Highlights from Satish Kumar on "Holistic Education"

One of the World's 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People - Satish Kumar Speaks in Taiwan, China for the First Time
2014/3/24 (Mon) 19:00-21:00 International Conference Hall, Library of National Chung Hsing University

Registration: http://www.wutong.org.tw/tw/event/280-satish-kumar.html

Highlights video clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWo1k4jrbgk

Text source: Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden

I think we have forgotten what the word "education" means. We educate our students in universities as if they were empty baskets. We put countless pieces of knowledge, data, and concepts into these empty baskets.

But "education" does not mean filling an empty basket; it means bringing out what is already there. The word "education" comes from the Latin educare, which means to lead out what is within a person. Therefore, education is not limited to schools; education is a lifelong process, leading out what is within you throughout your life of learning. How will you use your life to lead out what is within you?

Every student is a seed. If you imagine carefully, the whole tree is inside this seed, and it is not only one tree that is inside this seed, because fifty years later, thousands upon thousands of apples will grow from this seed.

The farmer's job is not to tell this seed how to become an apple tree, yet almost all teachers do this. The farmer's job is to provide the right growing conditions: fertile soil, ample water, abundant sunlight, and a little fence to protect this seed, letting it grow into a tree. What the farmer does is love this seed, care for it, and dedicate himself to this seed. This is a simple and beautiful metaphor for education.

Every one of us is born with potential, just as every seed has its potential. We hope to get some help from schools, teachers, and parents, just as a seed gets help from the farmer. If you were born into a primitive tribe, perhaps you would not need school, because the whole universe is your university, and all of nature is your textbook, but we exist in a civilized society and need teachers and parents to help us embark on an adventure to find out who we are. Education is precisely a journey of self-realization, nothing else.

We have narrowed the meaning of education to obtaining a degree, passing exams, and then finding a job sitting in front of a computer in an office. We have not been taught that everyone is born with a special potential, and that life's journey is to discover and seek out this potential.

We are born with this body. This beautiful body is a magical structure, awe-inspiring. What is inside this body? There is the brain, thoughts, the heart, imagination, creativity. But when you enter university, you are told, no no no, the rest of your body is merely a tool for taking care of the brain. Our education is only about learning, learning the 3Rs: Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic.

These 3Rs are all learned with the brain, and the rest of your body - thoughts, the heart, imagination, and creativity - are not within the scope of education. The 3Rs are good, but not enough. Education needs to be holistic, replacing the 3Rs with the 3Hs.

We need to cultivate our Heart, Head, and Hands. If your heart has not been trained, educated, and developed, how will you face all the relationships that arise in life? Relationships are the key in our lives. We are not, as the French philosopher Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am" - this is completely materialistic and dualistic misguidance. I am part of a web of relationships. I do not live in my brain; I live in my relationships with all things. I am speaking with you here not because of this concept in my brain, but because you are here, because teachers have taught me something, because my parents brought me into this world, because the soil and the earth embrace me with her body and feed me with food and water. I am a mixture of all relationships.

I once met a great philosopher, Gregory Bateson, who asked me: "Satish, do you have five fingers?" I said: "Of course I have five fingers." "No, you do not have five fingers, you have four relationships, the relationship between each finger." He tried to teach me that everything is in relationship. How do you handle relationships? With friends, with parents, with partners, with children, with nature, with trees, with the animals and birds around you. School does not help us develop this part of life, and therefore such an education is not enough.

We need to train our hearts: how to feel compassion, how to feel love, how to feel generosity, how to face sorrow, loss, and the negative emotions that arise in daily life.

Our schools are producing thousands upon thousands of completely useless young people. One report pointed out that one in ten university graduates cannot boil an egg. Apart from using mobile phones and computers, we do not know how to use anything else. The hands are a magical gift we have been given. Through the hands, connected with our hearts and imagination, we can transform ourselves and transform anything we touch. With a piece of clay, our hands can turn it into a beautiful teapot; with a stone or a piece of metal, we can turn it into a beautiful sculpture; with our hands we sow seeds, scatter fertilizer, and then water, and you can see the seeds grow into big trees.

If we do not teach young people how to use their hands, what use is it if they only know how to use mobile phones and computers? They cannot thereby discover who they are or realize themselves. If you do not develop the abilities of the heart and the hands, you cannot bring your creativity and imagination into play. You just graduate from university, then find a job, and you have missed it just like that.

We need to know "who I am." An Indian philosopher once said, "An artist is not a particular person; everyone is a special artist." We are all artists. The greatest art is not painting a picture, building a house, singing a song, or dancing a dance; the greatest art is the art of living. We are all potential artists, but our education has not taught us to become true artists; instead, it has hindered our development.

Education is playing a negative role - suppressing and restricting our hearts. Success in life depends only on having a good job, publishing a few articles, and having a bit of fame. This is extremely narrow. What we need is a broader picture. Education is for self-awakening, and self-awakening is not just returning to the self, but living out the self. An apple tree can selflessly offer its fruit to everyone who asks it, without setting any conditions. If you want to learn unconditional love, unconditional giving, and unconditional generosity, there is no better teacher.

We need to learn from nature. The nature we learn about in school does not come from nature. You think you can see nature on television and search for trees on the internet, but you cannot learn nature through a screen or beautiful pictures. This is not true learning. You must learn in nature, walking by a river, by the sea, or in a forest, to experience it. Schools feed us knowledge but deprive us of the opportunity to experience.

Knowledge without experience is incomplete. When your brain has acquired some knowledge, you need to experience it, with your body, your heart, your senses, through your eyes, taste, and smell. Only then can your knowledge truly be understood, elevated, and made complete, because you have established a relationship rather than learned about an object.

Nature has been regarded as an object - how can we benefit by knowing nature? How can we conquer it? People in science, technology, and many fields are busy knowing nature in order to control it and use it. We think we can exploit nature to provide for human use. We act arbitrarily, as if we were the rulers of the world, and almost all beings other than humans are our slaves - they exist to be used by humans, and they must cater to human needs.

The concept of conquering nature must be challenged, replaced by the idea of living with nature as a partner. All living things on this earth are our family; the whole earth is our home. We are connected to everything in the natural world, and our giving and taking is a reciprocal relationship. But now, such a reciprocal relationship does not exist. Humans keep taking but rarely give back, resulting in climate change and global warming.

Many thinkers founded schools based on this understanding. The Indian poet Tagore did so too. He taught under a tree and said to his students: "You have two teachers. One is the human teacher, that is, me, and the other is this big tree."

What did the Buddha learn from the tree? Clouds, sunlight, birds, and soil - how are all things connected? How is everything connected? Everything is interrelated and mutually beneficial. The Buddha therefore proposed the theory of dependent origination: when this exists, that exists; all things are interdependent - this is the basic teaching of Buddhism, and this is also why "compassion" is one of the Buddha's greatest teachings.

All of us are interconnected and are not single, independent existences, and therefore we need to treat one another with compassion. If we are also connected to all living things, then we must also be compassionate to all living things. When we take apples, food, clothing, wood, or a house from nature, we say: "Thank you, earth." We do not take it for granted; we take with gratitude. Thanks to nature, thanks to the sun, thanks to the rain, thanks to the soil for producing food, thanks to the gardener, and even thanks to the earthworm. I take only the food I need and do not waste it.

This is the foundation of education. Education must be freed from the narrow thinking of books and computers and step out into nature and human community.

When you leave university, do not look for a job. You did not go to university to get a job, but to create your work. In Buddhist language, that is to create your own life. When you become someone's employee, you more or less need to follow the employer's instructions, and then you cannot become your own creator. You cannot follow your heart or obey your imagination. The bigger the company, the more rules there are. How can you express yourself? Therefore I tell students, go, create your work, create your life, become your own master. Serve no teacher except the greatest teacher. In fact, the greatest teacher is your heart, so follow your heart and create your work.

Our education should enable young people to be independent and self-reliant. When students graduate from university, they should be able to say: "Now I know how to live." University graduates should not have to look for a job that says "give me a job"; if no one gives me a job, I am unemployed. If a university education leaves you so powerless that you cannot create your own occupation, what use is such a university? This is the biggest challenge facing universities today - how to cultivate well-prepared young people with imagination, creativity, skills, thoughts, heart, and interpersonal relationships.

You must ask yourself: is the education you received helpful to this world? Does it make this world better? Or does it make this world, the economy, order, and the environment a mess? The big problems happening in today's world were all created by these highly educated people. Who led and participated in the Iraq War? Tony Blair, a graduate of the prestigious Oxford University, and Bush, a graduate of the prestigious Yale University.

If education cannot take responsibility for solving these problems, then who can? This is the challenge we face. Holistic education is about accepting this challenge, redesigning our education system so that our body, our heart, our thoughts, our brain, our hands, our whole body are connected to the world.