by Satsvarūpa dāsa Goswami
by Satsvarupa dasa Goswami
We all know that education is for training tomorrow's leaders. But today's schools are little more than training grounds for criminals. Last year's U.S. statistics bear witness to the horror: 100 school murders, 17,000 armed robberies, 200,000 aggravated assaults against teachers, 2 70,000 school burglaries, and $600 million lost to vandalism. So where are we going to get tomorrow's leaders? From among these students at ISKCON's new academy in Vrndavana, India.
So many of today's social ills persist simply because we lack qualified leaders. Recently, of course, we have even seen many highly-posted political leaders exposed as complete incompetents. But then, if our society is materialistic and our education is materialistic and our leaders and teachers are all materialistic, how can we expect to produce a generation of spiritually strong adults-people competent to solve today's crises? True, we may hold technological know-how and university degrees in high esteem. But these things can't take the place of spiritual strength and purity of character.
If a young boy has no spiritual training, how can he have a sense of morals or know anything about God? And if such a spiritually ignorant person gets to be a leader, how can we expect anything but a criminal? So when His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada came to the West, he brought the gurukula, "the school of the spiritual master"-the school for real leaders.
Srila Prabhupada's first American disciples were eager to help him start the gurukula: we wanted our own children to get training in spiritual life from the very beginning. Most of us had come to Krsna consciousness only after twenty years of being misled. We didn't want our children to follow us in watching all kinds of nonsense on television, or in being chronically addicted to liquor, drugs, and cigarettes, or in growing up with a taste for mere temporary happiness and no knowledge of the next life. Also, we wanted our children to escape the disgust that cheating religious and political leaders had produced in us. So under Srila Prabhupada's guidance we started a school whose enrollment grew in a few years to more than a hundred students. Recently, I visited this school (in Vrndavana, India, its new location) and spoke with the teachers and students.
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