 Through the mystic eye, eminent personalities, from various walks of life, in conversation with Sadguru. This week features Shekhar Kapoor, globally recognized film director, media visionary and proponent on the future of new media. He is the best known for films including Elizabeth, Bandit Queen and Four Feathers, that have won or been nominated for awards including the Oscars, Baap Das and the Filmfare Awards. Mr. Kapoor is also involved in social and environmental issues and is working on his passion project Pani about the impending water wars in the world. In this episode, he explores the intricacies of the education system and the best methods to impart the learning process to children in this competitive work. Let's talk about childhood because when my daughter was, when she was four or five, she asked me a very similar question that you asked. She said, Daddy, am I living a dream or is this reality? So then I asked her, so you tell me. So she said, is the world that I live in, is it my dream or is it imagination or is it reality? So I asked her, you tell me and she said, it's both. It's my imagination and it's reality, both. But this question persists. Am I living a dream or is this reality? And I'm actually very afraid because it's such a subtle question. I'm afraid that as she grows, they'll take that question away from her in the way they educate her. So let's talk about childhood and education. And in the school, the Isha school, tell me, is that an issue, what you're trying to do here? Essentially, education is basically about enlarging the horizons of human perception. But unfortunately today, slowly education has shifted into a mode where people believe is about enforcing information. Heaps of information. Information is useful, it's useful in a certain way, but it's not going to make your life. It'll earn you a living. So right now, most of the education on the planet has become essentially a means to earn a living, not to enlarge your horizons. So here at Isha Home School, education is about enlarging your horizons. So this is not about giving them ready-made answers as information. This is to have an active intelligence which constantly searches and seeks and looks at everything in every possible way. Above all, to know the joy of wondering about life, not having ready-made answers for everything. Ready-made answers are religion. And so the question everybody is going to ask you is, in this highly competitive world, are you saying that they'll come out non-competitive? Or they will have such awareness that they'll make them become even more, their ability to deal with this world will be more precise. Suppose you and me are walking and you're in competition with me, you will either get to walk slightly faster than me or probably less than me and feel depressed about it. If you walk little faster than me, you are going to be thinking you've reached the peak of your life. If you fall behind me, you'll feel depressed that you can't walk as fast as me. But if you're not in competition with myself, you would explore the possibilities of what you could do and maybe we don't know you could fly. I can walk fast, maybe you could fly, but you will miss out the possibility of flying because you're in competition with me. All you want to do is take few steps more than me. So the very human potential is distorted because people are in competition. Right now people believe that you will not propel yourself to your fullest if you're not in competition, which is a very false idea. It's a very, very false idea. We have cultivated that in societies that you believe you will not reach your full potential unless you're in competition, not at all true. Actually, only when a human being is in a very extended periods of joyfulness, blissfulness, he will stretch himself to the limits and do what he could do to the fullest. When he's in competition, when he's in fear of failure, he will only do little better than somebody else. You're destroying the human genius through the process of education, teaching competition. It's all about getting two marks more than you're the one who's sitting next to you. In this mode of competition, only one can win. All others are losers, isn't it? It's a horrible way to create a society. What I'm saying is the gardener in this school is as important for us as the headmistress of the school. So that's what the children are constantly perceiving. We're not saying these things as philosophies, but that's the atmosphere that is set. The one who cleans the place, one who cooks for us is as important as the teacher who teaches you science or literature or runs the school or me who visits once in a way to give them a different perspective of the whole thing. Once you put one above the other, you are not going to know anything in this world. Your whole perspective is distorted. So that is the basis of competition, trying to put one above the other. Once you make one thing bigger than the other, one thing small, one thing big, one thing high, one thing low, one thing divine, another thing filthy, then you miss the whole point of existence. So the essence of education is to enhance your perception in such a way that you are able to perceive a blade of grass being as important as the coconut tree. It's not less important. It's different, that's all. Every difference that you find in the world, if you make it into a discriminatory process, that is what you're suffering a prejudiced world. Whether between races or nations or languages and cultures and even gender, every difference we have made it a discriminatory process and that has been our mode of education also unfortunately. So here at homeschool, there's what the most important part of education here is not taught. It is a constant demonstration. All the teachers are dedicated people. They're all volunteers, hugely educated, but they're all here to volunteer their full time, their life they're volunteering to make this happen for the children. So the key element of the school is the way everybody moves, the way everybody sits and stands and eats and does everything. Education, you have to follow some system, we are following ICSE, but the most important thing is the atmosphere, the ambience, the way it is. One thing you will see is the strength of the children, the mental strength of the child here is phenomenal. Today that is one thing that's missing in the urban schools, they're all becoming flaky. Competition will make them determined and focused in one way at the same time make them fearful of failure, fearful of you know, being less than somebody else. Here you'll see they don't have that at all in them. Every one of them is a king by himself. I noticed that. I've seen the children and I've saw these children, but I've seen other children. What surprises me mostly is that there's a certain sense of alertness in them. When I go back to urban areas, anywhere in the world you see children walking to school and there. There's that sense of lack of purpose I guess. Now I can't say I can't impose purpose on kids, but I have to say whenever I've seen kids from the Isha school, wherever I've seen them, completely alert. They seem to be going from one place to another with a sense of identity and sense of doing something. And I find that and with a lot of happiness it's not that they don't laugh. Getting to know something, moving into a new area of life, learning is always a joyful process. But unfortunately schooling is not a joyful process for most children. I must tell you this. When I was just in my sixth standard, the president of India died and we got two days leave. The school was closed for two days. We went to the school, then we came to know he's dead and they announced that it's holiday today and also tomorrow. So all of us met, me and my friends, wow the president died means we get two days. We didn't know this until then. Two days off. Suppose the prime minister dies, how many days? Chief minister dies, how many days? In our minds we're just killing the whole cabinet, one by one. If they all die this year, how many days off will we get? Why is school such a horrible place? Because learning is always a joyful experience for any human being. Or should be. It is actually. When you get to know something new, there is a certain invigoration of energy within you. But that's not happening in the school simply because of the way it is delivered. So that's the reason I started the school and I wanted that to be different, that people must be excited about learning. You won't believe it. At eleven, eleven, thirteen in the night some children can't sleep. They say, Akka, Akka please, Akka open the library. I just want to see this one thing. You know, this is the regular thing. I just want to, just Akka I won't spend time. Five minutes I want to just see. He wants to know before he goes to bed. He can't go to bed without knowing that now because it's always like that. So to keep that enthusiasm up, to keep that inquisitiveness up, longing to know, that is the job of the teacher. Knowing is a child's job. Here the teacher is just working to keep that up, the longing to know. So any special techniques you developed here in sense of, I mean I wish that I was taught mathematics differently and now, you know, at this age I'm obsessed with mathematics but I should have learned it that and all I can remember is the fear of maths. They're employing nothing very special as such because what I see is it is information versus inspiration. Here they're inspired. That's why you see them moving about with such energy. They're inspired. Information, if you have an alert mind you can gather anytime and today the way the technology is developing, you carrying all the information in your head is not any more relevant, you know. It's all there on the net. If you have an alert mind when you want it, you have it. They're doing very well academically also. And are you planning to open more schools? I thought because it's so much demand, we thought at some point we should open four, maximum of four schools in India, this kind. One in the westerns, this is the southern one, one in the western sector, northern sector and eastern sector. But opening a school like this will not happen because you build buildings. You have to get those kind of people who are committed to making it happen. That's always a challenge because dedication is the scarce material in the world today. Though we are enjoying that much in Isha, still it's a very scarce material in the world. Everybody is always doing something thinking, okay, what will I get? Not doing something simply because they love to do it. Those people are very small number. So we're talking about childhood innocence and its relevance to us as adults. I don't think a child is innocent. Oh, he can be very mean. Okay, if he doesn't get what he wants, he'll get very mean. The beauty of the child is he's flexible. That's all that needs to happen to the adult also. Not that he's innocent, ignorant, that's not the point. The point is that he's flexible. That's the most important aspect of the child. The same thing comes to the adult, he's also fine. Generally, it's become fashionable for people to say like a child. Somewhere they're thinking adulthood is evil, childhood is a good thing, you know? Child is just in the making. Adulthood is a real thing. Even so-called spiritual people go about saying, I'm like a child. So I keep asking people, do you really want to be a child? Suppose at the age of six your body and your mind stopped growing and you remained a child, is that a great thing? We'll call you a retard. Isn't it good you've grown out of your childhood? Because you made a mess out of your adulthood, you're aspiring for your childhood. I think adulthood is great. Do you think the children have that kind of perception that we then have to work towards? Do you think we need to uneducate ourselves? Do you think that the normal learning processes that we go through in modern day life is actually lessening our ability to become greater human beings or more perceptive? No, Shekhar, the thing is, what you know is not the problem in your life. The more you know, the better it is, okay? That's why you're trying to know. But now you're complaining, knowing is a problem, I have to unlearn. No, I wouldn't say that. Knowledge is not causing problem. You're identified with what you know. That is what is causing problem. If you learn to be not identified with what you know, all that you know, whether it is considered great knowledge or it's considered silt on the street, both are useful actually to live a life, isn't it? So knowledge is not the problem. You get identified with every bit of information that you gather. That is the problem. Identity is the problem. Knowledge is not the problem. So somewhere when you say, I want to be like a child, you're celebrating ignorance. And I'm singing, asotho masat gomaya and you're saying... No, knowledge is not the problem. Knowledge is not the burden. Identity is the burden. You get identified with limited things that you know. That is a problem. At that time, in a village there would be only one person who could read. I remember this when I had a farm in Karnataka. There's only one person who can read in the village. Everybody gets their personal letters for him to read, you know? A wife wants to read a letter that her husband has written. A postcard comes. She goes to this man and he has to read. So he reads and interprets it in a million ways that he knows. So just literacy was a rare thing because the necessary infrastructure was not there. And it looked like one strange mystical thing that somebody is able to look at the postcard and say all these things look like a great mystical thing. It's not difficult because we did not maintain that infrastructure of inward looking in the society. You did not cultivate that right from your childhood. Now it looks like a faraway thing. Suppose you did not know how to read and write. If you look at a book and somebody looks at a book and saying all these things, would look like a mystical process, isn't it? We haven't invested in that direction. So that's exactly what we're trying to build now. To build an infrastructure of spiritual process in the world. To give the necessary infrastructure because no society has invested enough towards the inner well-being of a human being. We have hospitals, we have schools, we have toilets, we have this, we have that. But we don't have enough infrastructure for the actual well-being, the inner well-being of a human being because your well-being and whatever else you go through. Your joy and misery happens within you. Your pain and pleasure happens within you. Agni and ecstasy happens within you. Everything that happens to a human being happens within you. For that we have not built any infrastructure. So there was a time there used to be... They say Krishna built about fourteen hundred ashrams across the country in the northern plains. Because he felt that's an infrastructure that's needed for the society to live well. So we don't have such infrastructure. What it like about issue of homeschool is... Hit it! The way they teach us. This is what we look up. What sort is it? You can easily answer this question. This one move can take lots of people out of your head. So what is it about the speech? I'd like to hold it. It's not an exact science, but I need you to be precise. Are you an architect? Yes. Are you an architect? No. I'm a taxi driver. What I like about teacher homeschool is... The exposure they gave. Oh my God! I was better as a child. It also one-hand homeschool. What you will regret is not the things you did which didn't work out. The things you'll regret is the things you didn't do. It is not the qualifications that you gather in your life which makes you who you are. It's the exposure that you get which makes you who you are. To what type of people, to what type of culture, to what type of world that you're exposed to is what is making you who you are. Anything that you push you, you will always remember. Anything that's imposed on you will never add to your life. This is the basics on which the school is structured. The child will learn not just to read and write. We will make sure that the child is exposed to every little thing. He should know how to fix a bicycle. He should know how to milk a cow. He should know how to cook his food. He should know everything. This is what trees look up. This is what it's about. They have to learn that, you know, they're a part of something much, much bigger than themselves. The school wants the child to find what they love and to use that to develop all the other skills that are necessary for this child to survive in the world. But I think the difference really is that you are with them all the time. There is no difference between home and school here. Your family. All the teachers who are here are dedicated teachers. They're not here for economic reasons. They're here because they want to create this. What I like about Asia Home School is that there's no competition.