Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), Today I would like to share a thought provoking excerpt from the chapter, \u2018The Greatest Resource \u2013 Education\u2019 from the book \u201cSmall is Beautiful\u201d, A study of Economics as if People Mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also as we begin today \u2018let us remember this about \u2018Attention\u2019.<\/strong> <\/em>Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Small is Beautiful<\/em><\/strong> <\/em>is essentially a collection of essays and speeches written and given over a number of years. This classic book was first published in 1974.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Greatest Resource \u2013 Education<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n All history \u2013 as well as all current experience \u2013 points to the fact that it is man, not nature, who provides the primary resource: that the key factor of all economic development comes out of the mind of the man. Suddenly, there is an outburst of daring, initiative, innovation, constructive activity, not in one field alone, but in many fields all at once. No-one will be able to say where it came from in the first place; but we can see how it maintains and strengthens itself: through various kinds of schools, in other words, through education. In a very real sense, therefore, we can say that education is the most vital of all resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Science and engineering produce \u2018know-how\u2019; but \u2018know-how\u2019 is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. Can education help us to finish the sentence, to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of values, of what to do with our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dark Ages: A perspective<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The essence of education, I suggested, is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own, a part, so to say, of our mental make-up. This means that they are more than mere formulae or dogmatic assertions: that we think and feel with them, that they are the very instruments through which we look at, interpret, and experience the world. When we think, we do not just think: we think with ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we begin to think we can do so only because our mind is already filled with all sorts of ideas with which <\/em>to think. All through our youth and adolescence, before the conscious and critical mind begins to act as a sort of sensor and guardian at the threshold, ideas seep into our mind, vast hosts and multitudes of them. These years are, one might say, our Dark Ages during which we are nothing but inheritors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We need to understand why things are as they are and what we are to do with our lives. What we learn by studying a particular science is in any case too specific and specialized for our wider purposes. So we turn to the humanities to obtain a clear view of the large and vital ideas of our age. Even in the humanities we may be bogged down in a mass of specialized scholarship furnishing our minds with lots of small ideas just as unsuitable as the ideas which we might pick up from the natural sciences. But we may also be more fortunate (if fortunate it is) and find a teacher who will \u2018clear our minds\u2019, clarify the ideas \u2013 the \u2018large\u2019 and universal ideas already existent in our minds \u2013 and thus make the world intelligible for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such a process would indeed deserve to be called \u2018education\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All subjects, no matter how specialized, are connected with a center; they are like rays emanating from a sun. The center is constituted by our most basic convictions, by those ideas which really have the power to move us. In other words, the center consists of metaphysics and ethics, of ideas that \u2013 whether we like it or not \u2013 Transcend the world of facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Small is Beautiful \u2013 A Study of Economics as if People Mattered; by E.F. Schumacher<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr.E.F.Schumacher was a Rhodes Scholar (1930) and studied economics at New College, Oxford. At the age of 22, he taught economics at Columbia University, New York. As he found theorizing without practical experience unsatisfying, he went into business, farming and journalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amongst the many positions that he held, he was the Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board from 1950-1970. He also served as the President of the Soil Association (Britain\u2019s largest organic farming organization, founded in 1946). He passed away in 1977.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can buy your copy on the link given below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n