I said, “Come with me, I have checked in the university register.” For twenty years he had been a professor in that university and he had not taken a single book from the library. I had looked into twenty years’ registers, just to check whether this man had ever had issued in his name even a single book.
He could not believe…when I took him to the library he said, “Where are you taking me?”
I said, “This is the library.”
He said, “But what is the point of it? What are we going to do in the library? How are you going to prove that I have not been reading?”
I said, “You just come in.” And I had those twenty years’ registers there, and I told him, “These are the registers for all twenty years and your name is not mentioned even a single time. And now I am coming with you to your home.”
He said, “For what?”
I said, “Just to see what you go on doing, how many books on modern psychology are in your home. I am giving you a chance: perhaps you have your own collection and you don’t come to the library.”
He said, “No, there is no need!”
I said, “You don’t be worried. I have been there this morning already – I don’t take chances. I asked your wife and she said, ‘That idiot, all he reads is the newspaper.’”
Education has created one of the most important elements of the generation gap. Teachers complain that students don’t respect them – why should they?
When addressing a meeting of professors, I said to them, “Every professor is complaining about only one thing: ‘Something has to be done; students don’t pay respect to us.’ And I am here to say something exactly the opposite: Something certainly has to be done, because no professor seems to be respectable. It is not a question of students not paying respect to you; it is a question of your own. You are no longer respectable. Why were you respectable in the past? – do you understand? You knew more. Today, students know more than you. Unless you remain ahead of your students you cannot be respected.”
Respect needs some rationale. Parents are continually complaining that their children don’t respect them, because children are no longer the old kind of children who were following in their footsteps. A new dimension of education has opened in this century which is not in the direction of the old. The old direction was simple: follow the elders, because they know and you don’t know. There was only one way of knowing and that was by experience. Naturally, the older person had more experience.
Now, through education, experience is not at all a necessity. By learning, studying, you can know as much as you want. Just sitting in the library you can know the whole world in all its dimensions, whatsoever is happening. You need not even move out of the library.