When you reflect back on your education, what do you remember? Are your memories mostly positive, joyful even, or are they largely neutral or even negative? Unfortunately for many people, their education was delivered in a way that did not manage to inspire our natural, human, innate curiosity for new information. What characteristics make the difference between those positive experiences and those that were less joyful or inspiring?
On another hand, some might raise the question of whether education should even be a joyful process. Isn’t it just hard work we have to get through to receive the benefits on the other side? Perhaps. But might there also be specific benefits to a joyful education rather than a “deadly serious” one? If so, what might those benefits be, and how might we cultivate them?
In that same vein, we must ask what the role of a teacher in the education process should be. Are teachers simply sources of information and instruction, or is there some more significant role for teachers to play? If we’re lucky, we’ve had teachers who have dedicated their lives to truly open our eyes to entire worlds of wonder and growth that learning makes possible. But that’s not always the case. As such, what is the most significant characteristic of exceptional, inspiring teachers? And how can we recognize teachers who embody this characteristic in the strongest possible way?
Sadhguru: “If you perceive something new, if you learn something new, it’s such a joy. But why is schooling such a pain? Somewhere, the way we’re delivering it, we have not looked at it carefully enough. We have not put ourselves sufficiently into it. When I was supposed to go to school, I did everything possible not to go there. So, when I thought of creating schools, I thought we must create schools in such a way that children want to go there. What is the point creating a school that a child doesn’t want to go?
Of all the different manifestations of human beings – the categories are getting more and more – a child is the simplest and the easiest to make them happy and joyful. With such a segment of population which is naturally joyful I don’t see why it is so difficult to create a joyful way of delivering education. There is substantial scientific and medical evidence today that if you remain in a pleasant state of experience, that is when your body and your brain works at its best.
So today there is data that a joyful way of existence, it will enable and empower a human being to a very high level of perception and performance. So, this is a must. “How” is the question. There may be many methods But one fundamental is, if you are not joyful, you’re not going to inspire anybody to be joyful, that’s for sure.
If we are joyful, whatever we do, whatever we create, we will make it that way, isn’t it? Without we being that, now if I say, “Let’s create a joyful education,” it looks like a very complicated problem. If you’re joyful, is it not natural that you will cook joyfully, you will serve joyfully, you will talk to people joyfully, you will do everything joyfully? Is it not natural consequence?
So the thing is,whether it is schooling, or business, or anything that we are doing is about how we conduct it now. “What will come out of it?” Whatever comes out of it, are we doing it in the most beautiful way possible? If this one thing is embedded in us, methods, various tools, all this… these things will come from experts. There’re many, many experts. There are a whole lot of people who have invested their life thinking through these things. We can use that. But to use these methods in a way that it works, we need people who are first of all, joyful, who know how to make their life beautiful. If you do not know how to make your life beautiful, this aspiration of making everybody’s life beautiful is not going to work.”
“The evolution of the teacher is the most important thing; everything else is secondary. Who delivers this is the most important thing. It’s not… We have not invested enough in that. Evolution of the teacher does not mean just more and more tricks about education. As a human being, if the teacher blossoms, becomes a joyful, loving, compassionate human being, above all, conscious human being – everybody has to strive for this, otherwise this will not happen. This is not something that’ll happen because you got a PhD. This is something that you have to work upon yourself.”
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