March 2012.pdf - Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan

Editorial
Education sans
values = Kolaveri
he brutal murder of a school teacher by a
student in Chennai has shocked us all.
TThis crime has happened not in some
remote corner of a village. It has happened in the
state capital. According to the details available,
the boy belongs to upper middle class. What made
this boy stab a teacher to death What made him so
inhuman and brutal
It will be easier to assign the reason for this foul
murder to the individual pathology of the student's mind. But education is meant to
transform the baser elements in human psyche into their divine possibilities.
Education is to bring out the divine within. Even if we are to assume that the boy was
born a killer and sinner, the education should have refined him, transformed him
into a better human being. But let us remind ourselves that the assumption itself is
wrong. No child is born a sinner or saint.
Mythologies of a society are the most potential forces for directing that society into all
its highest possibilities. Hindu mythologies always emphasize that every so-called
sinner rarely by birth and mostly by circumstances, has always the potentiality to
become the greatest of the saints. Thus we have the forest robber Ratnakara becoming
the saint and primordial poet Bhagawan Valmiki. The very son of Hiranya – the
egoistic demon- became the greatest of the devotees of the Divine. It was the seed of
Hiranya that flowered into Prahalada. It is not accidental that both these
mythological narratives have sage Narada at the center of transformation. The seer
proactively intervened and transformed the lives of each of these individuals. Narada
was held at the point of a dagger by Ratnakara when the seer became the dacoit's
guru.
Yuva bharati - - 33 - February - March 2012