What is education? In our culture we have come to understand education in terms of instruction. This means, having someone else instruct us. From the latin in-structurare, “in” meaning interior, and “structurare” meaning to structure. Therefor someone else is structuring our interior - building within us a structure.

But the word education, to educate, is actually derived from the latin “educere” to make known. From the Latin, ex and ducare, meaning to ‘lead out’. “Ex” meaning “out” as in ex-terior and “ducare” meaning “con-ducare”, “to conduct” to lead or to guide. “Ex-ducare”, to lead or to bring out to the exterior. So, indeed, education should be the opposite of instruction! It should be the process of taking what is already in our interior, our potential, our “true nature”, and letting it come to the fore, thus manifesting our interior in the exterior. However modern education is more about putting in than leading out!

The first and foremost question is then, when does this education actually start or when does this conditioning start? At the moment of conception would be one logical answer, from the physical point of view. Both parents to some extend and almost exclusively the mother ‘conditions’ the fetus with her physical, energetic, emotional and mental environment from the very beginning. But on a deeper level our previous existences have preconditioned our being, that expresses itself through a human form. After this a great deal of our conditioning and our convictions originate from our so-called ‘education’ and the value systems we adopted from the families and societies we live in.  

Yoga is per definition a system to rid ourselves from our primary and secondary conditioning and return us to the original state of ultimate un-conditioning. So, both yoga and education in its original (true) sense share a common feature: they are both a kind of an ‘unlearning’ process - a way of freeing us from what we have already learned, from that which binds us.  

Our current society has for many decades forgotten this fundamental reality. The consequences of this dehumanization of education are really disastrous for the lives of the individual as well as for society. The inability to realize these fundamental truths about a holistic human development has undermined the total social structure that we find ourselves part of. The older generations, which should play an essential role in unfolding and manifesting the innate capacities of the child, are carelessly exiled to ‘old age homes’ or institutions. The younger generation lacks a balanced development and the middle generation lives in fear of getting old, senile and being made redundant. 

The challenges we face are to redefine the roles and the functions of education – what should education be in a multicultural society such as ours, with its diversity of value systems? What and how can Yoga, with its thousands of years of experience, knowledge and insight into the depths of our own human existence, contribute to a new definition of education in an ailing society? On the other hand, can our current research into education systems contribute anything to the transmission and teaching of Yoga in our society?  

Where do we start? Yoga gives the answer: “If we want to improve our world, our society, we will have to start with ourselves.”