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Jiddu Krishnamurti Thoughts on Education

We pass certain examinations, find a job, get married, have children, and then become more and more like machines. We remain fearful, anxious, frightened of life.

Is it the function of education to help us understand the whole process of life, or is it merely to prepare us for a vocation, for the best job we can get?

Education has no meaning unless it helps you to understand the vast expanse of life and 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 on a very good job; but then what?

What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?

So, while you are young, must you not seek to find out what life is all about?

And is it not the true function of education to cultivate in you the intelligence which will try to find the answer to all these problems?

Do you know what intelligence is? Is it the capacity, surely, to think freely, without fear, without a formula, so that you begin to discover for yourself what is real, what is true but if you are frightened you will never be intelligent.

Any form of ambition, spiritual or mundane, breeds anxiety, fear; therefore ambition does not help to bring about a mind that is clear, simple, direct and hence intelligent.
Jiddu Krishnamurti