In plain words
The condition of the vice-chancellors in the university too is sinking day by day. Going round and round the U.G.C., with the right money not coming in on time, unable to bear the clamour of these teachers, the vice-chancellors too, in deep disgust, are trying to retire from their working lives.
Problems of this kind are growing abundantly in the field of education. The reason for this: an educational institution must have no connection whatever with the government. Only then will education come right. In the past, Sarasvatī Devī had no fetters called the bondage of government. Today they have bound even that Sarasvatī with the fetters called government. So this Sarasvatī has lost the freedom to move about at will. Ask any boy today, “What are you doing?” and this boy utters a fine word: “I am getting my education.” I am getting my education: I am buying it with money. Go to any private primary school at all: two thousand for the first class, three thousand for the second class; unable to pay money in this way, many are giving up.
When we study this education in this way, we cannot see what good comes to the world from it. Physically, in Dharma, scientifically and economically, these students have not the strength to understand it for themselves, and even the strength to enquire into it rightly has come to nothing in them. The principle of the great sages of ancient times was satyaṃ vada. The influence of today's conditions is satyaṃ vadha. Then they taught us to speak Satya; today people are killing Satya. For the problems man meets in daily life, the strength to face them, the strength and the power to rise up and challenge them, are not to be seen in education at all. That is precisely why the field of education is turning, day by day, into non-education. In such conditions, no fault of the students is to be seen at all.
Truly, students must enter sacred society and make the right effort to do the service it needs. Parents went through many hardships, had them taught many kinds of learning and brought them up to such a height; yet to these parents they offer no gratitude at all. They merely receive a degree, carry that very thing about as a bowl they call victory, and go to every office begging, “A job, a job!”: such a fate has become rife among them. We must win a strength of our own to stand on our own feet. Through our own effort we must build up our own character. Above all, the educated must become people of virtue and character.