What is meant by "education"?
"Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in a man", wrote Swami Vivekanda It means to draw out a person’s inner beauty, a beauty that is a function of relationship. It translates into how well you relate to yourself, your friends, your community, the world, and the reality beyond all which we call God. Through the relationship and its harmony, an inner beauty will emerge. The word education comes from the Latin word "educare", which means to “draw out.”
To educate, therefore, means to draw out something that fundamentally is already there. In the process of education, you actually become aware of yourself! You grow, you transform and become the real you. Rather than simply memorizing a bunch of information, you absorb ideas that draw out the inner you and bring you into the world of relationships. As you discover your own inner beauty, you discover the beauty of all people from the inter-relatedness we all share.
Indoctrination is the complete opposite. Indoctrination seeks to put something into you, while education tries to bring something out of you! At the very early stages of education, we go to kindergarten (I never went; because the expense was far beyond my parents could afford at that time!) Anyway, Kindergarten comes from German and literally means a children’s garden! What kind of name is this for a children’s school? A better name would be kinder- workshop or, better these days, a kinder-factory(hahaha)!! But if education is likened to a garden, then the educator is really a spiritual gardener. A gardener interacts with a seed. If he has a pear seed, then he wants to identify it is as a pear seed so that it will become a pear tree. If he has a carrot seed, he will want it to become a carrot. An educator’s job is to create an environment that feeds you ideas that will nourish you in a manner in which you will grow and flourish. An educator only wants you to be who you are. While an educator is like a gardener, an indoctrinator is like a carpenter. A carpenter imposes his vision on a raw material, while a gardener sets his vision according to his seed; whatever you are, he wants you to become. To indoctrinate is to coerce. It involves imposing the teacher’s values—aspirations, identity and character—on the student, so that the student will become like the teacher and reflect the teacher. In the process of indoctrination, a conflict is liable to arise between the teacher and the student because the teacher has a message he wants the student to accept, even at the expense of the student’s unique identity and individuality. Because the teacher may be physically or mentally more powerful than the student, he is able to coerce the student to bend and submit to the teacher’s position. There are teachers who are brilliant in their logic yet coercive in their brilliance, rather than concerned with whether the growth is coming from the student. Conversely, the educational process starts first with a genuine patient and caring relationship with the student. To educate also is to communicate. Communication is not simply two people taking turns speaking. It can be one person listening and the other person speaking. What’s the difference? The word communication is from the same source as the word community. In an indoctrination experience, the teacher is imposing himself or herself on the student. The object is to impose the teacher’s views in such a way that they become the student’s own view. However, in an educational experience, the object is to communicate truth. Therefore, the teacher’s message will resonate from without and from within the student. The message the student hears is something that she would have heard from inside had she been open to it or had someone helped her to be open to it. When you hear truth it resonates inside, not just outside. And there is something inside that tells you that you knew it all along.
To indoctrinate is to impose, but to educate is to expose what is inside. The educator is simply sharing truth.
