In plain words
If the children are to grow up as the finest sons of Mother Bhārata and as heirs to Indian culture, spiritual thoughts, words and conduct must grow in them. What is the fruit of studying mathematics well, if you do not know how to reckon? They will show the way to America, but they cannot find the way to Kāśī! The educated young men of today know algebra, but they do not know the area of their own house! They do drill, every day! But if they have to sit in padmāsana, they suffer. They are experts in botany, but they do not know the use of the tulasī. They make fine drawings of jackals and dogs, and yet they will not write their letters round. How can we believe that Indian culture will grow through the teaching of such people?
Teachers must come to know the principle of education and, from the heart, teach the tender Manas of boys and girls noble feeling, a path worth following, and firm faith. I know how much enthusiasm is bubbling up in the Bal Vikas students today, and what a sacred enthusiasm there is in their teachers too; but the teachers, for their part, still have to learn well the ways in which learning should be taught. In former days teachers, with a selfless spirit, would have the children learn verses by heart: with every word clear, the right way to pronounce each word, and even its root form. Not merely the meaning of the words saḥ and tvam: they would also teach from which root those words came. Today, thinking that learning it that way would be a strain for the children, or on the ground that the teachers do not know that very matter, they do not teach the root forms. So if the children are asked to read some difficult śloka, they are thrown into confusion; not only that, not knowing where to begin and where to stop, they get lost among the many meanings, misunderstand it, and prove that all they have read is useless.
Knowing the Letters
Not knowing where to divide a verse like ‘cintaku pulusu lēdu erracīmaku toṇḍamu kaddu’, if you take it to mean ‘the tamarind has no sourness, the red ant has a trunk’, how laughable it would be! ‘The tamarind has its sourness; the red ant has no trunk’: that is the right way to read the verse. Splitting the sentence ‘rāmunitōkapivaruḍiṭlaniye’ as ‘rāmunitōka, pivaruḍiṭlaniye’, one teacher, it seems, fell into confusion over who this pivaruḍu might be! ‘The desires for the objects of the senses are like the pakoḍīs of the market fair: the stuff is bad. The attraction is very great’: when I wrote this, our Kasturi, who does not know Telugu, did not know the meaning of that word (he knew what kōḍīlu are; not knowing what santapa was, he struggled over it) and had it printed in the Sanātana Sārathi as ‘santapa kōḍīlu’. Learning the form of the letters well is also very necessary. When I wrote and gave him ‘Śrī Rāmacandra taught spiritual matters to the host of ṛṣis’, Kasturi (he does not know the shapes of the Telugu letters very well) thought that in the word ṛṣi Swami, writing in a hurry, had put in one stroke too many; he struck it out and had it printed as ‘bushikōṭi’.