Consequences of Limited Brain Development

The ineffectiveness of education today, therefore, can be viewed as resulting from focusing the brain’s activity only in narrow channels without also developing holistic brain functioning, particularly greater integration of brain functioning.

The limitation of this approach, according to Maharishi Vedic Science, is that students are deprived of the direct experience and understanding of the wholeness of knowledge and the wholeness of life; Natural Law in its totality remains beyond the range of their direct comprehension. Without this level of comprehension, individuals fail to develop the ability of spontaneous right thinking and action, abilities which Maharishi Vedic Science identifies as characteristic of fully developed brain functioning.

Evidence of the failure of education is everywhere: underachievement typifies the average classroom; most students do not wish to continue to higher levels of education; narrow thinking, stress, and antisocial behavior are widespread in educational environments and expressed in society. Students are not taught how to awaken their natural capacity to think comprehensively, behave responsibly, and experience bliss in gaining knowledge.

Consciousness-Based education offers a gratifying contrast to this unfortunate state of education worldwide. This approach gives every student the experience of unbounded awareness, which enlivens the total potential of brain functioning and thereby cultures the most complete expression of one’s creative intelligence in daily life.

The implication of the findings cited is this: Prevailing educational systems, in which students spend their crucial formative years in narrow boundaries of knowledge, without gaining holistic awareness in higher states of consciousness, must be judged as detrimental to the development of the total potential of the brain.

Inadequacy of Prevailing School and University Education
The inadequacy of education in the world today is acutely obvious. At the secondary level, the problems of school dropouts, antisocial behavior, lack of motivation, dullness, and even despair are symptomatic of the great frustration students experience when they are not educated to systematically unfold the unique creative possibilities latent within each of them.

Post-secondary education has its own particular weaknesses. The segmented and fragmented experience of studying separate disciplines and specializing in an academic field — without the concomitant experience of the wholeness of knowledge and the wholeness of life — not only fails to develop the brain’s potential; it actually hinders the development of the mature intellect and personality by directing students’ attention only to partial values of knowledge.

From the state of the world today, and from the quality of leadership in every area of national and international concern, it is clear that education is not offering the knowledge to actualize human potential. Educated people make as many mistakes and create as many difficulties for themselves and others as uneducated people. Graduates are ill-prepared to eliminate the fundamental problems in their areas of expertise and to structure the steps for balanced progress — socially, economically, environmentally, technologically, politically. They lack the breadth and depth of comprehension to spontaneously make decisions that will serve the progress and well-being of everyone.

In light of the enormous possibilities for human life detailed in Maharishi Vedic Science^SM, education everywhere today can be viewed as miseducative. Rather than giving students the knowledge and experience to live the full value of life, formal education restricts the students’ awareness to narrow boundaries, and in so doing prevents the total development of the brain in higher states of consciousness.