Justice, peace and prosperity for all

“Peace can be achieved when the Power of Love replaces the Love of Power.” - Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, better known as Sri Chinmoy, an Indian spiritual master, in his book My Heart Shall Give A Oneness-Feast

Occasionally in life there are instances - a twinkling in time - of unutterable moments of realisation of the truth; and yet it cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words.

Their meaning, at best, can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. If there is to be justice, peace, and prosperity for all, an investment in knowledge is essential.

The people should be encouraged to possess a passion for learning because the direction in which education starts will determine the soul of a society, the destiny of a people, and that of the nation.

Education helps replace an empty mind, with an open mind.

A free education, like all else given free, is born of a real passion for progress and the belief that through growth the nation will see justice, peace, and prosperity.

This was the vision those leaders had who advocated and introduced free education.

They also believed in its power to change lives. However to achieve this end; a faith in real excellence and intolerance of failure of the system are essential ingredients.

When China is going through an educational renaissance, and when India is churning out science graduates; complacency on our part would be fatal for our prosperity: unless it is the intention of the authorities to turn our land into a source, a supply centre, for housemaids, sex workers, unskilled labour.

Yet, complacency seems to be the norm, impairing rather than imparting education.

Perhaps it suits the political purpose of our politicians to create a nation of empty minds regardless of the future of our economy and our society.

Mayhem

Ours is a land where warfare, violence, and all-around mayhem were the norm; and even though in reality we are not fighting, nor in battle with anyone as at present; the mind set of the psyche is still as if we are at war.

Thus, the atmosphere of confrontation prevails; the folly of fools abound.

When modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future, we in Sri Lanka remain without a future.

Man has produced machines that think and instruments that traverse the universe and peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space; and yet, we still follow a system of education our grandfathers followed.

Man has built air-planes and spaceships that dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere; and yet, we struggle to build lasting roads.

If the dazzling picture of modern man's scientific and technological progress is awe inspiring; and he has achieve spectacular strides in science and technology with still unlimited ones to come; we remain holed up and isolated in a land called serendipitous.

Something very basic must be missing in us; and that is nothing but due to the wrong system of our education.

Our education imparts a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to the scientific and technological abundance in the rest of the world.

For how long are we to remain thus?

Until the soul of our people remains in the black hole of the system we call education; until the minds of our rulers are fixed only on their love of power; and until the people have not learnt the simple art of living together as brothers and sisters; we will not see justice, peace, and prosperity.

The attainment of these goals require a people devoid of moral and spiritual poverty; a people in whom the roots of knowledge run deep.

Our people remain in the dark recess of their ignorance due to their inability to think clearly.

This incapability, this impotence, this inadequacy, is the result of our system of education: the result of a lack of spirit to invest in imparting knowledge.

Future

The illiterate of the future will not be the people who do not read. It will be a people, who do not know how to learn.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he does not need motivation to speed him up; he needs education to turn him around; and the most beautiful thing about gaining the right kind of knowledge is, no one can take it away from you.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions to confer: valuable knowledge, and the art of thinking rationally, logically.

Are they doing this, is the question? Thus, it is time that we became a people who: rather than keep doing that which had been, done before; start doing that which had not been, done before.Any delay in doing so is time wasted and a generation lost.

Finally, I would like to end this with a quote from Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, who was an American author and humourist: Anyone who stops learning is old, whether 20 or 80.

Anyone who keeps learning stays young.

The greatest thing you can do is keep your mind young.

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