The Importance of Right View in Education : หน้า 126/164

second significantly affects the mind. You can take any subject that you teach, whether it is math, or geography, or biology, if a student has wrong understanding, it does not cause that student (or you) to go to Hell. But right understanding is always better! In profound understanding, however, it affects our afterlife. If we don’t think there is an afterlife, for example, then it significantly affects the mind and whether or not you go to Heaven or Hell. This, in itself, has significance and can or cannot affect the mind. “This is called having the Right View because profound understanding is the Right View. If we can instill the right view into the student’s mind, then we will be able to change people for the better. The right thought also has common and profound meaning and so on, around the wheel, but we always need to think in terms of the ten right views. Teachers need to use the eightfold path to profoundly affect their students in the right way, but not to create thoughts that might direct them to use the wrong view. For example, in teaching chemistry, we do not want students to come away thinking it is moral to make a bomb, a gun, or to have an abortion. We can do this because we are basing everything on the right view. Right motivation has everything to do with good deeds, just as right understanding has to do with views of life after death. If we do this, teach this, then people will be reluctant to behave badly. Societies fall apart because they have not been educated in the eightfold path. If you teach the students the Dhamma, you will have given them the safety net for their lives. Because they have the right view, they will have the right thought, and so on around the wheel. Every time we lie, we deceive ourselves and we lose confidence in ourselves. We reap what we sow. Our speech should always be within the context of what is in the Dhamma. And, because the mind is clear, it is easy to be successful. Buddhists would not go into the wrong livelihood if they were taught the eightfold path as a child. They would simply not give people drugs, so they would not be available. And so, as teachers, we need to practice the eightfold path for ourselves. If people don’t tell you, you don’t know how to fix your habits. You must always think of your responsibility you have and the good that you do. The tradition in Thailand, when the children were growing up, was to gather around the grandparents in the evening and the children would tell the grandparents what good actions they had performed that day. This created good energy in the family and for the individual members of the family. During the rainy season (June through October) the 125