Testimonial letter from Sw Abhudaya
This letter is one of a remarkable series of over 2650 letters amassed in 1983 to support Osho's attempt to get permanent resident status in the US at the time of the Oregon ranch. The image is reproduced here with the kind permission of The Oregon Historical Society. Information about their collection of these letters and other supporting material -- the "Jeffrey Noles Rajneesh Collection", named for Osho's immigration lawyer Jeffrey Noles, who compiled them in 1983 and donated them to the OHS -- can be found at this page. The wiki is grateful to the OHS for making access available for these documents. For more information and links to all the letters, see Testimonial letters.
This letter is from Sw Abhudaya (Joachim Brandt). It is "Exhibit A-1713" in the Noles collection.
The text version below has been created by optical character recognition (OCR), from the images supplied by OHS. It has not been checked for errors but this process usually results in over 99% correct transcription. Most apparent "errors" are correct transcriptions of typos already in the original. The image on the right in the text box links to a pdf file of the original letter, it has one page.
 July 1, 1983 I studied "Theories of Education" and "Psychology of Education" as a Fulbright-Scholar during the academic year of 1968/69. I graduated from the University of Dortmund in 1972. The degree is somewhat equivalent to the Ph.D. I devised a highly approved educational program for the training of kindergarten teachers. The Ministry of Cultural Affairs issued a rule afterwards that all kindergarten teachers should be trained this way. Since 1974 I have been working as a lecturer. My special subject is concerned with the education of small children up to the age of 6-7 years. I’ve devised projects in that area. The research intentions are to find out the real basics of early education in institutional educations, like schools or kindergarten. The lecturing I’m doing covers the different theories in this subject. I’ve come to know about the work of Bhagwan through his religious books and the way of living of his disciples. During my stay in Rajneeshpuram, I had a closer look at the educational training of the children. I dare say: Dewey and his opinion in the "Education and Democracy", Helen Parkhurst, Kilpatrick, Steiner, Montessori, Bettelheim, has been completed by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. All authors and genious ideas of the European Educational Reformers would give their approval because they find their ideas transformed into reality. Not even that the ideas which had been partial are totally completed. Right now, German students start to write master-thesis papers on the outstanding work of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. These papers are accepted on the level of scientific research. Bhagwan's exceptional ability to get ideas across and to start them working is really tremendous. All I've done and worked on are smaller parts of this work. Look at the Kibbutzim-education in Israel and compared it to the training of the children in Rajneeshpuram, and you don't find the disadvantages of the Kibbuzim's. If you start and do some research, you'll end up and discover that all major categories of American and European theories of child rearing are put into practise. [signed] |
(Please note: We assume that the above letter is still copyrighted, but we regard its historical interest to constitute a Fair Use exception for publication in this wiki.)
