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Purpose

First things first, why do we really have education?

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During my time at Sholai, I experienced the pressures felt by teachers in an "alternative" school. One of the challenges of doing philosophy with children was that parents, educators and children did not think of it as relevant and significant in comparison to other subjects.

In many schools in India, ‘extra - curricular’ or ‘co-curricular’ activities have a limited time on the schedule. They are essential but not as important as science, math and language. How are we challenging this distinction between curricular and ‘extra’ and ‘co’ curricular? How can we bring about a paradigm shift in how we perceive a hierarchy in subjects?

Thinking about the ‘purpose’ of education may help us throw some light on these questions. For this reason, I refer to J Krishnamurti’s teachings from various books, articles and talks to emphasise the ways in which he envisioned the ‘purpose’ of education. To follow the dialogical pattern, I came up with questions of my own and use his teachings as responses (repeat: this is an imagined dialogue, with cited responses).

Imagined Dialogue

I share an imagined conversation with J. Krishnamurti as JK
‍
Q: What, according to you, is the purpose of education?

JK: The highest function of education is to bring about an integrated individual who is capable of dealing with life as a whole.

Q: How can we, as educators, enable a child to be an 'integrated individual who is capable of dealing with life as whole’?

JK: First, one must understand how the confusion in the world has arisen. It is because individuals have not been educated to understand themselves. Moreover, conflict and confusion result from our own wrong relationship with people, things and ideas, and until we understand that relationship and alter it, mere learning, the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction.

Q: What acts as a barrier to understanding ourselves?

JK: Children are being taught to conform, to accept existing values. To do this, is to condition children without awakening their intelligence. Education, on the other hand, is to create new values through the transformation of ourselves.

Q: How can I unlearn the way in which I teach children to conform?

JK: We can begin by understanding children as they are without imposing upon them an ideal of what we think they should be. To enclose them in the framework of an ideal is to encourage them to conform, which breeds fear and produces in them a constant conflict between what they are and what they should be; and all inward conflicts have their outward manifestations in society. Ideals are an actual hindrance to our understanding of the child and to the child's understanding of oneself.

Q: What is needed to ‘understand children as they are’?

JK: First of all, we must all imbibe the fact that each child is different in how they feel, how they express themselves and their interests (as we notice when we observe the diverse ways of being maintained by the adults in society). Expecting children to express themselves in a limited number of ways and to excel in a countable number of tasks would be unfair to how different we are as humans.

Q: Schools, however, expect children to excel in a countable number of tasks!

JK: Yes indeed! Moreover, what we now call education is a matter of accumulating information and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. Such education offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and, like all escapes, it inevitably creates increasing misery.

Q: So, what about the technical knowledge, the maths and the sciences?

JK: Technical knowledge, however necessary, will in no way resolve our inner, psychological pressures and conflict; and it is because we have acquired technical knowledge without understanding the total process of life that technology has become a means of destroying ourselves. Furthermore, throughout the world, engineers are frantically designing machines which do not need humans to operate them. In a life run almost entirely by machines, what is to become of human beings?

Q: Oh, there is so much to talk about! But, before we end, one last question: You had mentioned that the other reason for conflict and confusion is our ‘wrong relationship with people, things and ideas’. How can we have ‘right’ relationships?

JK: To begin with, an educator must establish a relationship with a student which is not hierarchical, authoritarian, but a relationship of mutual inquiry, study, sharing, communication, affection, love, and security.(1)

Know more about ‘right relationships’ from the section relationships

Citations

(1). The content for this dialogue was taken from Education and the Significance of Life, chapter 2, the right kind of education

Thinking Rhizomatically

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