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Vol. XX, No. 4
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related with one's concept of a good social order. Similar character building is a part and parcel of the social system as it exists and as is visualised for the future.
Our democracy, our socialism, our secular values, our universal message of brotherhood, our republic's sovereignty itself depend upon the people of high moral values. So here one can realize the importance of value-based education. If we want man of high quality our planner must keep the ideals of Vivekananda in his mind.
Realising the importance of value based education Swami Vivekapanda, who was a century ahead of his generation said:
"We must have hold on the spiritual and secular education of the nation. Do you understand that? you must dream it, you must talk it, you must think it, and you must work it. Till then there is no salvation for the race. The education that you are getting now has some good paints, but it has tremendous disadvantage which is so great that the good things are all weighed down. In the first place it is not a man-making education, it is merely and entirely a negative education. A negative education or any training that is based on negation, is worse than death-By the time he is sixteen he is a mass of negation, lifeless, and boneless. And the result is that fifty years of such education has not produced one original man in the three Presidencies. Every man of originality that has been produced has been educated elsewhere, and not in this country or they have gone to the old universities once more to change themselves of superstitions. Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and run riot there, undigested all your life. We must have lifebuilding, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library. "The ass carrying its load of sandal wood knows only the weight and not the value of the sandal wood. "If education is identical with information, the libraries are the greatest sages in the world, and encyclopaedias are the Rishis: The ideal, therefore, is that we must have the whole education of our country spiritual and it must be on national lines, through national methods as far as practical".4
One may conclude by saying that if education in India is to serve any meaningful purpose, the entire education system at every level should be over-hauled and re-structured. I suggest that the educationalists and intellectuals (not so called intellectuals) should come forward and they should give up the power politics of manipulation
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