Many followers of Sathya Sai Baba think his promotion of human values is something extraordinary. Schools and voluntary projects have been started by them in various countries, and efforts are constantly made to introduce them into national educational systems.
Unfortunately, the values Sathya Sai presumes to teach are not human values as such, but are clearly explained to be divine values implanted, so to speak, in the human make-up. According to him, moreover, they are “eternal, fixed” values. He has created a fixed dogma for his followers, who dare not change anything for fear of offending him (self-promoted as the Divine Creator of the divine values themselves!).
He identifies them as being (only) five major values, using the most ambiguous and all-encompassing words ‘love’, ‘truth’, ‘peace’, ‘righteousness’ and ‘non-violence’.
All other values, his educational programmes teach, are sub-values of the five big ones.
Serious flaws and shortcomings on the ‘five human values’ doctrine include:-
1) These values exclude most important standards upon which modern, civilised societies depend: universal human rights, the specifically human (i.e. not God-given) value of justice, the human precepts of democracy, respect for the equality of women and social fairness.
2) The values are made to seem inflexible, God-given once-and-for-all ‘eternal ideas’, But no human values are set in stone – they develop with advances in morality and changes in civilised circumstances. Attempts at codification of moral values - especially the rigid kinds - have always led to suppression of people throughout history. There are natural, human reasons for this.
3) Their vagueness makes then useless as practical conceptual tools, and they are presented in a one-dimensional way without even trying to take account of the endlessly many nuances of real human behaviour, the moral dilemmas that arise and to which there are no simple answers (as Sathya Sai proposes there are).
4) The various values education institutions set up in the name of Sathya Sai Baba work in complete isolation from modern educational research, pedagogy and developing scientific understanding of the learning process, and consider his doctrine as sufficient and necessarily unchanging, immune to debate or modification.
5) Since Sathya Sai Baba insists that all teaching is worthless unless the teacher practices what is taught to the full. This disqualifies him as a teacher, because of his own many proven untruths, fraudulence, deceits, unaccountability, and the many crimes it is credibly alleged he has committed (for which he cannot be brought to justice due to governmental protection).
Teachers in the Education in Human Values projects and Sai Educare
Though well-meaning individuals support these ‘Sai Baba human values’, they owe it to society – and above all to children – to study the entire field of moral education and pedagogical research into child development and learning far more deeply, less doctrinally and allow open discussion and, above all, dissent where it is made on a well-stated and reasonable basis. So far, nothing produces by any of the Sathya Sai human value educators stands up as sound philosophy, or new ideas producing (independently studied) good long-term results or contributing any valid and tested insight and understanding into the questions of human values. The pedagogical method used combines ideas and techniques taken from other sources, such as story-telling, role-playing and ‘though for the day’.
To go further into this, they might consider reading:-
Cardinal_Failings_in_Sai_Baba’s_Human_Values
Human_Values_as_Common_Ideals
Sathya_Sai_Educare_fundamentalist_doctrine
