Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with 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 a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
Interpretation
Education should enrich one's understanding of life's complexities rather than just serve as a means to an end.
In this quote, Jiddu Krishnamurti emphasizes that the true value of education lies not in obtaining degrees or securing a job, but in gaining a deep understanding of life's multifaceted experiences, including its beauty, sorrows, and joys. He warns against the risk of pursuing academic achievement at the cost of intellectual and emotional dullness, urging individuals to seek education that enhances their awareness and appreciation of life rather than merely fulfilling societal expectations.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students to seek deeper knowledge.
The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.
If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.
If you have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud - you are all that, and that is love.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.
Children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations. Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up.
Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.
Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
...Started by missionaries in 1841, Punahou Academy had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites...It hadn't been easy to get me in, my grandparents told her (my mother); there was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps' boss, who was an alumnus (my first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race).
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