Osho,
Recently, in a radio address, President Reagan urged parents to get involved in their children’s education by insisting schools teach ethics, morality and values along with the three R’s. He said, “To me, a value-free education is a contradiction in terms.” Addressing students, Reagan said, “You are not only studying for yourself, but for your family, your community, your country, and your God.”
Osho, is this what education is all about? Would you kindly share with us your vision of education?

Ronald Reagan is not aware of what he is talking about. Education, to be authentic, must be value-free. It should not give you a certain kind of morality, ethics. It should not give you a belief in God and other similar lies.

Education’s whole purpose is in the very word “education.” The root meaning of the word “education” is: to draw out. Whatever is your potential, education is to help it come out of you, from the seed to the flowers. It is not the purpose of education to mold you into a certain pattern – that’s what Reagan is saying.

These words are vague. Let us start with “God,” because everything else is dependent on the concept of God. If every educational system schools, colleges, universities teaches God, that means they don’t teach you to think, they don’t teach you to doubt, they don’t teach you to experience. They teach you to believe in something you do not know.

If that is not hypocrisy, then what else can be hypocritical?

Education cannot be concerned with God, because God is the biggest lie invented by the priests. Moreover, almost half of the world does not believe in God. Communists don’t believe in God, Atheists don’t believe in God, Buddhists don’t believe in God, Jainas don’t believe in God. It is almost half the population of the world. What are you going to do with these people?

Are you going to deprive them of education, just the way the scout leaders have expelled their best scout because he refused to sign a paper in which he was to declare that he believes in God?

He said, “I do not know. How can I believe?”

Just a fourteen-year-old child has more sense than Ronald Reagan. What he says has sincerity, authenticity: “I do not know, so how can I believe? Give me experience and you will not need to ask me to believe.”

Rather than respecting him, rather than respecting his independence and freedom of thought, he was expelled.

Now, half of the world does not believe in God. What are you going to do with these people in your education system? Expel them? Then better be finished with all educational systems and just teach in your churches!

Nobody has ever been able to prove the existence of God. For thousands of years hundreds of theologians have been trying to find some way to prove God, but no proof has been found.

Education is the search for truth. I cannot start with any belief. Its basis has to be doubt.