The following quotations from J. Krishamurti summarize the educational
philosophy of Krishnamurti schools:
"The purpose, the aim and drive of these schools is to equip the child with the most excellent technological proficiency so that he may function with clarity and efficiency in the modern world, and, far more important, to create the right climate so that the child may develop fully as a complete human being. This means giving him the opportunity to flower in goodness so that he is rightly related to people, things and ideas, to the whole of life. To live is to be related. There is no right relationship to anything if there is not the right feeling for beauty, a response to nature, to music and art, a highly developed aesthetic sense. I think it is fairly clear that competitive education and the development of the student in that process—the pattern which we now cultivate and call education—is very, very destructive. You teach him to read and write within the present system of frustration then the flowering of the mind is impeded. The question then is: if one drops this competitive education, can the mind be educated at all in the accepted sense of the word ? Or, does education consist really in taking ourselves and the student away from the social structure of frustration and desire and, at the same time, giving him information about mathematics, physics, and so on? We must be very clear in ourselves what we want, clear what a human being must be — the total human being not just the technological human being. If we concentrate very much on examinations, on technological information, on making the child clever, proficient in acquiring knowledge while we neglect the other side, then the child will grow up into a one-sided human being. So we must find a way, we must bring about a movement which will cover both. So far we have separated the two and, having separated them, we have emphasized the one and neglected the other. What we are now trying to do is to join both of them together. If there is proper education, the student will not treat them as two separate fields. He will be able to move in both as one movement; in making himself technologically perfect, he will also make himself a worthwhile human being."
"Surely, a school is a place where one learns about the totality, the wholeness of life. Academic excellence is absolutely necessary, but a school includes much more than that. It is a place where both the teacher and the taught explore not only the outer world, the world of knowledge, but also their own thinking, their own behaviour. From this they begin to discover their own conditioning and how it distorts their thinking. This conditioning is the self to which such tremendous and cruel importance is given. Freedom from conditioning and its misery begins with this awareness. It is only in such freedom that true leaming can take place. In this school it is the responsibility of the teacher to sustain with the student a careful exploration into the implications of conditioning and thus end it. A school is a place where one learns the importance of knowledge and its limitations. It is a place where one learns to observe the world not from any particular point of view or conclusion; one learns to look at the whole of man's endeavour, his search for beauty, his search for truth and for a way of living without conflict. So far education has not been concerned with this, but in this school our intent is to understand actuality and its action without any preconceived ideals, theories or beliefs which bring about a contradictory attitude towards existence. The school is concerned with freedom and order. Freedom is not the expression of one's own desire, choice or self-interest; that inevitably leads to disorder. Freedom of choice is not freedom, though it may appear so; nor is order conformity or imitation. Order can only come with the insight that to choose is itself the denial of freedom. It is here one can learn about the movement of thought, love and death, for all this is our life. From ancient times, man has sought something beyond the materialistic world, something immeasurable, something sacred. It is the intent of this school to inquire into this possibility. This whole movement of inquiry into knowledge, into oneself, into the possibility of something beyond knowledge, brings about naturally a psychological revolution, and from this comes inevitably a totally different order in human relationship, which is society. The intelligent understanding of all this can bring about a profound change in the consciousness of mankind."
For more details reference may be made to:
| J. Krishnamurti, "Education and the Significance of Life" (Gollancz: London, 1954) |
|---|
| "Krishnamurti on Education" (Orient Longmans Ltd: New Delhi 1974) |
| J. Krishnamurti, "Letters to Schools: Vol. I & II"(Mirananda: USA, 1985) |
|
|
|
|
last
updated on Aug 30, 2008
Page Administrator
© Krishnamurti Foundation India
