In plain words
If all the good qualities are not fully there, they are not truly gurus. Good qualities, a good Buddhi, steadfastness in Satya, Bhakti, discipline, the keeping of one's duty: what teaches these is education; the student must learn them.
Teachers, embodiments of Prema! Students!
In this vast world, endless time is moving on at great speed, like a raging wind. Man gives up the body before he has recognised his duty. Every person needs to recognise for what purpose the body has come into being. This body is for the good of others: this body comes to us for the sake of doing karma. And if you ask for what purpose karma comes, it comes to make time sacred. We must try to set every karma of ours on the divine path. We must keep regarding every karma as spiritual, and only as spiritual. work will be transformed into worship.
So the teachers must first recognise the Satya of these three: the body, time and karma. The body for the doing of karma, karma to make time sacred: these two points we must keep in our hearts always. What takes man to the highest state or to the lowest state is man's own karma. Karma is like a mirror. Just as a mirror set before us shows our looks, so in every karma a man does it keeps giving us back reflections of good and bad.
Some people look perfectly calm before they begin a piece of work. As soon as they get into the work, they show irritation and anger. Others are full of all kinds of agitation before they begin the work. As soon as they get into the work, they do it calmly and enjoy it with sacred feelings. So it is in the work itself that a man's purity or impurity shows itself to us. That is why, in the Bhagavad Gītā: Your right is to action alone, never to its fruits. In every karma we do, the qualities that belong to the future show themselves to us.
At first it is very hard for us to enter into karma without desire. The right path is to pass from bad deeds into good deeds, and from good deeds to arrive at desireless karma. Karma is like a thermometer. As a thermometer can tell how much heat there is in a man, so the karma a man does shows how far the afflictions within him have cooled, how far they have grown, how far they have stayed as they were. So it is the very karmas we do that show whether a man is in the sāttvic guṇa or in the rājasic. Only when a man is skilled in karma, when he has entered into karma, when he is a hero in karma, can the divinity of our humanness be shown. A man who wishes and longs to see his own divinity through sacred deeds needs, first of all, one particular quality. That quality is character. It does not put up with bad conduct in the least. Not only that: it develops the readiness to act and keeps nourishing it with divine feelings. More than that, character gives social life its highest place too. And besides, it does not care to live for food; it lives for an ideal. A life without such character is no more than a dark house; that life is like a kite whose string has snapped. A life without character does not pass, like a rupee that is no longer current.
It is precisely because this sacred character has worn somewhat thin in the students of today that the colleges and schools truly fall into revolt. Besides, they swell with pride that they are educated, but they pass as people empty of discrimination. Today in education all we have is an acquaintance with books. But in practice, in conduct, we remain very far off. To develop character we are starting, and developing, the Sathya Sai Bal Vikas, the Sathya Sai Vidya Vihar, the Sathya Sai High School, the Sathya Sai Junior College and the Sathya Sai Degree College under those names.
We say, ‘the end of education is character’, but we do not try to find out what character is.