When the mind is without fear and head is held high.

It would be a crime to not mention Tagore on an education blog. A friend from West Bengal was instrumental in helping me realize it So, Sooner the Better.  

I recently found a very nice exploration of Tagore’s contribution by Kathleen M. O’Connell  titled ‘Rabindranath Tagore on education’ cited in the encyclopaedia of informal education . Thought of Sharing that..

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, was born into a prominent Calcutta family known for its socio-religious and cultural innovations during the 19th Bengal Renaissance. The profound social and cultural involvement of his family would later play a strong role in the formulation of Rabindranath’s educational priorities.  His grandfather Dwarkanath was involved in supporting medical facilities, educational institutions and the arts, and he fought for religious and social reform and the establishment of a free press.  His father was also a leader in social and religious reform, who encouraged a multi-cultural exchange in the family mansion Jorasanko. Within the joint family, Rabindranath’s thirteen brothers and sisters were mathematicians, journalists, novelists, musicians, artists.  His cousins, who shared the family mansion, were leaders in theatre, science and a new art movement. 

The tremendous excitement and cultural richness of his extended family  permitted young Rabindranath to absorb and learn subconsciously at his own pace, giving him a dynamic open model of education, which he later tried to recreate in his school at Santiniketan.  Not surprisingly, he found his outside formal schooling to be inferior and boring and, after a brief exposure to several schools, he refused to attend school. The only degrees he ever received were honorary ones bestowed late in life.

His experiences at Jorasanko provided him with a lifelong conviction concerning the importance of freedom in education.  He also realized in a profound manner  the importance of the arts for developing empathy and sensitivity, and the necessity for an intimate relationship with one’s cultural and natural environment. In participating in the cosmopolitan activities of the family, he came to reject narrowness in general, and in particular, any form of narrowness that separated human being from human being. He saw education as a vehicle for appreciating the richest aspects of other cultures, while maintaining one’s own cultural specificity. As he wrote:

I was brought up in an atmosphere of aspiration, aspiration for the expansion of the human spirit.  We in our home sought freedom of power in our language, freedom of imagination in our literature, freedom of soul in our religious creeds and that of mind in our social environment.  Such an opportunity has given me confidence in the power of education which is one with life and only which can give us real freedom, the highest that is claimed for man, his freedom of moral communion in the human world…. I try to assert in my words and works that education has its only meaning and object in freedom–freedom from ignorance about the laws of the universe, and freedom from passion and prejudice in our communication with the human world.  In my institution I have attempted to create an atmosphere of naturalness in our relationship with strangers, and the spirit of hospitality which is the first virtue in men that made civilization possible.

I invited thinkers and scholars from foreign lands to let our boys know how easy it is to realise our common fellowship, when we deal with those who are great, and that it is the puny who with their petty vanities set up barriers between man and man. (Rabindranath Tagore 1929: 73-74)

As well as growing up in a household that was the meeting place for leading artists and intellectuals from India and the West, Rabindranath had a further experience which was unusual for someone of his upbringing.  In the 1890s, he was put in charge of the family’s rural properties in East Bengal. His first experiments in adult education were carried out there as he gradually became aware of the acute material and cultural poverty that permeated the villages, as well as the great divide between the uneducated rural areas and the city elites.  His experiences made him determined to do something about rural uplift, and later at Santiniketan, students and teachers were involved with literacy training and social work and the promotion of cooperative schemes. As an alternative to the existing forms of education, he started a small school at Santiniketan in 1901 that developed into a university and rural reconstruction centre, where he tried to develop an alternative model of education that stemmed from his own learning experiences. 

Rabindranath composed his first poem at age eight, and by the end of his life, had written over twenty-five volumes of poetry, fifteen plays, ninety short stories, eleven novels, thirteen volumes of essays, initiated and edited various journals, prepared Bengali textbooks, kept up a correspondence involving thousands of letters, composed over two thousand songs; and – after the age of seventy – created more than two thousand pictures and sketches.  He dedicated forty years of his life to his educational institution at Santiniketan, West Bengal.  Rabindranath’s school contained a children’s school as well as a university known as Visva-Bharati and a rural education Centre known as Sriniketan.

Key ideas

Rabindranath did not write a central educational treatise, and his ideas must be gleaned through his various writings and educational experiments at Santiniketan In general, he envisioned an education that was deeply rooted in one’s immediate surroundings but connected to the cultures of the wider world, predicated upon pleasurable learning and  individualized to the personality of the child. He felt that a curriculum should  revolve organically around nature with classes  held in the open air under the trees to provide for a spontaneous appreciation of the fluidity of the plant and animal kingdoms, and seasonal changes.   Children sat on hand-woven mats beneath the trees, which they were allowed to climb and run beneath between classes. Nature walks and excursions were a part of the curriculum and students were encouraged to follow the life cycles of insects, birds and plants. Class schedules were made flexible to allow for shifts in the weather or special attention to natural phenomena, and seasonal festivals were created for the children by Tagore. In an essay entitled “A Poet’s School,” he emphasizes the importance of an empathetic sense of interconnectedness with the surrounding world:

We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it.  We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy.  The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.  But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed.  From our very childhood habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weaned away from nature and our mind and the world are set in opposition from the beginning of our days. Thus the greatest of educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead.  We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar.  His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates…Child-nature protests against such calamity with all its power of suffering, subdued at last into silence by punishment. (Rabindranath Tagore, Personality,1917: 116-17)

In Tagore’s philosophy of education, the aesthetic development of the senses was as important as the intellectual–if not more so–and music, literature, art, dance and drama were given great prominence in the daily life of the school. This was particularly so after the first decade of the school. Drawing on his home life at Jorasanko, Rabindranath tried to create an atmosphere in which the arts would become instinctive.  One of the first areas to be emphasized was music. Rabindranath writes that in his adolescence, a ‘cascade of musical emotion’ gushed forth day after day at Jorasanko. ‘We felt we would try to test everything,’ he writes, ‘and no achievement seemed impossible…We wrote, we sang, we acted, we poured ourselves out on every side.’  (Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences 1917: 141)

In keeping with his theory of subconscious learning, Rabindranath never talked or wrote down to the students, but rather involved them with whatever he was writing or composing. The students were allowed access to the room where he read his new writings to teachers and critics, and they were encouraged to read out their own writings in special literary evenings. In teaching also he believed in presenting difficult levels of literature, which the students might not fully grasp, but which would stimulate them. The writing and publishing of periodicals had always been an important aspect of Jorasanko life, and students at Santiniketan were encouraged to create their own publications and put out several illustrated magazines.  The children were encouraged to follow their ideas in painting and drawing and to draw inspiration from the many visiting artists and writers. 

Most of Rabindranath’s dramas were written at Santiniketan and the students took part in both the performing and production sides. He writes how well the students were able to enter into the spirit of the dramas and perform their roles, which required subtle understanding and sympathy without special training.

As Rabindranath began conceiving of Visva-Bharati as a national centre for the arts, he encouraged artists such as Nandalal Bose to take up residence at Santiniketan and to devote themselves full-time to promoting a national form of art. Without music and the fine arts, he wrote, a nation lacks its highest means of national self-expression and the people remain inarticulate. Tagore was one of the first to support and bring together different forms of Indian dance.  He helped revive folk dances and introduced dance forms from other parts of India, such as Manipuri, Kathak and Kathakali.  He also supported modern dance and was one of the first to recognize the talents of Uday Sankar, who was invited to perform at Santiniketan.

The meeting-ground of cultures, as Rabindranath envisioned it at Visva-Bharati, should be a learning centre where conflicting interests are minimized , where individuals  work together in a common pursuit of truth and realise ‘that artists in all parts of the world have created forms of beauty, scientists discovered secrets of the universe, philosophers solved the problems of existence, saints made the truth of the spiritual world organic in their own lives, not merely for some particular race to which they belonged, but for all mankind.’ (Tagore 1922:171-2)

To encourage mutuality, Rabindranath invited artists and scholars from other parts of India and the world to live together at Santiniketan on a daily basis to share their cultures with Visva-Bharati. The Constitution designated Visva-Bharati as an Indian, Eastern and Global cultural centre whose goals were:

1. To study the mind of Man in its realisation of different aspects of truth from diverse points of view.

2. To bring into more intimate relation with one another through patient study and research, the different cultures of the East on the basis of their underlying unity.

3. To approach the West from the standpoint of such a unity of the life and thought of Asia.

4. To seek to realise in a common fellowship of study the meeting of East and West and thus ultimately to strengthen the fundamental conditions of world peace through the free communication of ideas between the two hemispheres.

5. And with such Ideals in view to provide at Santiniketan a centre of culture where research into the study of the religion, literature, history, science and art of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Islamic, Sikh, Christian and other civilizations may be pursued along with the culture of the West, with that simplicity of externals which is necessary for true spiritual realisation, in amity, good-fellowship and co-operation between the thinkers and scholars of both Eastern and Western countries, free from all antagonisms of race, nationality, creed or caste and in the name of the One Supreme Being who is Shantam, Shivam, Advaitam.

In terms of curriculum, he advocated a different emphasis in teaching.  Rather than studying national cultures for the wars won and cultural dominance imposed, he advocated a teaching system that analysed history and culture for the progress that had been made in breaking down social and religious barriers. Such an approach emphasized the innovations that had been made in integrating individuals of diverse backgrounds into a larger framework, and in devising the economic policies which emphasized social justice and narrowed the gap between rich and poor.  Art would be studied for its role in furthering the aesthetic imagination and expressing universal themes.

It should be noted that Rabindranath in his own person was a living icon of the type of mutuality and creative exchange that he advocated.   His vision of culture was not a static one, but one that advocated new cultural fusions, and he fought for a world where multiple voices were encouraged to interact with one another and to reconcile differences within an overriding commitment to peace and mutual interconnectedness. His generous personality and his striving to break down barriers of all sorts gives us a model for the way multiculturalism can exist within a single human personality, and the type of individual which the educational process should be aspiring towards.

Tagore’s educational efforts were ground-breaking in many areas.  He was one of the first in India to argue for a humane educational system that was in touch with the environment and aimed at overall development of the personality.  Santiniketan became a model for vernacular instruction and the development of Bengali textbooks; as well, it offered one of the earliest coeducational programs in South Asia.  The establishment of Visva-Bharati and Sriniketan led to pioneering efforts in many directions, including models for distinctively Indian higher education and mass education, as well as pan-Asian and global cultural exchange.

One characteristic that sets Rabindranath’s educational theory apart is his approach to education as a poet.  At Santiniketan, he stated, his goal was to create a poem ‘in a medium other than words.’   It was this poetic vision that enabled him to fashion a scheme of education which was all inclusive, and to devise a unique program for education in nature and creative self-expression in a learning climate congenial to global cultural exchange.

Conclusion

Rabindranath Tagore, by his efforts and achievements, is part of a global network of pioneering educators, such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori and Dewey–and in the contemporary context, Malcolm Knowles–who have striven to create non-authoritarian learning systems appropriate to their respective surroundings. In a  poem that expresses Tagore’s goals for international education, he writes:

Where the mind is without fear

   and the head is held high,

   Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken 

up into fragments by narrow domestic

         walls;

 Where words come out from the

         depth of truth;

 Where tireless striving

       stretches its arms towards

          perfection;  

 Where the clear stream of reason

      has not lost its way into the

 dreary desert sand of dead habit;

    Where the mind is led forward

 by thee into ever-widening

      thought and action–

 into that heaven of freedom,

     my Father,

        Let my country awake.

 

Time for Some controversies – OSHO on Education.

 

I have read quite a bit of OSHO in past, still don’t know about enlightenement and all such stuff but having explored him for quite some time now, I can really say that he was a man of some  extraordinary capabilities and intellect and arguably one of the best orators till date. He was one of the most versatile thinkers and has given spontaneous lectures on a wide range of topics, most of which are being converted into books, tapes and CDs . He speeches have been translated in 44 languages in the form of books.

Coming back to education, as this is the first article on OSHO’s views on Educaiton, I will prefer to post one of the relatively simple but quite holistic chapter called ‘Five Dimensions of Education’ from the series called The Golden Future..  It goes like..

The Five Dimensions of Education

“Maneesha, the education that has prevailed in the past is very insufficient, incomplete, superficial. It only creates people who can earn their livelihood but it does not give any insight into living itself. It is not only incomplete, it is harmful too — because it is based on competition.Any type of competition is violent deep down, and creates people who are unloving. Their whole effort is to be the achievers — of name, of fame, of all kinds of ambitions. Obviously they have to struggle and be in conflict for them. That destroys their joys and that destroys their friendliness. It seems everybody is fighting against the whole world.Education up to now has been goal-oriented: what you are learning is not important; what is important is the examination that will come a year or two years later. It makes the future important — more important than the present. It sacrifices the present for the future. And that becomes your very style of life; you are always sacrificing the moment for something which is not present. It creates a tremendous emptiness in life.The commune of my vision will have a five-dimensional education. Before I enter into those five dimensions, a few things have to be noted. One: there should not be any kind of examination as part of education, but every day, every hour observation by the teachers; their remarks throughout the year will decide whether you move further or you remain a little longer in the same class. Nobody fails, nobody passes — it is just that a few people are speedy and a few people are a little bit lazy — because the idea of failure creates a deep wound of inferiority, and the idea of being successful also creates a different kind of disease, that of superiority.Nobody is inferior, and nobody is superior.One is just oneself, incomparable.So, examinations will not have any place. That will change the whole perspective from the future to the present. What you are doing right this moment will be decisive, not five questions at the end of two years. Of thousands of things you will pass through during these two years, each will be decisive; so the education will not be goal-oriented.The teacher has been of immense importance in the past, because he knew he had passed all the examinations, he had accumulated knowledge. But the situation has changed — and this is one of the problems, that situations change but our responses remain the old ones. Now the knowledge explosion is so vast, so tremendous, so speedy, that you cannot write a big book on any scientific subject because by the time your book is complete, it will be out of date; new facts, new discoveries will have made it irrelevant. So now science has to depend on articles, on periodicals, not on books.The teacher was educated thirty years earlier. In thirty years everything has changed, and he goes on repeating what he was taught. He is out of date, and he is making his students out of date. So in my vision the teacher has no place. Instead of teachers there will be guides, and the difference has to be understood: the guide will tell you where, in the library, to find the latest information on the subject.

And teaching should not be done in the old-fashioned way, because television can do it in a far better way, can bring the latest information without any problems. The teacher has to appeal to your ears; television appeals directly to your eyes; and the impact is far greater, because the eyes absorb eighty percent of your life situations — they are the most alive part.

If you can see something there is no need to memorize it; but if you listen to something you have to memorize it. Almost ninety-eight percent of education can be delivered through television, and the questions that students will ask can be answered by computers. The teacher should be only a guide to show you the right channel, to show you how to use the computer, how to find the latest book. His function will be totally different. He is not imparting knowledge to you, he is making you aware of the contemporary knowledge, of the latest knowledge. He is only a guide.

With these considerations, I divide education into five dimensions. The first is informative, like history, geography, and many other subjects which can be dealt with by television and computer together. The second part should be sciences. They can be imparted by television and computer too, but they are more complicated, and the human guide will be more necessary.

In the first dimension also come languages. Every person in the world should know at least two languages; one is his mother tongue, and the other is English as an international vehicle for communication. They can also be taught more accurately by television — the accent, the grammar, everything can be taught more correctly than by human beings.

We can create in the world an atmosphere of brotherhood: language connects people and language disconnects too. There is right now no international language. This is due to our prejudices. English is perfectly capable, because it is known by more people around the world on a wider scale — although it is not the first language. The first is Spanish, as far as population is concerned. But its population is concentrated, it is not spread all over the world. The second is Chinese; that is even more concentrated, only in China. As far as numbers go, these languages are spoken by more people, but the question is not of numbers, the question is of spread.

English is the most widespread language, and people should drop their prejudices — they should look at the reality. There have been many efforts to create languages to avoid the prejudices — the Spanish people can say their language should be the international language because it is spoken by more people than almost any other language…. To avoid these prejudices, languages like Esperanto have been created. But no created language has been able to function. There are a few things which grow, which cannot be created; a language is a growth of thousands of years. Esperanto looks so artificial that all those efforts have failed.

But it is absolutely necessary to create two languages — first, the mother tongue, because there are feelings and nuances which you can say only in the mother tongue. One of my professors, S. K. Saxena, a world traveler who has been a professor of philosophy in many countries, used to say that in a foreign language you can do everything, but when it comes to a fight or to love, you feel that you are not being true and sincere to your feelings. So for your feelings and for your sincerity, your mother tongue… which you imbibe with the milk of the mother, which becomes part of your blood and bones and marrow. But that is not enough — that creates small groups of people and makes others strangers.

One international language is absolutely necessary as a basis for one world, for one humanity. So two languages should be absolutely necessary for everybody. That will come in the first dimension.

The second is the enquiry of scientific subjects, which is tremendously important because it is half of reality, the outside reality.

And the third will be what is missing in present-day education, the art of living. People have taken it for granted that they know what love is. They don’t know… and by the time they know, it is too late. Every child should be helped to transform his anger, hatred, jealousy, into love.
An important part of the third dimension should also be a sense of humor. Our so-called education makes people sad and serious. And if one third of your life is wasted in a university in being sad and serious, it becomes ingrained; you forget the language of laughter — and the man who forgets the language of laughter has forgotten much of life.

So love, laughter, and an acquaintance with life and its wonders, its mysteries… these birds singing in the trees should not go unheard. The trees and the flowers and the stars should have a connection with your heart. The sunrise and the sunset will not be just outside things — they should be something inner, too. A reverence for life should be the foundation of the third dimension.
People are so irreverent to life.

They still go on killing animals to eat — they call it game; and if the animal eats them — then they call it calamity. Strange… in a game both parties should be given equal opportunity. The animals are without weapons and you have machine guns or arrows…. You may not have thought about why arrows and machine guns were invented: so that you can kill the animal from a faraway distance; to come close is dangerous. What kind of game is this? And the poor animal, defenseless against your bullets….

It is not a question of killing the animals; it is a question of being irreverent to life, because all that you need can be provided either by synthetic foods, or by other scientific methods. All your needs can be fulfilled; no animal has to be killed. And a person who kills animals, deep down can kill human beings without any difficulty — because what is the difference? And there are cannibals….

Just a few days ago in Palestine, the people demanded that the government allow them to eat human flesh, because there was not enough food — so why waste a dead body? Whether it has died naturally or has been destroyed by the terrorists or has been in an accident, it is good food! And the surprising thing is that the government of Palestine has agreed — they had to. Food is short, and people cannot be left hungry. Today they will be eating the naturally dead or the accidentally dead, or those killed by terrorists; but this is not going on forever. Soon they will start finding ways to kill people — to steal children, because their flesh is thought to be the most delicious.

A great reverence for life should be taught, because life is God and there is no other God than life itself, and joy, laughter, a sense of humor — in short a dancing spirit.

The fourth dimension should be of art and creativity: painting, music, craftsmanship, pottery, masonry — anything that is creative. All areas of creativity should be allowed; the students can choose. There should be only a few things compulsory — for example an international language should be compulsory; a certain capacity to earn your livelihood should be compulsory; a certain creative art should be compulsory. You can choose through the whole rainbow of creative arts, because unless a man learns how to create, he never becomes a part of existence, which is constantly creative. By being creative one becomes divine; creativity is the only prayer.

And the fifth dimension should be the art of dying. In this fifth dimension will be all the meditations, so that you can know there is no death, so that you can become aware of an eternal life inside you. This should be absolutely essential, because everybody has to die; nobody can avoid it. And under the big umbrella of meditation, you can be introduced to Zen, to Tao, to Yoga, to Hassidism, to all kinds and all possibilities that have existed, but which education has not taken any care of. In this fifth dimension, you should also be made aware of the martial arts like aikido, jujitsu, judo — the art of self-defense without weapons — and not only self-defense, but simultaneously a meditation too.The new commune will have a full education, a whole education. All that is essential should be compulsory, and all that is nonessential should be optional. One can choose from the options, which will be many. And once the basics are fulfilled, then you have to learn something you enjoy; music, dance, painting — you have to know something to go inwards, to know yourself. And all this can be done very easily without any difficulty.I have been a professor myself and I resigned from the university with a note saying: This is not education, this is sheer stupidity; you are not teaching anything significant. But this insignificant education prevails all over the world — it makes no difference, in the Soviet Union or in America. Nobody has looked for a more whole, a total education. In this sense almost everybody is uneducated; even those who have great degrees are uneducated in the vaster areas of life. A few are more uneducated, a few are less — but everybody is uneducated. But to find an educated man is impossible, because education as a whole does not exist anywhere.”The Golden Future
Chapter #23
Chapter title: The five dimensions of education
 

If you’ve read it full, will love to hear your comments especially on this.. I have got one more very interesting note on his response to a school going girl’s question aboute secret of education.. Will post it later sometimes..

 

Krishnamurthy on Education – Finally an Indian thinker on this blog — or Does it really Matter ?

 

I recently brought his book named ‘Krishnamurty on Education’ from Landmark, versova mumbai…they have quite a decent set of collection there  was somewhat surprised to find a book on that grim a topic.. over there at the landmark…

What I like most about him is he really goes deep, very deep – to the roots/basics/foundation of everthing and he makes us question or at least examine those.. it does gets a bit baffeling sometimes but he is still worth giving a serious consideration..as in most of the thinkers, he hardly assumes anything and so he questions all our conscious and subconsious assumptions another good thing about him he rarely attributes any direct value to anything (as to whether what is good or bad …he puts a lot of emphasis on  a deeper understanding of everything rather than attributing some values)… Now if you’ve read the last sentence …did you notice anything funny or contradictory in it  ? if not, then that says that you are not reading this carefully.. pls. read it again … There’s a hint of contradiction or paradox in the sentence (cutting it short, I said, It’s good that he does not attribute values like good or bad to anything..) ..

This book, in particular is divided into two sections, Dialouges with Children and Dialouges with teachers and a majority of the chapters are in the form of live discussions or to say questions and answers .. I will share some of the interesting excerpts from his dialouges with teachers on Teaching and learning..

P.S. — you will notice how deep they try to go into anything …on the first look it won’t seem that they are talking about education at all..but if you have some patience & interest than read on ..otherwise forget it and carry on with some other stuff..as this might sound completely absurd and pointless to some … It starts from the teacher asking question ..

TEACHER : We realize that we cannot see a fact unless the mind of empty of thought. But even if it is empty for a while, thought seems to rise again. How do we end thought?

KRISHNAMURTY: I wonder if all of us understand the importance of the role of thinking? Is thought important, and at what level is it important? What is thinking? Wht makes us think? were is thougt important and where is it not important, how do you answer that question? And what is the machinery that is set going when a question is asked?

Is thinking merely the habiutal response to a habitual pattern? You live here in this school in a certain groove, with certain patterns of thoughts, habbits, feeling. You live, you funciton inthose habits, patterns and systems; and the funcitoning of the brain, thought is very limited. And when you go out of the valley you live in a little wider field. You have certain grooves of actio and you follow them. It is all a mechanical process really, but in that pattern of mechanical activity there are certain variations. You modify, change, but always in that pattern, whereever you are, Whatever position you may have — minister, governor or doctor or professor — it is always a groove with varying changes and modifinations. You funciton in patterns. I am not saying it is right or wrong. I am just examining it. You have beliefs but they are in the backgorund and you go on with your daily activities, with you envy, greed, jealousy. Whenever your beliefs are questioned you get irritated but you go on. Chinldren are being educitoned to think, to form grooves of habits and to funciton in those habits for the rest of their lives. They are going to get jobs, they are going to be engineers, doctors, and for the rest of their lives, the pattern will be set. Any deviation from thatis what is disturbing. That disturbance is lessened throught marriage, responsibility, chinlrfen; and so gradually the mould is set.. And all thinking is between what is convinient, what is not convinient, wht is benificial, what is worthwhile — it is always within that field.

TEACHER: That is not thinking, sir, it is a repetition.

KRISHNAMURTY: But that is how we live, that is our life. That is all we want. Everything is repetition and the mind gets duller and more stupid. Is that nota fact, sir? We do not want to be disturbed, we do not want to shatter the pattern.

What makes us shatter the pattern or break through the pattern? And is it possible not fall into a groove ? But why should I end the making of patterns ? I begin to hink about ending them whe the pattern does not satisfy me, when the patter is not longer useful to me or when there are in the patter certain incidents like death, the husband leaving the wofe, or losing a job, In the breaking of that particular pattern there is adisturbance called sorrow and I move away fro mthat into another pattern. I move away from pattern to pattern from one framework into which circumstances, environment, family, educaiton have put me, to another. The disturbance makes me questiona a little, but I imeediately fall into antoher groove and there I settle. That is what most people want, waht their parents want, waht society wants. Where does this idea of ending the thought come in ?

TEACHER: Sir, there are times when one is discontended with the whole pattern and everything in it 

KRISHNAMURTY: What makes us see the futility of this pattern? when do I see it and what makes me see it? A pattern is set if there is a motive. If i break from this pattern with a motive, the motive will mould the new pattern.

Now, wat makes me change, what makes me do something without a motive?

TEACHER: It is very difficult to be free from motive?

KRISHNAMURTY: Who tells you to be free? If it is difficult why bother about breaking the pattern? Be satisfied with a motive and continue with it, why bother if it is difficult?

TEACHER: It leads me nowhere, sir.

KRISHNAMURTY: But if it led anywhere, whould you pursue it?

TEACHER: Which mens there is a motive again.

KRISHANMURTY: What makes you break through and give up the motive? What do you mean by motive? You teach ehre because you get some monty, that is a motive. You like somebody because he can give a position or you love God becaues you hate life. Your life is miserable and love of God is the escpate from that. These are all motives.

Now, what makes a mind, a human being. live without a motive? If you can pursue that and go into it, I am sure you wil find the answer to your question?

TEACHER : The question, “Do I know my motives?’ seems to come befire the question “Do I do something without a motive?”

KRISHNAMURTY: Do we know our motives? Why do I teach, why do I hold on to a husband, wife? Do I know my motives and how do I find out ? And if I do find out, what is wrong with having motives? I love somebody becuase i like to be with that somebody physicall, sexually, as a companion, what is wrong with that ?

TAEACHER; When I teach because I must have money, motive is not a hindrance. I must have monty, so I must take to some profession, and I take to teaching.

KRISHNAMURTI: First of all, do we know our motives, not only the conscious but the unconscious motives, the hidden motives ? Do we do anything in out lives without a motive? To do something without a motive is love of what one is doing, and in that process thinking is not mechanical; then the brain is in a state of constant learning, not opinionated not moving from knowledge to knowledge. it is a mind that moves from fact to fact. Therefore, such a mind od capable of ending and coming tosomething it does not know, which is freedom from the known.

you asked at the bginining: “How do we end thought?” I said what for? We do not even know what thinking is, we do not know how to think. We think in terms of patterns. So, unless we have investigated or understood all that, we cannot possibly ask that question: “How do we end thought?

TEACHER: How can we enqire into thinking and how to think? (Pls. note that A teacher who teaches the children everyday is asking this question..and nothing to feel bad about it the good thing about this whole thing is that atleast the teachers here are honest and far less pretentious..)

KRISHNAMURTY: Not only enquire into how to think but also into what is thinking. CAn I, as a human being, as an individual,find out what is the way of my thinking? Is it mechanical, is it free? Do I know it as it is operating in me ?

To end thought I have first to go into the mechanism of thinking. I have to understand thought completely, deepdown in me. I have to examine every thought, without letting one gthought escape without being fully understood, so that the brain, the mind, the whole being becomes very attentive. The moment I pursue every thought to the root, to the end completely, i will see that thought ends by itself. I do not have to do anything about it because thought is memory. Memory is the mark of experience and as long as experience is not fully, completely, totally understood, it leaves a mark. The moment I have experienced completely, the experience leaves not mark. So, if we go into everhthought and see where the mark is and remain with tha mark, as a fact — then that fact will open and that fact will end that particular process of thinking. So that every thought, every feeling is understood. So the brain and the mind are being freed from a mass of memories. That requires tremendous attention, not attention only to the trees and birds but invward attention to see that every thought is understood.

There is one more very interesting chapter in that book..will be posting it later.. I hope the publishers won’t sue me for this )

 

Lets see what Mr. G. Bernard Shaw has to say on Education.

So, after Plato, its the time for Mr. Shaw.. one reason for taking Shaw’s perspective on education after Plato’s is that Plato was a stern advocate for formal education while, on the contrary, Shaw was one very harsh critics of the Formal Education system…It is clearly reflected in the following words quoted by him.. and he has very

“A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”

More on his criticisms on schools and formal education will be discussed later.. for not let me throw one more intresting fact here …the reason I wrote G. Bernard Shaw instead of his full name is that Mr. Shaw himself preferred to be called by this name ..i.e. he somehow happened to dislike his first name George so he always used G. Bernard Shaw.

Okay now coming to the main topic.. it sometimes seems that Shaw, as compared to plato is much more practical (inspite of the rampant shrudeness or bluntness in most of his writings) as seen in Parents and Children*, one of Bernard Shaw”s infamous prefaces (to the minor drama Misalliance), is a profoundly passionate argument for the child”s right to be free to develop in her or his own unique way. Shaw explains how and why small-minded pedagogical thinking has been failing us — children, parents, society as a whole, and even the poor educators themselves.

Parts of this 40,000-word essay are screamingly funny, as we would expect from Shaw, whose first play made the King of England laugh so hard that the King broke the chair he was sitting on. Yet woven between the woof of wit and the warp of sarcasm, Shaw has set himself the task of addressing one of the most complex and perennial problems that face the human race.

Also included in this volume is Bertrand Russell”s essay titled Education ( written in 1916), another plea for an educational revolution. Praising the methods of Maria Montessori, the essay pre-envisions ideals that Russell would put into practice when he operated his own school from 1927 to 1935. Russell writes: “If we respect the rights of children we should educate them so as to give them the knowledge and the mental habits required for forming independent opinions.” … Russell states that effective teachers need one quality above all: reverence. Reverence for others, and reverence for the children they teach.

The wall between parents and children — and the desert between teachers and children — still stands as solidly and barrenly as ever before. These two remarkable essays advocate the practice of freedom, sincerity, and kindness — our only hopes for tearing down the walls.

After completely banging parents in the initial pages of his treatise on Parents & Children, After calling them and the families ‘The Manufacturer of Monsters’ and after trying to define children – to be very short here, he defines children as “An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman.” – he goes on and completely ridicules the schools..it is a very interesting read..following is how he bangs the schools ..

Shaw on Schools (A must read)

But please observe the limitation “at home.” What private amateur parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organized professional enterprise in large institutions established for the purpose. And it is to such professional enterprise that parents hand over their children when they can afford it. They send their children to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with,
it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise
tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents.

In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they dont understand and dont care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body;
but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the world’s bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called
a school book, written by a man who cannot write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest
of your life. With millions of acres of woods and valleys and hills and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes and all sorts of instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or with streets and shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city delights at
the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with some human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you move, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you
escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of daring to live.

And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is nothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure your society for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction of knowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful doing of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked to fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright
sense, like Dr Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a ghastly business, quite beyond words, this schooling.

Then in goes on and tries to address the most practical issues like whether children should be made to earn, what kind of subjects should be taught in schools (He advocates more detailed teachings on economics, political science and even sex education) to the most subtle issues like Children’ happiness & love..He has also very strongly advocated for children rights and freedom from the very begining..he goes on to say ..

“But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical
our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not
free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free
at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but
of 21 seconds.”

I will finish this with one more positive quote from Shaw on education..

” Education is a succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.”

Truly a marvelous man.

* The parents and Children introduction is taken from www.zorbapress.com

if this interests you you can read the full treatise names Parents & Eduation.. you can copy paste this link to read his full treatise …http://www.readprint.com/work-1354/George-Bernard-Shaw.

 

Our own Plato.

This being my first post in the blog, I have decided to share Plato’s views on education as I am highly inspired and impressed by his comprehensive writings and views on education, written in his most famous work called ’The Republic’. And there is sure some hint of it in Whatever I am today…(Good or Bad )

Plato, Philosopher

• Born: 428 B.C.
• Birthplace: Athens, Greece
• Died: 347 B.C.
• Best Known As: Author of The Republic

Plato, originally named Aristocles (Plato means “broad-shouldered”), was one of the early stars of Western philosophy. The student of another great Greek thinker, Socrates, Plato founded the Academy in his native Athens in 387 B.C.; it became a famous hotbed of philosophical and scientific discussion, the first known university in the world. His writings mostly take the form of dialogues (or ‘dialectics’), often with Socrates as a main character. The Republic, in which Plato lays out his ideas on the perfect state, remains a staple of college educations around the world.

Plato’s most famous pupil was that other great Greek thinker, Aristotle. 

Like his mentor, Plato suspected that most people did not know what they claimed to know, and hence wondered why rigorous qualifications for rulers did not exist. Challenging the Sophists’ claims that knowledge and truth were relative to the perspective of each individual, Plato developed an epistemology and metaphysics that suggested an absolute truth that could only be gleaned through rigorous self-examination and the development of reason – skills crucial for enlightened political leaders.

Importance of Child Devleopment 

Plato has clearly emphasized the importance of proper child upbringing. He says,“The beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken”.Plato’s educational ideas derived in part from his conception of justice, both for individuals and for the ideal state. He viewed individuals as mutually dependent for their survival and well-being, and he proposed that justice in the ideal state was congruent with justice in the individual’s soul.

The Ideal State

Plato’s ideal state was a republic with three categories of citizens: artisans, auxiliaries, and philosopher-kings, each of whom possessed distinct natures and capacities. Those proclivities, moreover, reflected a particular combination of elements within one’s tripartite soul, composed of appetite, spirit, and reason. Artisans, for example, were dominated by their appetites or desires, and therefore destined to produce material goods. Auxiliaries, a class of guardians, were ruled by spirit in their souls and possessed the courage necessary to protect the state from invasion. Philosopher-kings, the leaders of the ideal state, had souls in which reason reigned over spirit and appetite, and as a result possessed the foresight and knowledge to rule wisely. In Plato’s view, these rulers were not merely elite intellectuals, but moral leaders. In the just state, each class of citizen had a distinct duty to remain faithful to its determined nature and engage solely in its destined occupation. The proper management of one’s soul would yield immediate happiness and well-being, and specific educational methods would cultivate this brand of spiritual and civic harmony.

The Cultivation of Morals

The dialouges, very meticously discuss about the censorship of our interactions with children, as it may very easily cast some deep negative impacts.. He even advocated for children to the removal of all infants from their natural families to receive a proper aesthetic education – literary, musical, and physical – for the development of character in the soul and the cultivation of morals necessary for sustaining the just state. Suspecting that most writers and musicians did not know the subjects they depicted – that they cast mere shadows of representations of real objects, ideas, and people – Plato feared that artistic works could endanger the health of the just state. Consequently, he wanted to hold artists and potential leaders accountable for the consequences of their creations and policies. This is why Plato advocated the censorship of all forms of art that did not accurately depict the good in behavior. Art, as a powerful medium that threatened the harmony of the soul, was best suited for philosophers who had developed the capacity to know and could resist its dangerous and irrational allures. Exposure to the right kinds of stories and music, although not sufficient to make a citizen beautiful and good, would contribute to the proper development of the elements within one’s soul. For Plato, aesthetics and morality were inextricable; the value of a work of art hinged on its propensity to lead to moral development and behavior.

Some General thoughts on Education

• An ideal state, embodying the highest and best capabilities of human social life, can really be achieved, if the right people are put in charge. Since the key to the success of the whole is the wisdom of the rulers who make decisions for the entire city, Plato held that the perfect society will occur only when kings become philosophers or philosophers are made kings
• Despite prevalent public skepticism about philosophers, it is to them that an ideal society must turn for the wisdom to conduct its affairs properly. But philosophers are made, not born. So we need to examine the program of education by means of which Plato supposed that the future philosopher-kings can acquire the knowledge necessary for their function as decision-makers for the society as a whole.
• Plato supposed that under the usual haphazard methods of childrearing, accidents of birth often restrict the opportunities for personal development, faulty upbringing prevents most people from achieving everything of which they are capable, and the promise of easy fame or wealth distracts some of the most able young people from the rigors of intellectual pursuits.
• The highest goal in all of education, Plato believed, is knowledge of the Good; that is, not merely an awareness of particular benefits and pleasures, but acquaintance with the Form itself. Just as the sun provides illumination by means of which we are able to perceive everything in the visual world, he argued, so the Form of the Good provides the ultimate standard by means of which we can apprehend the reality of everything that has value.

An Educational Program

Having already described the elementary education and physical training that properly occupy the first twenty years of the life of prospective guardians, Plato applied his account of the structure of human knowledge in order to prescribe the disciplined pursuit of their higher education. It naturally begins with mathematics, the vital first step in learning to turn away from the realm of sensible particulars to the transcendent forms of reality. Arithmetic provides for the preliminary development of abstract concepts, but Plato held that geometry is especially valuable for its careful attention to the eternal forms. Study of the (mathematical, not observational) disciplines of astronomy and harmonics encourage the further development of the skills of abstract thinking and proportional reasoning. Only after completing this thorough mathematical foundation are the future rulers of the city prepared to begin their study of philosophy, systematizing their grasp of mathematical truth, learning to recognize and eliminate all of their presuppositions, and grounding all genuine knowledge firmly on the foundation of their intuitive grasp of the reality of the Forms. Finally, an extended period of apprenticeship will help them to learn how to apply everything they have learned to the decisions necessary for the welfare of the city as a whole. Only in their fifties will the best philosophers among them be fit to rule over their fellow-citizens.

Aaj ke liye itna hi. Please Let me know if I have misquoted/misinterpreted/misrepresented something.