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Krishnamurti and value education

Vinita Kaushik Kapur

The world is in such chaos that even if you deliberately set about to make the world more chaotic than it is you could not succeed.... And it needs a very sharp, clear, decisive, sane mind to resolve such a chaotic condition. I do not think such a mind can come about, except through religious perception.

—Krishnamurti, The religious mind, p. 4

Education and the human condition

For Krishnamurti, the means to religious perception is through scepticism, doubt and questioning, and this can come about through right education. All through his teaching years he emphasized the crucial and vital role that education can play in the creative regeneration of the way human beings think, and therefore live. Enquiring deeply into the nature of the mind, he posited that the aim of education must be to awaken an intelligence through which thought and knowledge find their rightful place. Such perception is religious perception. And it is only when the truly religious mind informs the values on which we build our daily existence that there is a possibility of a sane and orderly world, free from conflict and sorrow.

Education, as generally understood, is the movement generated by social systems to ensure their perpetuity through time. It is a process of imparting and acquiring skills for life, at home, in schools and colleges; it is also the total process of psychological imprinting that is absorbed and perpetuated in tandem with the acquisition of such life skills. Wherever human beings have lived in groups, they have created structures, both physical and psychological, in order to ensure the safe continuity and security of their offspring. Workable solutions, ways of being, of understanding the world, have been codified and passed on as a means of coping with inner (psychological) and outer exigencies. These patterns are mostly subject to the needs and requirements of the maintenance of power structures within societies. All new entrants to human groups must necessarily submit to these established structures. They must be programmed to fit into pre-determined and socially approved slots.

Education generally conditions the mind to accept these structures of society. Therefore, such a mind is unable to see beyond this socially constructed reality.

The process begins at home and continues throughout the life of a person. Societies are so particular about the maintenance of social order that deviations are kept in check through formal and informal means of social control. Those considered mad or wayward are re-oriented, even re-parented in order to fit them back into society.

Krishnamurti questions the very basis of this kind of education. He suggests that conditioned human beings can neither bring about nor participate in a society that is free and creative. Hence, for him, the most important concern of education is to help the child enquire into and understand the movement of conditioning as it expresses itself in the individual and in society, and thus be free of it.

In order to appreciate his vision of an education that can bring about deeply religious values, it is necessary to understand the nature of human existence as he saw it. For Krishnamurti, it was axiomatic that the human mind operates from a base that is made up of patterned responses, which themselves are the result of thousands of years of human struggle with nature and with the ever-evolving worldviews that make up our social environment. These responses are so deeply embedded in the fabric of our psycho-physical natures that it has become impossible to meet the movement of life without the filter of these pre-established means of cognition. These means manifest themselves in the way human beings think. Our thoughts are directly linked to the basic assumptions held by the society we are born into. There is a continuous back and forth movement of patterning between the conditioned individual and the conditioned society. And this is what sustains the system.

At a more fundamental level, human conditioning inevitably brings about a sense of fragmentation within the psyche, and separation from other humans, other social groups and from nature. The culture one is born into plays an integral role in the way the instinctive drives take shape, and the child is programmed to respond to fear and approval from a very early age. The personality created through conditioning is the constructed self, the prison in which one is held. Any ‘action’ that emanates from such conditioning is therefore based on a partial and fragmentary view of a given situation and of the totality of life. And being a constructed piece or ‘fragment’ that has been plucked out of a whole picture, it must necessarily lead to partial action. Partial, biased equations can never be balanced; by their very nature they will be in conflict with other fragments operating from similar backgrounds.

It is this kind of conditioning that has brought about sorrow, confusion and pain. The wars and battles fought over the territorial identities and interests of religions, nations, corporations and individuals; the escalating stress and misery in every field of life; the momentary relief and pleasure that act as buoys on the ocean of the constructed ‘me’, all these form the human condition—a prison from which human beings must find a way out if humanity is not to destroy itself and the planet we live on.

Enquiry and human values

The process of educating the mind is generally aimed at conditioning the intellect into predetermined ways; however, for Krishnamurti, education implies a process of un-conditioning. It is freedom from given ways of thinking that allows the mind to observe without a parallel biased movement of interpretation. In this kind of education, understanding the ways of the self is more vital than the accumulation of knowledge.

The whole movement of enquiry 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. (Krishnamurti, 1984)

Most of what we know as values are culturally defined ways of responding to life situations. Each social system has its own parameters for socially appropriate behaviour. So, depending on a multiplicity of factors, which include religious beliefs, customs, and the economic and political status of a society, the codes of conduct that are the guiding principles in one society may not be so in another. This is an anthropological truth. Several themes for enquiry emerge from this: are human beings doomed to live by a conceptual relativity where any value system is bound to clash with another unless it shares a common set of assumptions? Or are there values that are true regardless of time, place, culture or situation? Are there universal human values that will bring about an order that cannot be found through identifications such as nationalism, religion, sect and caste and political ideologies? Are there values that cut across the cruel lines of class division and racial discrimination? Is it at all possible for a mind born into the complex web of culture to ever be free of it?

In all the talks and dialogues he conducted over the span of more than half a century, Krishnamurti paid little heed to the details of cultural differences between societies. He examined directly the fundamental reality of the common human condition, the nature of man-made ways of thinking, and the universality of basic instincts as they manifest in forms like greed, fear, envy and the desire for security. Subservience to these movements is the cause of human bondage. He maintained that it was possible for man to be totally free of these bonds so long as he could hold them in awareness, without taking recourse to any means of relief. The moment the mind in distress seeks a way out, it moves away from the reality of its situation (the ‘what is’ in Krishnamurti’s terminology) and gets caught in another pattern. Thus, the original problem gets superimposed with another idea and in effect remains un-addressed because ‘Truth alone liberates, not your desire to be free. The very desire and effort to be free is a hindrance to liberation’ (Krishnamurti, 2002, p. 108).

How does one discover the nature of this machinery that keeps generating patterns within which we live as subjects? The first step is to observe one’s own mind and see how ‘cluttered and burdened it is with belief’ (Krishnamurti, 1999, p. 6). Krishnamurti points out the sheer absurdity of using systems of ‘belief as a hypothesis’ (Krishnamurti, 1999, p. 6). A mind that is enquiring must put aside faith, belief, tradition and the learned ways of man. ‘When a man is enquiring, he does not start out with a hypothesis, he has a free mind …. He is not bound by any fear. He starts out denying all that and then begins to seek’ (Krishnamurti, 1999, p. 6). The very enquiry contains the answers, but they need to be looked for.

It is thus evident that the mind looking at facts as they are cannot possibly look clearly through the prism of fear. Fear in any form bends the lines of perception towards that which will bring security. These barriers to seeing are created by the mind, which seeks security within the confines of thought. It is not physical security that prevents the mind from enquiring beyond known frontiers; it is deep psychological fear that does not allow the movement of seeing to go beyond the known.

‘Fear dictates conformity, fear dictates that I must imitate, that I must follow somebody in the hope that I shall find comfort’ (Krishnamurti, 1999, p. 8). So, one sets authority up as a guiding light that will show the way out of uncertainty. Thus we barter away freedom for certainty, which promises security but never delivers.

Krishnamurti held that mankind could and must become free of these layers of conditioned responses and come upon the nature of the mind in its natural state. It is ‘… only a mind that is free from conflict, free from problems, free from sorrow that can find out. And you must find out because that is the only way out of this misery, this confusion that we have created in this world’ (Krishnamurti, 1999, p. 7). Hence, meaningful education would be concerned with allowing for the flowering of this kind of intelligence, and not merely with building the intellect.

Academically, it is not very difficult to analyse relations within and between power structures in society. Sociological enquiry into the operating axis of power can reveal the underlying motives, the polarizations and struggles between unequal elements in individual or social schemes. All these and more are possible and essential as pedagogical techniques for the development of a clear mind, but for Krishnamurti, this kind of enquiry is still limited. Modern education stops short with developing the intellect alone. Enquiry must be carried further into the examination of the nature of thought itself. Thought carries memory and belief. It is the vector for the assumptions that further thinking is based on. Thought, in fact, is the attire of the self.

The thousands of years of human thought overflowing with a plethora of ideas explored to their logical limits and their ramifications—intellectual, emotional and, very concretely, physical—are apparent in our day-to-day living. Working from within these given paradigms can only lead to answers situated within these same paradigms. Is there a way of looking that operates from outside the circular confines of thought? If understanding the nature of thought is imperative to a clear seeing of the human situation, if such understanding is essential to coming upon a sense of the sacred, then learning about oneself is a necessary part of education.

Learning about oneself

Krishnamurti makes a distinction between learning about oneself and accumulating knowledge about oneself. Consistent with what has been said, learning about oneself is an awareness of our patterns, beliefs, hopes and fears, as revealed in our daily lives and interactions. Awareness brings its own order without taking recourse to imposing control over it.

The beginning of the religious mind is self-knowledge—not the knowledge of the supreme self, that is sheer nonsense. How can a petty mind, a narrow mind, a nationalistic mind, a mind that is begotten through fear, through compulsion, through imitation, through authority—how can that petty, shallow mind try to find out what is the supreme self? To seek the supreme self is an escape; it is pure unadulterated romanticism. The fact is—you have to understand yourself first. (Krishnamurti, 1999, p. 9)

The task involves the art of looking, listening and observing choicelessly, neither denying nor accepting what is revealed through such observation. The mind must watch its own functioning to understand the ways of the constructed self. Can the educator learn and help the child learn to observe the myriad ways in which thought creates its own prison? Instead of pushing beliefs, whether religious or secular, as a priori premises for living life, can the educator place the multiple stimuli that storm the brain and senses, within an objective context? Can one learn to see clearly and without bias? In the classroom and at home, an atmosphere that invites the colourful variety in which life and man express themselves and still enables a holding of such questions, may inculcate an enquiring mind.

It is becoming more and more important in a world that is destructive and degenerative that there should be a place, an oasis, where one can learn a way of living that is whole, sane and intelligent. Education in the modern world has been concerned with the cultivation not of intelligence, but intellect, of memory and its skills. In this process little occurs beyond passing information from the teacher to the taught, the leader to the follower, bringing about a superficial and mechanical way of life. (Krishnamurti, 1984)

Relationship with nature

Relationship with nature is fundamental to the kind of education that Krishnamurti envisaged. Man’s relation to nature is perhaps one of the few areas where there is a possibility of direct perception without the interfering noise of thought. Children growing up amongst scrub jungle and animals, climbing trees and eating raw fruit have the possibility of touching and perhaps retaining a sense of being one amongst a ‘community of beings’ (Gadgil & Guha, 1997, p. 18), an inherent identity within the natural world that is man’s genetic inheritance.

With the Industrial Revolution, there has been an accelerating separation between man and nature. From being in a state of participation with nature, mankind now sees itself as manipulator of the natural world. The resulting alienation has brought about the near destruction of the planet. Simultaneously, it has consigned mankind to a state of psychological alienation, where humans are divorced from their real and simple roots. They have become creatures of thought, occupied with creating and solving abstract problems that work well only within the parameters of mental logic.

Therefore, Krishnamurti repeatedly stressed the absolute necessity of a relationship with nature as part of education, in order to provide the ground for coming upon “value”, which is an act rather than a concept. After all, to value something is to respect it, care for it and treat it with sensitivity. This cannot come about through the mere inculcation of frameworks and paradigms. Therefore, education is not just imbibing information from books or teachers, not just learning how to manage the examination system and achieve technical proficiency, it is also being vulnerable enough, ‘… to be able to listen to the birds, to see the sky, to see the beauty of a tree, and the shape of the hills and to feel with them, to be really, directly in touch with them’ (Krishnamurti, 1974, p. 14).

Nurturing the individual

Working with children demands awareness and attention on the part of the educator. It means seeing the child as s/he is, without measuring her/him against ideals dictated by one’s own ambitions or by society at large. To see the process of life as it is and people as they are without any distortion implies a denial of comparitive modes based on measure and mean, on better and worse, on success and failure. In today’s fiercely competitive, achievement-oriented culture, this presents a formidable challenge. In terms of everyday life, this means being aware of one’s own conditioned responses in the process of dealing with children. Confronted with a child who is either conforming or reacting to conventional academic structures, a great deal of energy and understanding is needed to meet the situation adequately without judging the child through the social context that exists within the mind of the teacher. It means coming up with the response that addresses that particular child and helps her/him discover the movements necessary to actualize her/his own individual potential.

Individuality, Krishnamurti maintained, is not the same as personality, with its shifting identities. Any kind of identification born out of insecurity and comparison leads to separation. Through our present structures of competition and comparison, we strengthen identity and the alienation that inevitably accompanies it. Individuality, on the other hand, has to do with the inner grain of the person, her/his unique and specific dispositions. Individuality has its own movement of excellence and passion, which does not need competition and comparison to sustain it.

The role of the educator is to pay heed to the inner movements and feelings of the young—who, ‘if they are at all alive, are full of hope and discontent’ (Krishnamurti, 2003, p. 42)—and in awakening an intelligence that can see the myriad influences one is subject to. Each individual student needs to be helped to watch these movements within her/himself, to observe how personal impulses and ways of apprehending the world are deeply rooted in collective values as well as in one’s own habits and patterns. The educator may then guide that flame of discontent, not into reaction but into ‘self-knowledge and self-abnegation’ (Krishnamurti, 2003, p. 42). In this way, young people can be helped to break free from the ways of the self ‘… from the craving for self-fulfilment that brings endless conflict and sorrow’ (Krishnamurti, 2003, p. 29). Out of this may emerge the truly creative action of the individual.

There are dangers that inevitably arise in a process of deconstructing deeply rooted ways of being. Personalized and idealized interpretations of freedom emerge. The mind, freed from the grosser forms of social regimentation, reacts with a stubborn self-indulgence. Explorations into the pernicious nature of authority, combined with a refusal to use authority, and the withholding of reward and punishment which are generally used as a means of cultivating susceptibility to external control may leave participants in a psychological atmosphere where there seem to be no guidelines.

Like Ariadne’s thread, which showed a way through the labyrinth of Minos, the only possible guiding factor is the mirror of relationship. Quite apart from the overt modes of interaction, it is in the subliminal layers of the psyche that engagement with students really takes place. Even an intellectual acceptance of the fact that the use of authority is damaging to the process of education leads to a questioning of one’s own self-importance, and the possibility of being free of the burden of authoritarianism. Teachers no longer need to invest energy into projecting images about themselves. The result is an opportunity to develop an open and caring relationship with children who, through this means, learn the value of relationship without the need for dominance. This ground of relationship is where the teacher and the student are learning and moving together and understanding the process of conditioning. There need be no dichotomy between living and learning. There is not even a distinction between the teacher and the taught. In the field of life, teacher and students are both participants in an exploration into an arena that is common ground for them both.

In such an environment of love, there is little need for constructed ways of exercising the control commonly referred to as discipline.

Discipline is an easy way to control a child but it does not help him to understand the problems involved in living … with the right kind of educator and a small number of students would any repression, politely called discipline, be required? If the classes are small and the teacher can give his full attention to each child, observing and helping him, then compulsion or domination in any form is obviously unnecessary. If, in such a group, a student persists in disorderliness or is unreasonably mischievous, the educator must enquire into the cause of his misbehaviour, which may be wrong diet, lack of rest, family wrangles, or some hidden fear. (Krishnamurti, 2003, p. 33)

If an educator is able to establish such an atmosphere in the classroom, mischief and natural exuberance can flow together with the flowering of an innate sense of responsibility. Freedom and responsibility are generally perceived as antithetical. In Krishnamurti’s understanding, freedom means responsibility. ‘Freedom does not mean the opportunity for self-gratification or the setting aside of consideration for others’ (2003, p. 31).

The right kind of educator, aware of the mind’s tendency to reaction, helps the student to alter present values, not out of reaction against them, but through understanding the total process of life. Co-operation between man and man is not possible without the integrity which right education can help to awaken in the individual. (2003, p. 31)

Questioning value systems in contemporary India

Today, India stands at the threshold of a major economic leap. Links with global arteries of material nourishment are within reach. Affluence is no longer a far-off dream for a large section at the top of the ladder of wealth and achievement. The millions strung on the rungs below are scrambling to revise their technical skills in order to be part of this chain of wealth.

Yet, even as technical knowledge and skills outpace the best the world has to offer, stride for stride walks a spectre. Paradoxically, it is the spectre of our ancient heritage. Replete with the self-transcending wisdom of the ages, it also carries the most rigid and unblinking adherence to belief and tradition.

Deep cultural imprints, especially when overlaid with semi-tones of religious emotion and ‘truths’, can begin to masquerade as the real thing. Tradition and custom have a deep hold on the Indian psyche. Known practices rooted in belief systems may appear as prerequisites for a sense of psychological security, but are neither necessary nor mandatory stepping stones for ‘coming upon the sacred’. In fact, Krishnamurti has pointed out that the quest for security through these systems of thought is a barrier to clarity, and actually creates insecurity.

As symbols of the sacred, systems of religious belief lend themselves to a host of interpretations. They have been the receptacles of the human being’s need for something bigger than her/himself. And in the face of any disturbance, they seem to stand as guarantors for the elusive truth of the universe. In India today, religious values are being interpreted in ways that can provide a counter to the insecurity that social and economic change has engendered. New and varied inputs from the world pose questions that threaten old customs and beliefs. This has led to a revival of deeply separative trends as people cling to known ways that have, for centuries, been concretized in religious forms.

Any system of values, whether rooted in a set of religious beliefs, a vision of Utopia or in the ideology of the marketplace, creates divisions. The result is an increasing hardening of identities that can never reflect upon the very process of identification. In such a scenario, what economic and technological superstructures are we setting up? Factionalism cannot end with material comfort. And the invention of faster and easier ways of doing things cannot bring about an order that embraces a true appreciation of life on this marvellous and wonderful earth, where life can be lived in true freedom and dignity.

In Indian society, the most threatening divisions are between one religious identity and another, as well as that between a society rooted in religious tradition and one rooted in secular, modern values. Both approaches are partial and fragmentary. Each position is content to oppose the other and reiterate its own beliefs without asking more fundamental questions about the nature of the psyche, of relationship and whether there is something sacred that is not put together by thought.

Krishnamurti’s approach to the nurturing of values offers a possibility of moving outside the dichotomies of belief—secular or religious. He initiated the process towards establishing values that are deeply rooted in the sacred, in the truly religious. In contrast to other religious thinkers and educators, Krishnamurti provides no prescriptions and no methodology. He did, however, direct exceptional energy and passion into creating educational institutions in India, England and America. The Krishnamurti schools attempt to create conditions that may foster a spirit of freedom, enabling enquiry into the nature of the self because ‘… it is essential that education should above all, help the individual to understand his own psychological processes’. It is only on this ground that a truly religious mind can be nurtured.

A religious mind is a mind that has no belief, that has no dogma, that has no fear, that has absolutely no authority of any kind. It is a light unto itself. Such a mind, being free, can go very far. Then you will find out for yourself that extraordinary stillness of the mind—it is not an idea but an actual fact. A mind that is completely still without any distraction, a still mind, but not the romantic mind, a mind that is not begotten through conflict or through contradiction or through misery—it is only such a mind that is completely quiet and therefore completely alive, totally sensitive; it is only such a mind that can receive that which is immeasurable. (Krishnamurti, 1999, p. 18)

Acknowledgements

This chapter has benefited from the contributions of Kabir Jaithirtha and Alok Mathur, Krishnamurti Foundation India, who gently and patiently read the initial drafts and in the process assisted in elucidating Krishnamurti’s ideas. Revisions to the text have been based on their suggestions. Thanks to Usha Rao for bringing about order to the first draft.

References

Gadgil, M., & Guha, R. (1997). This fissured land, an ecological history of India. New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks.

Krishnamurti, J. (1974). Krishnamurti on education. Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation India.

Krishnamurti, J. (1984). Talk at Ojai, CA.

Krishnamurti, J. (1999). The religious mind. Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation India.

Krishnamurti, J. (2002). Commentaries on living, second series. Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation India.

Krishnamurti, J. (2003). Education and the significance of life. Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation India.