Selected Thoughts of Swami Vivekananda on Education:

• Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man.
• What is education? Is it book learning? No. Is it diverse knowledge? Not even that. The training by which the current and expression of will are brought under control and become fruitful is called education.
• The very essence of education is concentration of mind.
• Complete continence gives great intellectual and spiritual power.
• No one was ever really taught by another; each of us has to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion which rouses the internal teacher to work to understand things.
• We may read books, hear lectures, and talk miles, but experience is the one teacher, the one eye-opener. It is best as it is. We learn, through smiles and tears we learn.
• Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making, assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library.
• Books are infinite in number and time is short; therefore the secret of knowledge is to take what is essential. Take that and try to live up to it.
• The education that you are getting now has some good points, but it has a tremendous disadvantage which is so great that the good things are all weighed down. In the first place it is not a man-making education, it is merely and entirely a negative education. A negative education or any training that is based on negation is worse than death.
• The present system of education is all wrong. The mind is crammed with facts before it knows how to think.
• We must have the whole education of our country, spiritual and secular, in our own hands, and it must be on national lines, through national methods as far as practical. Of course this is a very big scheme, a very big plan. I do not know whether it will ever work out. But we must begin the work.
• It is man-making education all round that we want.
• Our part of the duty lies in imparting true education to all men and women in society. As an outcome of that education, they will of themselves be able to know what is good for them and what is bad, and will spontaneously eschew the latter. It will not be then necessary to pull down or set up anything in society by coercion.
• Educate our people, so that they may be able to solve their own problems. Until that is done, all these ideal reforms will remain ideals only.
• It is one of the evils of your Western civilization that you are after intellectual education alone, and take no care of the heart. It only makes men ten times more selfish, and that will be your destruction.
• I would a hundred times rather have a little heart and no brain, than be all brains and no heart, ... he who has no heart and only brains dies of dryness.