On 25 December this year, a day normally dedicated to love and universal brotherhood, newspapers carried two interesting articles. Normally lost in the general maze of political and sports news and the air of festivity surrounding the period, the topics broached in the unrelated articles had an uncanny congruence around them.
One of them was about a speech given by the Dalai Lama in one of the functions attended by him. “We should include in education the inner values without touching religious faith,” the spiritual leader asserted while delivering a lecture on Education for Wisdom and Compassion to Rebuild Nation, organised by the Seshadripuram Educational Trust near Bangalore. The Nobel laureate suggested that ancient Indian knowledge be taught as an academic subject, but without “touching religious faith”. The other article was a news report, tucked away in an insignificant corner of most dailies. In an attempt to promote values such as harmony, peace and humility, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had signed an MoU with the Ramakrishna Mission under which the Ramakrishna Mission, New Delhi has prepared a teaching programme. The ‘Awakened Citizen Programme’ , which has been prepared for both students and teachers, is a three year graded Values Education programme for students of class 6, 7 and 8. The significance of the two news reports lies in the fact that they seek to highlight, from two very different corners of India, a much neglected subject in a country once considered an apostle of lofty human ideals and values. Hardly any one talks about “value education” in India any longer. There are, of course, lengthy debates in the media and elsewhere which mostly tend to restrict themselves to the periphery – shying away from the “core”. We have a lot of cacophony on the so-called “Hindutva” effect on the society, with stakeholders pitted for and against the idea of “cultural nationalism” and what not.
However, we do not see television debates arguing if religion and the values embedded in them need to be brought out more and more in the public space as an antidote to the various social malaise that we see around us. We have the Parivar brand of champions crying hoarse on the various alleged threats to their religion – only to be countered by the Nehruvian socialists for whom religion is in itself a dirty word. The discourse on what potential “benefits” a true harmonisation of religious ideas can bring to the table is considered too unfashionable and staid a topic to be occupying the national mindspace.
In a world of give and take, opined Swami Vivekananda more than a century back, India has much to offer by way of the veritable treasures that are espoused in its religious beliefs. The all round moral degeneration that we see in the society around us could be effectively neutralized if the nation is fed on the correct dose of sound ethics and morality as articulated in different religions. We are yet to define a robust education system centered around the imparting of value education as derived from a harmonious interpretation of religious preaching – the kind of “value education” that provides the young generation of the country the impetus to be anchored in the right principles.
Not only for India, but for a world torn by strife and hatred, where turf protection is the name of the game, religion has always been looked upon either as a potentially divisive force that needs to be eliminated in its entirety, or as a means of establishing a cultural identity that can then be exploited as a political tool by dictators and democracies alike. The Dalai Lama rightly assessed the dangers of politicking of the value education process – hence the caution not to identify the contents with “any religious faith”. And the CBSE Board has gone right ahead to identify the body in the form of Ramakrishna Mission that boasts of impeccable credentials and integrity for the task.
In the backdrop of such a frustrating scenario, the baby steps taken by the CBSE or the utterances of the Dalai Lama may soon be lost in the myriad shouting of the beleaguered society, but they represent the right kind of thought which, if explored in the true spirit of egoless collaboration, has enormous potential in a world that prides itself on either ignoring or distorting religion.
