Rigveda (5/5/2) directs that savants should nurture people with truth and knowledge akin a cow that saps its owners with its nectar like milk.
Swami Vivekananda was a critic of the modern education system; his educational philosophy was guided by the Upanishads.
With a stress on booklore, he firmly believed that education should facilitate character building, intellectual development, expounding growth manifesting into a rational and independent personality. He held the belief that with an existent soul in every person, all knowledge and powers are already vested in him and will only be revealed only on close examen of oneself.
Swami Vivekananda proposes- “A concentrated mind is quintessential for education.” For instance, it is only a well focussed scientist who can plan, experiment, analyse and reflect well to discover and expand the existing boundaries of knowledge. Hence, no matter the scholar is a teacher or a meritorious student or just any other inquisitive mind, he will have to work coherently to look for what is undiscovered.
For a life vested with success and peace its is important to be well-read, righteous and dutiful, and this is what eminent education provides, besides helping earning a livelihood. The Rishis thus dealt with knowledge and the education system both, to impart learning opportunity to the eager. A person who is empathetic to the society and understands its well and thus attempts to amputate the distortions of society with their teachings of truth and knowledge is only worthy to be a teacher or a sage.
Education is imperative for all round human development. Swami Vivekananda concurred, -“An education that can not enable an ordinary person to strive in life with the valour of a lion and does not help develop a character with integrity, dedicated to altruism is not well intentioned. Hence education should be such that could make a person self-reliant with self-respect along with deepening the intellect.
