Avidya means ignorance in the sense of spiritual blindness; vidya means knowledge in the sense of spiritual illumination. Vidya does not mean mere secular knowledge or scholarship; nor does avidya mean mere illiteracy & lack of information. Vedanta does include in vidya literacy & gathering information, & all forms of training in the mind for creative acquisition of knowledge - what is usually termed as education. But it holds that if this education fails to advance the spiritual growth & development of man, if it fails to raise him above the sensitive level, it sheds its avidya quality & becomes avidya; for vidya is that which liberates the human spirit from thraldom to the sense - ya vidya sa vimuktaye - & where it fails to do this it becomes avidya, in spite of all the intellectual knowledge & sharpness of mind gained from that education.

         The sensate man, guided by a self-sufficient hedonistic ideology, refuses to grow into the spiritually-aware man, in spite of his high intellectual knowledge & discipline. In spite of all the energy & movement manifested in his life & work, the life force has become stagnant in him; he blindly, because unaware of the divine within, & foolishly goes round & round in the very limited arena of the sensate world -dandramyamanah pariyanti mudha-as verse five of this chapter of the Upanishad will presently yell us. He is content to stay in this dark valley & is afraid to march up to the sunlit heights; by thus refusing to move forward he makes his vidya turn into avidya. By stepping from the main stream of evolution which leads to increasing awareness & fulfillment, he chooses a path leading nowhere, like some of the biological species, the insects for instance, which reached a dead-end in organic evolution.

         The Upanishad therefore does not condemn secular education in itself; but it expects education to be a continuing process. The building up of the sensate man & his ego is but the first step; it must lead the transcendence of this trivial finite man & emergence of the spiritual man endowed with clear vision, process. Like the chick breaking the shell or the butterfly coming out of its cocoon into the world wide of light & opportunity, man has to break through the shell of his sensate world which had nourished him so long, & continue his march to self-fulfillment in the infinite expanse of the trans-sensuous world. That is the opening of his third eye; that is the second birth. He then becomes a dvija, twice-born, in the language of Vedanta.

         Thus vidya is not education in the sense of mere equipment for bread-winning or world-gaining; it is this but also something vastly more; it is illumination. The English word ‘education’ can stand for the vedantic word vidya if it includes both apara & para aspects of vidya. But then it will cease to mere book learning, mere gathering of information, mere control & manipulation of the external world; it will mean setting man on the road to spiritual growth, development, & realization by an ever increasing discipline & control of the sense-bound man.

         Referring to the scientific approach of India to this spiritual education of man, swami Vivekananda said in his famous speech at the Chicago parliament of religions in 1893 (complete works, vol. 1Eleventh Edition, p. 13):
         ‘The Hindu does not live upon words & theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, & alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: “I have seen the soul; I have seen God.” And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles & attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realizing-not in believing, but in being & becoming.’