Why doesn’t the current education system create a Vivekananda?

Acharya Prashant
6 min readFeb 19, 2020

Every system is designed by someone, for some purpose. Can you blame the car if it doesn’t travel to the moon?

Why? Isn’t it a serious shortcoming that the car isn’t able to fly up to the moon? Why don’t you blame it? Because that was not the designed goal. The car is perfectly fine at doing what it has been designed to do.

What has it been designed to do?

It has been designed to be a terrain vehicle, it has been designed to horizontally scan the surface. So it does that.

What is the intention of the current education system?

The system is good, very good at doing what it has been designed to do. But what is the intention of the designer, must that not be asked? And when you ask the intention of the designer, you will have to ask, “What is your vision of the products of such a system?”

When you envisage a product of the current education system, what do you see?

And related to that is the question: Do you understand who is entering the education system? If you understand who is the one who enters the system, you would probably be nicely placed to see that who is it that must emerge from the system?

In other words: Do we know who we are, and therefore who we must be? The ones that we are is the input into the system, the ones that we must be the output of the system. Do we know who enters the system at age three or five? And therefore, do we know what to expect from the one who emerges at the age of twenty-three or twenty-five?

Do we understand both our fact and our possibility?

And is not education the movement from our somber fact, to our splendid possibility?

Must that not be the very definition of our education — a movement from the sordid, primitive fact of our existence to the glorious, splendid possibility of a liberated human being?

Education is what must connect these two.

But is that even the thought or the idea? Is that the intention? No, it is not the intention. I will tell you what the intention is.

The makers of the system think of the input as raw material and the output as the

Acharya Prashant