Acclaimed film-maker Shekhar Kapur asks Sadhguru if today’s systems of education place too much emphasis on the intellect. Sadhguru looks at how education right now is designed to turn human beings into cogs for a machine.

Full Transcript:

Shekhar: …as children… you’ve often talked about education… as children are we in a wrong system of education that leads us to be much more involved with the mind and the intellectual pursuit and… rather than looking for the larger experience that you’re talking about?

Sadhguru: Largely there’s no education in the world. There are ancillary units, supplying cogs to the main machine. Human beings are like fuel for a larger machine that we have created. You call it the economic engine, you call it the social things… See, the immediate needs of a society has to be attended to; sometimes we have to do it. But to what extent? The fundamental goal of education is to enhance human… human perception; that is the only goal. But today education means they made an accountant out of you. I am sure you were a bad one.

Shekhar: I was terrible. (Laughter) But I managed to convince people I was good. In my own self I knew I was terrible.

Sadhguru: (Laughs) That’s a con artist. (Laughter)

Shekhar: Accountant… A con-tant, yeah…

Sadhguru: So what I’m saying is we are trying to make something for something, something that we think is useful. In the larger scheme of things, as life, you becoming an accountant, you becoming an engineer, you becoming a doctor, whatever else, is not of great importance. Socially right now maybe there is an immediate need for somebody to keep accounts. We need some accountants. We can teach somebody a bit of accounts, but we don’t have to go on producing millions of accountants and lawyers and engineers, but today’s society we built like this, it’s a must, okay?

But in the real sense of term, as a piece of life, what is relevant to this life – your education is nowhere near that! Education is telling you your life is not important, you have to serve this society. What is a society? It’s just an assembly of people. But no, people are not important, society is important. Where is the society? I don’t see any society anywhere. I see this man and this man and this woman and this woman. I don’t see any society. I see only individual human beings. But people see a society, because they got a mi… a word in their mind. I don’t have words in my mind. When I look at people, I just look at people. Can you make all of them one? (Laughs) Each one is a unique creature by himself.

So ins… the very nature of life is such – every life – whether it’s an earthworm or a gross… grasshopper or this tree or this blade of grass, just anything, it’s only longing is to find its full potential. And that’s all it should be – that human being should find their full potential as a life. Not… Today we want to fight a war, we will make everybody into a soldier. Tomorrow we have a lot of sick people, we’ll make everybody into a doctor. Tomorrow accounts, day-after-tomorrow everybody is quarrelling, so everybody is a lawyer (Laughs). What I am saying is we are trying to make life serve something else. No, the highest manifestation here is life and life itself. Everything else, all social structures are here to assist and serve that. Unfortunately today we are enslaving life to serve social structures. No. Social structures must be made in such a way that they will serve life, an individual life, not social life. And education is a fundamental tool, but education is twisted in such a way. All education on the planet, if you ask me, is fascist, because it’s all about enslaving people to serve the needs of whatever a few people are thinking. They’re not even thinking straight, they don’t even know. They are also slaves of the same system.