and Learning to Do have to become two inseparable aspects of any education designed to help the human child to achieve life fulfillment. Modern education all over the world has so far concentrated only on the Learning to Do aspect. The high efficiency achieved by modern Western man, and the Japanese, in this field is the product of the discipline of physical science and its technological fruits. Our own country, though backward in this field at the beginning of the modern period, is steadily catching up since our political independence. When all our children, from the primary to the school final levels, apart from the few that go up to the university levels, will receive the blessings of education in modern science, reinforced by a wide range of technical training courses, we can expect to see a high level of practical efficiency in our nation. That will mark a tremendous augmentation of the human energy resources in our country, unprecedented in our long history. We have to take all steps to orient our current educational processes in the direction of motivating and guiding our students to acquire the energy resources available from knowledge, organization, and self-discipline. ‘The nation must acquire scientific pluck and genius’, said Swami Vivekananda even at the close of the last century. Our philosophy assures us that vast energy resources are present in every child; education is the tapas, the discipline, that helps in making them manifest, like the striking that manifests the fire already present in a matchstick.

Widen scope of education from "doing" to "being"
But, learning to do, if carried too far without a corresponding stress on learning to be, will result in distortions in the human psyche and in the human social situation. These distortions, and the consequent human unfulfilments, constitute the dismal shadow on the otherwise bright human horizon of the modern scientific age. Practical efficiency, resulting from the training of the intellect and the will, in a context of physical health and vitality and yoked to an endless pursuit of organic satisfactions, may lead to the stifling of the imagination and of the spirit of creativity, and a general sagging of spirit. This is already afflicting modern civilization, including the stifling of the roots of pure science by the charms of the fruits of applied science. It reveals the age-old truth that the pursuit of profit, power, and pleasure can be only counter-productive, can only lead man to alienation, sorrow, and unfulfilment, if carried too far and without the guidance of a deeper philosophy of man. Training of the imagination is necessary to foster creativity; it is the energy behind pure science, art, ethics, and religion. Referring to the importance of this faculty, Lenin said (V. I. Lenin, Complete Works, Vol.45, 5th Edition):

‘This is an extremely precious faculty. To think that it is only indispensable to poets is a mistake and foolish prejudice, It is even needed in mathematics, for without imagination neither differential or integral calculus would have been invented.’
The scope of current higher education in India and the world outside is thus severely restricted, due to its undue stress on learning to do; it has to be widened to include also learning to be. This is the only way by which the current situation of ‘human skill as the means’ accompanied by ‘human folly as to ends’, as remarked by the late Bertrand Russell (Impact of Science on Society, p. 120-21), can be transformed into human wisdom as to ends; and ‘it follows that’, he concluded by warning, ‘unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow’.

EXTRACTS FROM: Eternal Values for a Changing Society Volume III – Education for Human Excellence; 12 – Education, Science and Spirituality (Pg:144-145; ed. 1995)
This was the convocation address at the Burdwan University West Bengal on February 20, 1976.