Ancient Indian Education

“Yastu vijnanavan bhavati, Yuktena manasa sada, Tasyendriyani vasyani, Sadasva iva sarathey”
He, who is possessed of supreme knowledge by concentration of mind, must have his senses under control, like spirited steeds controlled by a charioteer. (Katha Upanishad, iii,6)
The entire ancient Indian social organisation was planned on the principle that it should, in all its classes, ranks, and grades, offer the best scope for the development of the individual as its centre and chief concern. The entire Hindu view of like is, characterized by its instinctive ‘choice of realities’ of a particular order, the ideals and the spiritual as distinguished from the physical and temporal. Nowhere is this distinctive tendency of Hindu Thought more manifest than in the sphere of learning and education. Learning in India through the ages had been prized and pursued not for its own sake, but for the sake, and as a part, of religion, because a singular feature of Ancient Indian or Hindu Civilisation is that it has been molded and shaped in the course of its history more by religion than by political, or economic, influences.
Education was sought as the means of salvation or self-realisation. The result is that it is Religion that creates Literature in India and use it as a vehicle of its expression. Ancient Indian Education is also to be understood as being ultimately the outcome of the Indian theory of knowledge and a part the scheme of like and values. As the individual was the chief concern and centre of this Education, Education was also necessarily individual. It was an intimate relationship between the teacher and the pupil. It was not like the admission of a pupil to the register of a school on his payment of prescribed fee. The initiation of the student, called Upanayana, and elaborated in many texts, meant the teacher “holding the pupil within him as in a womb, impregnates him with his spirit, and deliver him in a new birth.”
The present work is intended to fill up a gap in the literature on the history of Education, which has not taken adequate account of the unique contributions made by Hindu Thought to both Educational Theory and Practice.