In plain words
So in the system of education there are two things we must recognise first of all. ‘I am a man’: this we must believe. This is only half truth. There is another half truth; what is it? That ‘I am not a beast’. ‘I am not animal’ is half truth. ‘I am human’ is half truth. Only by the joining of these two does humanness become full. If we tell ourselves ‘I am a man, a man’ and behave as an animal, how can we become man? So we must drive out the beastliness that has entered into us. Without driving out that beastliness, however long, and however many courses of study you may study, it is of no use.
Within this education there are two chief subjects: commonsense is one, General knowledge the second. When there is no commonsense and General Knowledge, however great a man of science one may be, at times one may fall into some unrest. One whose Jñāna is full stays in full Ānanda. A small example. The one who discovered that the earth has the power of attraction was Newton. He was a great scientist. He was a very noble man. Ceaselessly, all his research went on from one angle alone. He was the kind of man who sat inside the laboratory and took that alone to be his world. In matters that belonged to this world he had no acquaintance at all. So this science too is of no use if it goes along one angle alone. Awareness is life. In all things one must take note for oneself. That is why some dangers too keep increasing. This Newton very lovingly kept a cat. He grew very much attached to that cat. When he went into his room and was thinking about some matter of research, this cat would come to the door and cry, ‘Myāv, myām’. Telling himself that the cat's crying was something of a disturbance to him, he had a small hole made in the door to keep it from crying. Whenever it needed to, it would slip through that hole and come into the room, and it gave up crying. He was quite satisfied. After some days the cat had two kittens. There was a single hole for the cat to come in; now, for these two kittens to come in, he thought he would call a carpenter and have two more holes made. The carpenter came. ‘Where must the holes be made, sir, and what for?’ he asked. Before, there was one cat, a big one. Now it has had two kittens. So he told him to make two holes. Then the carpenter said, ‘Sir, all three can come through the hole that is there, can they not? One after another,’ he said. Then Newton thought. Chī! ‘The brain he has, I did not have! The General Knowledge he has, I did not have!’: so he believed that he had learned a great lesson from him. So, when it comes to learning, it is not only from great men: there are a great many things we must learn from every person.