If we take the happiness away from every child and it has been taken away from everyone; yesterday it was taken from us and today we are taking it from someone else. the person from whom we take away his happiness will surely take away happiness tomorrow from his children. This has been going on for centuries, that children's happiness is taken away during childhood, and then those children spend the rest of their lives taking away the happiness of others. It is very dangerous infectious disease.
What are we teaching them in schools and colleges? are we teaching them happiness? we are giving birth their to sad, serious faces. We are producing a person who is sad and serious, for whom life is not a play, but a burden. Convocations in universities and you will find vice chancellors, rectors and deans all attired in their black gowns, standing like ghosts why are they wearing clothes fit to be worn at a graveyard? They are trying to create an atmosphere of great seriousness; something very serious is happening. Go and watch the faces of the vice chancellors and the teachers, they are all standing like stone statues. They are performing some very heavy task. And the only task they are performing, in fact, is that they are creating barriers to the bubbling, cheerful and flowing nature of life. They are stopping it from all sides. Yes, they are making it take a different direction, they are trying to turn a river into a canal. Water flows in a canal too, but have you ever looked at a canal and at a river? there is a fundamental difference: river has a life of its own, but canal does not. There once was a flow there, and the engineer has taken it where ever he wanted to.
We do not want men to become rivers we make them into canals. Our whole education is a way of turning man's river into a canal. The bubbling joy of a river cannot be there in a canal. We take away all the happiness : from the very childhood, the nature of the whole system is that the child should not become joyous about anything. This is a strange perspective because every parent wants his child to be happy. Yes but the parents want the child to be joyous and happy in their way. How can a child be happy in the way of his parents? No, this is a trick to impose suffering. It is a very deceptive trick. Parent say, " We want our child to be happy. We don't wish our child to be unhappy but he should be happy in our way." A child should be happy in the way of an old man!
Just look at it from the opposite side. IF all the power were to go into the hands of children, and they were to tell the old people to be happy in their way, then you would come to know how difficult it is for the old to become happy in the ways of a child. The children would tell you; " Jump, Leap, tip toe, break things, run, climb trees," and only then would the old people come to realise that this not their way to be happy. this is not joy, it is madness.
