Should Gita Be Taught In Schools?
Should Gita Be Taught In Schools?
Ramdas Bhausaheb, the Deputy Municipal Commissioner of MCGM decided that the knowledge and teachings of Bhagwad Gita will be imparted to students. The group believes that it will have a positive impact on students and will make them independent. The debate that started with making Bhagwad Gita as National Book of India has now turned into debate of including the book into school curriculum. Here, it is important to discuss whether in India, which is also known as land of diversity, would it be justified to include Gita in school curriculum? Should Gita Be Taught In Schools?
Yes
- Youth is the future of our country. Hence, they should be taught literature that instills good morale in them. Understanding Gita preaching will help them to make ethical decisions at every step of life.
- Television, movies and the Internet together expose students to violence, pornography and insanity due to which they are misguided in life. The spiritual teaching will make them intellectually strong and help them to tackle negative vibes.
- The true essence of Gita is in its substance. It is a book followed by many famous personalities in their life including Aldous Huxley, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi and many more.
- When non Indians can follow the teachings of book, then why can’t students in India be taught Bhagwad Gita?
- The thought process of today’s youth needs a direction. Their attitude towards work, parents and women need to be changed. This deteriorating value system can be improved by adding Gita in school curriculum.
No
- The fact is Gita is a religious book and including it in school curriculum will hamper justice and equality components in a democratic nation.
- A sensitive matter like this holds the power to agitate the entire nation. It can result in communal riots in the country.
- Gita is studied by many elder people, but still the results are not visible. It is important to provide practical lessons than theoretical.
- Gita and other religious books together should be included in school curriculum. They can be kept as elective for students who intend to benefit from spiritual books.
- Instead of including the whole book in curriculum, it is better to take small parts and include them as chapters in literature books. It will be a better way to impart right education to students.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Gita is a book that can help students judge what is right and what is wrong in life. However, students will be willingly to learn only if they respect the book. The respect towards Gita can end as and when the students will realize that a religious book of Hindus is given more preference over their religious book. If it happens, the very essence of including Gita in the school curriculum will end. No matter then how hard teachers try, they won’t be able to inculcate the teachings of Gita in students.
Discussion
- RE: Should Gita Be Taught In Schools? -Deepa Kaushik (03/20/15)
- Bhagwad Gita has good teachings and preaching which is not specific to any religion. It has nothing to be termed in the name of religion; yet we need to accept the fact that ‘Bhawad Gita’ is widely known as the sacred book of Hindus. India, being a secular state, it would be a matter of agitation throughout the country to introduce a literature considered sacred by a specific religion to the schools as a part of their curriculum.
It is appreciable and we cannot deny the fact that people from different religions who understand the neutral teachings in Gita, accept the book as a good value to be added into the schools. But the decision of a those few could not be accepted as the voice of every single person residing in the country. Any citizen finding the text to be inappropriate can slowly lead to undue frustration amongst the citizens. Communal riots and violence are nothing new to Indians. And such a decision would be an open invitation to the notorious elements waiting for staring riots.
We cannot deny the fact that every religion preaches only good values. It is the humans who have separated the values in the name of God. We also fail or overlook all those good virtues in the rage to propagate own religion and develop hatred for the others. All these come from the individual perception, however, the religion teaches the value of oneness and strength in bond. With this point of view, we would need to start with every religious book into the school curriculum.
It would be worthy to start teaching all the religious literature in schools at the same time instead of only starting with Gita. Knowing all the religion by every child would help in developing the sense of oneness within these tiny souls and could prove to be stepping stone in abolishing the religious biasness. This could be a very nice mean to curb terrorism across the world and could be a good initiation to get back the values of humanity back to the form. Still, we cannot expect the little kids to understand all the core meanings in these literature, and requires to be simplified, which could be done by the top authorities in the educational field.
These things need sufficient time to be incorporated to the school curriculum. It would not be apt to just pick up a sacred book Gita and add the same to the school curriculum. We definitely need to analyse the post-effects of this addition.
