The portrait hangs in the corridor of countless Indian schools. A young monk in a saffron turban, arms folded, looks past whoever walks by. Under him, in painted letters gone soft with monsoon damp, is the line about education being the manifestation of the perfection already in man. On a winter morning the corridor smells of phenyl and chalk dust. Through the barred window come the PT teacher’s whistle and the thud of forty pairs of white canvas shoes on dry earth. Then the whistle stops. The children file back in, flushed and loud, and are told to sit straight, fold their hands and open their notebooks. The portrait keeps watching.
What “already within” means
Swami Vivekananda was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta in 1863. He spoke for Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897 and died in 1902, at thirty-nine. He never wrote a book on education. His talks and letters on it were later gathered into a small volume by T. S. Avinashilingam, who wrote its introduction in 1943 from a jail in Trichy during the satyagraha. The famous line is there. So is a sharper one. Education, Vivekananda said, is not the amount of information put into your brain, where it “runs riot” undigested for the rest of your life.
Behind this sits Vedānta (the philosophy of the Upaniṣads), for which knowledge is not poured into a person from outside but uncovered from within. He reached for a gardener’s image. Nobody grows a plant. The plant grows by its own nature, and the gardener only clears what is in its way. In the same sense, he said, a child educates itself, and the teacher’s work is to remove obstacles. Think how strange this still sounds in a country of coaching centres and question banks.
Where he took the body seriously
Physical weakness, he said, causes at least a third of our miseries. In a lecture collected in Lectures from Colombo to Almora, he told young men they would be “nearer to Heaven through football” than through the Gita, and would understand the Gita better with stronger biceps. The historian John Rosselli has written about how educated Bengal in the nineteenth century came to see itself as physically feeble, and how physical training became tied to nationalism. Vivekananda’s call for strength speaks to that wound.
He also saw that a teacher teaches with a whole life, not only with words. His ideal was gurugṛha-vāsa (living in the teacher’s home), where a student grows up beside a person whose character burns like a “blazing fire”. Without the teacher’s personal life, he said, there is no education. Children learn by watching and becoming the people around them, and he knew it. He also held that the essence of education is concentration of mind, not the collecting of facts. That points towards concentration as something cultivated, and towards attention as a thing the body does.
What he left out
Read closely, the body almost always serves something else. Strength is wanted so that the mind can concentrate, so that character can form, so that the nation can rise. Football is a road to heaven, not a way of knowing in itself. His training of the young asked for strict brahmacarya (celibacy and self-restraint), which treats the body mainly as energy to be held in check. His language is the language of “man-making” and muscles of iron. The small child who learns by touching, tumbling and playing barely appears. Girls appear in a separate chapter, where their education turns on religion, self-defence and household skills. He argued for educating women when many did not, and that deserves credit. But the girl’s body is given a different syllabus.
This instrumental reading is where Indian schools finally landed. The body gets a PT period and a yoga session for better focus and better marks, and the rest of the day belongs to the mind.
Taking him more literally than he did
The position of this series is simple. If the perfection is already within the child, it is already in her hands, her breath, her balance, the way she leans towards a sound. The body is not a casing around a hidden perfection. It is where that perfection shows itself. Manifestation means becoming visible, and nothing in a human being becomes visible except through a body. This is close to what embodied cognition now argues, and close to what Gandhi tried with education through the hand. Vivekananda opened the door. He did not walk all the way through it.
Go back to that corridor. The children come in from the drill, their cheeks hot, their legs still buzzing, and they are asked to become still before the real learning can begin. Above them hangs a promise that everything is already within. If we believe the words on that wall, why do we keep the child’s body waiting outside the classroom door?
Put it into practice: P43 Looking at one thing for one minute · P30 Mirror and shadow: learning by imitation · P51 Free play: what the teacher does while children play
Read next: R24 Ekāgratā: concentration that is cultivated, not commanded · R29 Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: integral and physical education
Notes
- Swami Vivekananda, Education, compiled by T. S. Avinashilingam (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math; introduction dated 2 July 1943). Chapters I, II, V, VI and VIII. Online at vivekananda.net.
- Swami Vivekananda, “Vedanta in its Application to Indian Life”, in Lectures from Colombo to Almora, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 3 (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama). Online at vivekananda.net.
- John Rosselli, “The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal”, Past & Present 86 (1980), 121 to 148.
- “Vivekananda”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, britannica.com.
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