NECESSITY OF VALUE EDUCATION
The majority of students today simply do not have a higher purpose of life, beyond personal profit, money-making, power grabbing and sensate enjoyments. Guardians inspire their sons and daughters towards individualistic gain and success through hard competitions. Teachers and coaching institutions help to create this eminently successful, individualistic and selfish giants with no concern either for others or higher values. When success and wealth is gained, the goal of education is reached and the selfish giants start ‘cheating’ each other in a highly competitive society where wealth and sensate enjoyments stand out as the final goal, and determinant of social status. This economic reductionism ends in Hedonistic Paradox by which peace eludes even after repeated sensate pleasures. Then begins a feeling of deeper frustration and purposelessness. Perpetual purposelessness leads a young man to drug addiction, which temporary gives a way of life to a young person. There are so many other inhuman tendencies may be brought out including large scale crimes and gun culture in our society.
What is the reason behind such an unfortunate state of affairs? The blame lies squarely on the elders of our society. We elders have not made our youths realize that youth is the right time to achieve big in life and earn great glory for themselves. We elders have not made them realize that if they do not achieve big things in their youth, they will repent in their old age for having wasted their lives! Old age comes to one and all; it comes to those who properly utilize their youth, it comes to those who waste their youth. But we elders have not made them realize the great truth that if they utilize their youth, their whole life will be one of fulfillment; if they under-utilize their youth, their whole life will be in vain; and if they misutilize their youth, their whole life will be a tragedy.
Now, to properly guide our young men and women, quite a good number of enlightened elders are required. But today, we have many elderly people who are old, only in years, but are still very immature in their mind. Life has added years upon years to these senior citizens, but experience has not added wisdom to their personality. When such is the case, who will open the eyes of our youths who are now blindly running the rat race; who will guide them towards a meaningful life? The future appears dark and unknown to these innocent souls. Who will light up the path for them?
In today’s education ethical values have been ignored. As a result, we witness the spiraling of social evils like bribery, corruption, tax-evasion, smuggling, lack of citizenship virtues like duty, punctuality, honest work for the remuneration one gets, and public spirit. The types, varieties, and range of social malpractices that our people indulge in today are unprecedented. In order to get rid of all these nuisance, we must pause and reflect upon this one great question: how to infuse human values into our national life and thus overcome our accumulated problems challenging our national aim of total human development.
The absence of ethical values which is referred above can be drawn from the life and teachings of moral leaders and our great national architect and path finder Swami Vivekananda. Swamiji brought the Vedantic vision of man as a creature not meant to be dominated by nature but to conquer nature. “The soul is not for nature, nature is for the soul.” His clarion call in the West was “Ye divinities on earth-sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is the standing libel on human nature.” Civilization is manifestation of divinity in man- Vivekananda told in Harvard University. Swamiji wrote to his disciple Sister Nivedita that “my ideal, indeed, can be put into a few words and that is to preach unto mankind their divinity and how to make it manifest in every movement of life”
Keeping the above ideal and teachings of Swami Vivekananda spread over his several volumes’ of work to infuse the concept of human values into our youths to become sensible citizens of our country, we conduct a value education programme by way of discussing modern science and the life of Swami Vivekananda. Besides, discourses by monks, patriotic songs and songs on Swamiji. Strategic Talks, Guided Meditation and distribute related literature among the participants.
