Man-making integrates education and religion

Mere intellectual growth, unaccompanied by this ethical growth, makes only for the fattening of man’s ego, of his raw ‘I’. Such an education tends to make him clever but not wise, a prey to tensions and sorrows, and may lead him as much to rascality, on the one side, as to frustration and unfulfilment, on the other. By sharpening his intellect without at the same time expanding his heart in love and compassion, that intellect tends increasingly to scorn all values except self-interest, and ends up in the stagnation of cynicism, which registers the spiritual death of man. This is more serious than physical death for one so high in the scale of evolution as man. This is the prevailing mood of modern civilization, especially of its intellectuals. It is a disease more deadly than cholera or smallpox, malaria or leprosy. This is the main weakness of education in the modern world, arising out of its lack of insight into the spiritual dimension of the human personality and consequent emphasis only on organic satisfactions and organic survival, which goals even physical science, in its twentieth-century biology, as we have seen, apart from the higher world-religions, treats as unworthy of man and relegates to the pre-human stage of evolution.

It is here that education and religion blend into a single man making process, the earlier and the later phases of the single discipline of human growth, development, and fulfilment. The Indian spiritual tradition does not identify religion as with mere profession of creeds and dogmas or performance of rituals and ceremonies; neither does it equate it with scholarship. Religious scholarship is only knowledge about religion; but religion itself is experience, it is spiritual growth, development and realization. Atma va are drastavyah – ‘The Atman has to be realized’, says Yajnavalkya to his wife, Maitreyi, in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (iv.v.6). The central theme of religion and its key words are, therefore, the same as in education, namely nourishment and growth, the spiritual growth of the human personality through spiritual nourishment. No formalism or creed or dogma can do this for man.

EXTRACTS FROM: Eternal Values for a Changing Society Volume III – Education for Human Excellence; 15 – The Philosophy of Man-Making Education (Pg:239-240; ed. 1995)
This was the convocation address at the Kanpur University on December 13, 1970.