True education should cultivate fellowship, peace, harmony, remove all narrow-minded thinking, develop broad-minded thinking and ultimately achieve harmony and peace in the world. The most important and fundamental principle of Indian culture is unity in diversity. Unity is something which cannot be explained, which cannot be understood by mere words. We can understand unity only through experience. True education is that which teaches unity of all existence. A fundamental aspiration which has been expressed in the form of a prayer in Indian culture is May everyone in the world be happy, may everyone in the world be free from all sorrow and misery, let everyone see good everywhere, let no one experience any hardship. Indian culture with great broad-mindedness prays for the welfare of all and not pray for the welfare and happiness of oneself and one’s family.
True education is that which will help us to get rid of narrow-mindedness, help us developing broad-mindedness and the feeling and sense of one family of all mankind. For broad-minded people, the whole world is their family. The fundamental cause for all tragedies and miseries and all catastrophes in the world is human selfishness and self-interest in the form of thinking of only oneself. It is My considered view that education is only that which helps us to grow from narrow-mindedness to broad-mindedness. The human values are those which add value to our life and personality and by experiencing and practicing which we get preciousness to our life. The highest human value is love. From this fundamental bedrock of love all other values arise. Love in words is truth; love in action is right conduct; love in thought is peace; love in understanding is non-violence.
The education will be complete if we teach our students how to love, how to accept, how to tolerate and how to be united with everyone. Education without true love is not real education. That education without love is only incomplete, it cannot be perfect. It is very very desirable that all of you discuss and deliberate on values and come up with a model of education which can be implemented anywhere in the world, but fundamental thing is to understand that the basis of all values is selfless love. In order to develop that kind of selfless love, we should recognise and realise the unity of whole creation, the unity of all existence. We may develop everything, we can have any kind of scholarship but if we don’t cultivate love, everything is useless. How do we teach this selfless love to students? By talking about it, we will not be able to make them understand. When we love them selflessly, they do understand what selfless love is. Therefore, first and foremost, we have to understand and practice selfless love. Through that we can easily understand the whole gamut of human values.