Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
Interpretation
Education should enrich one's understanding of life's complexities rather than just serve as a means to an end.
In this quote, Jiddu Krishnamurti emphasizes that the true value of education lies not in obtaining degrees or securing a job, but in gaining a deep understanding of life's multifaceted experiences, including its beauty, sorrows, and joys. He warns against the risk of pursuing academic achievement at the cost of intellectual and emotional dullness, urging individuals to seek education that enhances their awareness and appreciation of life rather than merely fulfilling societal expectations.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students to seek deeper knowledge.
The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.
If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.
If you have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud - you are all that, and that is love.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.
Children should be allowed to express themselves in whatever way they wish without anybody judging them because it is an important part of their growth... Society always has something to learn when it comes to the way we judge each other, label each other. We have far to go.
I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training
The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.
So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.
I think children love reading, and they will make time for it if we put the right books into their hands. And I hope I get the chance to keep being one of the people that writes them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.