Albert Einstein didn't have a very good memory. - OSHO

 

I have been a
        professor in the
        university,
        and I have been a    
        student from
        primary school to
        university.

My own observation is that ninety-eight percent of the information that we go on throwing on children is utterly futile;
it is not needed at all. And not only is it futile,
it is harmful,
positively harmful.

Children are to be helped to be more inventive,
not repetitive which is what our education is based on right now.
Our whole educational system is geared to repetition.
If a child can repeat better than others,
then he is thought to be more intelligent.
In fact he only has a better memory,
not better intelligence.
It almost always happens that the man of a very good memory may not have very good intelligence,
and vice versa.

 Albert Einstein didn't have a very good memory.
Newton,
Edison,
and so many more great inventors,
were really very forgetful of things.

Once it happened that Edison even forgot his own name.
Now that should be the last thing;
can you imagine forgetting your own name?
Even in sleep people don't forget it.
If all three thousand of you go to sleep and I suddenly come and call "Rama!" nobody else will listen,
but Rama will say,
"Don't disturb me,
let me sleep!
Somehow I have managed a little bit, fighting with the mosquitoes,
and now you are here, calling me."
Nobody else will listen, but Rama,
even in his sleep,
knows that this IS HIS name.

Edison once forgot his own name.
He was standing in a queue during the First World War days.
He had gone to take his ration,
and when his number came and the man on the counter asked,
"Who is Thomas Alva Edison?"
 he looked here and there.
Somebody in the queue said,
"If I am not wrong,
I think YOU are Thomas Alva Edison."

He said,
"You must be right!
I was also a little suspicious.
The name appears to be familiar,
but I was thinking that maybe it is someone's name that I am familiar with, maybe some friend's name."

  But our whole education system is geared around memory, not intelligence.
Stuff more and more information in the memory,
make the man a machine!
Our universities are factories where men are reduced to machines. Twenty-five years are wasted - one third of your life - in making you a machine!
And then it becomes really difficult to unwind you again, to make you a man again.

That is my trouble, my work here.
You come as machines, very uptight,
full of memories, information, knowledgeability, absolutely in the head, hung-up there.
You have lost all contact with your heart and your being.
To pull you down towards the heart and then towards the being is really a difficult task.

But in a better world this will not be needed. Education should help people to become more and more intelligent,
not more and more repetitive.
Right now it is repetition: you cram whatsoever nonsense is told to you, and then you vomit it in the examination papers - and the better you vomit the more marks you get. There is only one thing that you have to remember:
to be exactly repetitive.

Don't add anything,
don't delete anything, don't be inventive,
don't be original.

Originality is killed, repetitiveness praised. And intelligence can grow only in the atmosphere where originality is praised. Efficiency should not be the goal,
but originality.

It was a school in the farming district and one morning Johnny came late.

"Johnny, why are you late today?" teacher asked.

"This morning I had to bring the bull out to the cow, teacher."

"That's no excuse," said the lady. "Couldn't your father do that?"

"No teacher," said Johnny. "You got to have the bull."

Meditate over it - you missed it!

And the last question...

Right, you got it...

--0sho--