Educational philosophy of Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo

Keywords

Manifestation, spiritual development, and education.

Abstract

Swami Vivekananda believed education is the manifestation of perfection already in men. He did not think it a pity that the existing system of education did not enable a person to stand on his own feet, nor did it teach him self-confidence and self-respect. To Vivekananda, education was not only collection of information, but something more meaningful; he felt education should be man-making, life giving and character-building. To him education was an assimilation of noble ideas. Sri Aurobindo’s (1956) concept of ‘education’ is not only acquiring information, but “the acquiring of various kinds of information’’, he points out, “is only one and not the chief of the means and necessities of education: its central aim is the building of the powers of the human mind and spirit”. Aurobindo emphasized that the main aim of education is to promote spiritual development. According to him every human being has some fragment of divine existence within himself and education can scan it from each individual with its full extent.