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Development in order to be enduring and sustainable must have a moral base. Development without a moral bedrock would only be lopsided, unjust and fraught with perilous possibilities. The engine of development is knowledge and technical skills which centres of higher learning generate and disseminate. It is incumbent that these centres undertake the same assiduous exercise in respect of ethical values also, for knowledge without value is content without form and value without knowledge is form without content. Therefore, our Institutes and Universities must be the creator and preserver of knowledge and value both and in the same measure also the destroyer of ignorance and disvalues. Our polity is secular in consonance with the spirit of our Constitution. Though ideally it purports to inculcate equal respect for all religions, scientific temper and rational mindset, in actual practice, it has somehow undermined the status and significance of religio-spiritual world-view. Life to be lived in all its splendour and richness must be guided by a holistic paradigm which is nothing but an integral synthesis of science and spirituality. It is the sacred obligation of education to work out this synthesis in a viable and effective manner.
Religion and education have one very conspicuous and identical role i.e. the making of man. Religion has always enjoined that man must overcome his animal nature and become one with his human essence. It has always exhorted that human existence; even though bound by a chain of causal nexus is free, for, causation and freedom are not contradictory. Therefore, man is a free agent of his own self-transformation. Man's evolutionary journey is not yet finished; he is an eternal pilgrim on the path of spiritual evolution. In fact, all religious practices have been evolved and prescribed with this end in view i.e., to propel man in his upward movement. Any society or civilisation, that ignores this evolutionary dynamics, is unwillingly digging its own grave. Education in India has always meant vidya i.e., that which liberates, emancipates man from ignorance, bondage and all kinds of conditionings and sets him free to ascend to the empyrean heights. Education and religion, therefore, if they come together, fuse with each other, may become a mighty, magic force of human transmogrification. In order to accomplish this objective, however, it would be necessary to purge religion of all its excrescences, its narrow and sectarian features, and its crude and mythical trappings. Every religion has a denominational shell into which its followers are born. Man cannot remain cribbed and cabined in this shell forever. The evolutionary urge must impel him to cra shell and emerge into the sunshine of the spirit in order to have a dialogue with his own existential destiny. Man, thus, is a twice-born being, the first birth is by necessity and the second by choice, the first into the physical world, the second into the spiritual world. Religion, therefore, has helped education a great deal by positing before it the highest goal of life. If education,
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Jain Education International
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| SR No. | 524606 |
| Book Title | Tulsi Prajna 2001 01 |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Shanta Jain, Jagatram Bhattacharya |
| Publisher | Jain Vishva Bharati |
| Publication Year | 2001 |
| Total Pages | 146 |
| Language | Hindi |
| Classification | Magazine, India_Tulsi Prajna, & India |
| File Size | 7 MB |