Abstract

A visit to the Krishnamurti Foundation International School in Chennai (Madras), India during a study tour of India in late 1998 leads the author to a year of reflection and study of the works of the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti. In a piece of creative nonfiction, the description of the settings and milieu of 1998 India are evoked. Interwoven with a textual analysis of 670 sentences from his earliest educational work, Education and the Significance of Life (1953), and his last educational work, Letters to the Schools, II (1985), 13 key sentences were derived, by which to approach Krishnamurti’s teachings about how schools should be. Among the sentences was this: “Intelligence is much greater than intellect; for it is the integration of reason and love; but there can be intelligence only when there is self-knowledge, the deep understanding of the total process of oneself.”

Krishnamurti and Me:

Meditations on his Philosophy of Curriculum and on India^[i]

Krishnamurti always began his meditations with an observation of nature or his surroundings, and so the day after I met him through his school in Chennai (formerly Madras), on the east coast of India, in December of 1998, I wrote a meditation after his example:

To See The Beauty in The Filth of The Streets of Chennai

            Three puppies, one blonde, two dark, with tails that curlicue, cavort on the lawn behind the hotel, hastily running into the bushes when people approach. They doze in the sun and nip each other, fighting and tussling.  As I look out the window on this morning city, the blonde one squats on the green of the lawn, relieves herself, and nuzzles her flank where some fleas have taken up residence.

            Are they wild dogs? Few of the dogs that roam the streets here seem to have a home. Many are mangy. They all have short hair, and are medium-sized. Some have spots and some are plain black or tan. Whose dogs are they? If they are wild, why are they so calm? Do they have disease? Would they bite me if I petted them? They range over the garbage dumps and pick at the plastic debris, along with the rag pickers and the cows. In a vegetarian society are the dogs vegetarian also? No cats. Many dogs.  What do we learn from the lives of wild dogs in the cities of India? Why must we learn anything? Is it not enough that they exist here in harmony with the noise and pollution?

            I saw several of these Indian dogs a few minutes ago, while walking the road over the bridge through shit and spit. Huge gobs of spit, some white mucous, some red betel-stained, dot the pavement where I walk.

            Shit also has its place here, out in the open air. Voluminous orbs of buffalo shit, rounded piles of goat shit, long tubes of dog shit, dried straw in the old animal shit forms the soil of the street, mingling with the dust, and the dirt, swept aside by the morning sweepers, bent with their brooms moving the dirt into piles of shit, leaves, dirt, stones, left in spaced intervals for whom to pick up? Or do the day sweepers just spread it out again so they can, Sisyphian, sweep it into piles again tomorrow morning? I scrape the shit off my shoes at least once a day.

            As I look out at the pool, the sweeper, a barefooted brown woman, most likely of lower caste, in a red and yellow print sari, her black hair in a bun at the nape of her neck, bends with a soft flowing brush, sweeping the deck of the pool. In graceful swaths, the small detritus tumbles to the small wind caused by the broom’s motion. Much of it blows into the grass lining the pool deck.

Weaving in and out of children playing among the tin-roofed shacks down back roads, among flapping clothes strung on jerry-rigged lines, I take the autorickshaw hailed outside of the hotel, to my various destinations in this large city. The smells of spicy cooking from open-air small grills blend with the odor of rotten fruit tossed into piles for the cows to eat, as I am glad to be near the street and not in the leased car with driver, that my colleagues commandeer each morning. I feel nearer to what Chennai is all about, the “madam” professor in her straw hat and long leather purse with sketchbook, camera, tape recorder, pencils, and enough rupees to be considered disgustingly rich here. In the open bouncing one-stroke gas oil three-wheeled polluter, I am near to the shit, spit, ownerless dogs, no cats, many cows, cows all over the place. The animal life of the city assaults, and here I feel my animalness too.

            In his writings, after the description, Krishnamurti would then launch into a discussion of some sort. As I write this, I have spent a year reading his meditations, books, and letters to schools.

            The voyage began one day, in Chennai, formerly Madras, India, in December 1998, when I and three colleagues at my university were on a month-long study trip. I was visiting schools. The head of the Jnana Prabodhini School in Pune, where I had spent a week, listed for me schools throughout southern India at the cities we were to visit, which had as part of their philosophy and raison d’etre, to encourage their bright students to help the world, beginning at home, rather than to pursue their own aggrandizement and social mobility. “You will find these schools interesting,” he said.  One of the schools was the K. F. I. School in Chennai, based on the educational philosophy of Krishnamurti.

            Krishnamurti’s electric presence, some thought, was so intense a normal person could not face him directly. George Bernard Shaw called Krishnamurti “a religious figure of the greatest distinction” and added, “He is the most beautiful being I have ever seen.”   Henry Miller wrote, “There is no man I would consider it a greater privilege to meet.”  Aldous Huxley, after attending one of Krishnamurti’s lectures, wrote, “It was like listening to a discourse of the Buddha ‑ such power, such intrinsic authority.”  Kahlil Gibran wrote, “When he entered my room I said to myself, ‘Surely the Lord of Love has come’.”

            That morning I went to Adyar, an elegant region across the bridge and near the sea, to The Krishnamurti Foundation of India School at Damodar Gardens / Besant Avenue / Adayar, Madras 600 020. School officials do not permit vehicles to drive onto the property, and I walked down a tree-lined greenery-lit lane to the large yellow pillared colonial style building set back in a cleared grove lined with flowering bushes. The lack of motorized sounds pervaded, after the dense noise of the city. A feeling of peace fell over me, and as I walked slowly down the shaded lane into the sunny lawn at the end, I even heard insects. The polluted potpourris of the smells of the streets of Chennai faded.          I climbed the steps to the veranda, where a sign warned me to remove my shoes before entering. I did so, and entered a bare room, with a bare desk and a few empty chairs. As I copied down the material on a bulletin board, I was greeted by a middle aged man in a tan cotton shirt and pants. I asked for Mr. G. Gautama, the principal. The poster said:

 Guru — someone whose proximity can ingrain the essentials of fulfillment into a student. Someone who can help the growth of the mind, intellect, and soul. Someone who through dedication, diligence, and discipline has arrived, after years of struggle, at self-knowledge and self-realization. A visionary. An enlightened being. A guru. The SPICMAY Gurukul Scheme offers students an opportunity to spend one month with such a person. Living in close proximity . .

Guru? This school encouraged their children to seek out gurus. Later I read Krishnamurti, in his Letters to the Schools, written on 17 November, 1983: “You learn from a guru if he is at all the right kind, a sane guru, not the money-making guru, not one of those who want to be famous and trot off to different countries to gather a fortune through their rather unbalanced theories. Find out what it is to learn.”

            The headmaster/principal came and greeted me. Mr. Gautama, a slim, austere man, balding, with gray hair, focused with intensity as he shook my hand. He beckoned me to sit down in one of the four cane chairs in his bare office, and he told me that this Krishnamurti School is one of 7 such schools in India. It is a K-12 school, with a post-school program as well. Other Krishnamurti schools are the Rishi Valley School, the Madanapalle School, the Sholai School, the Rajghat Besant School , the Bal‑Anand School, the Valley School, the Bhagirathi Valley School, the Sahyadri School, the Riverside School in Thailand, the Brockwood Park School in England, and the Oak Grove School in Ojai, California. 

            As we sat in his office, Mr. Gautama’s piercing eyes and intensity, his calm and his vegetarian-induced slimness somehow made me take notice, and I scrawled these quotes in my thought log: 

 “Education is one whole part of human endeavor. It is the gathering of knowledge one needs. It is possible not to gather with prejudice? What separates man from man? Is there a way that man can not gather the other knowledge which provides prejudice? No learning happens without the other knowledge. Fear makes learning of any kind learning with a motive. The action is not revealed when there is fear. Is there some way out of the nature of the need that is always describing?”

            “Many children take naturally to philosophy.  They are capable of deep and marvelous conversation if the atmosphere is created where such conversation can begin in a matter that is noncoercive, and noncompulsive, non-dogmatic and non-indoctrinating, not moralistic. Today there is a death of conversation between old and young, between adults and children. There is an absence of soul talk with children. If you don’t have soul talk with adults by your teen years, you’re stuck.”

            “The strength of this school is conversation. We are learning about conversation with children. We try to create as many problems as possible where teacher and students are equal without letting go of the responsibility of the teacher.”

“We take them out to a farm we have. Students need to know how little they really need in life — if they can learn that they will not forestall opportunities to learn. We are engaged in a rich environmental debate. Plurality and multinationalism mean an appreciation of the diversity of the nation. Our students make acquaintance with the environment through positive work. You can’t wish away the fact that we have environmental problems. They need a space where they can discover how little they need. We try to strip them of the television, the comforts, the radio. They sleep on mats in huts.”

            “In a sense what we’re attempting is a joyful shift in the conversation with the young. We accept the engagement.”

            “You must listen not only with your ears. You listen with your whole being. We have been doing this.”

              He said, “It’s a pity you can’t stay longer. It would take 15 days to see what this school is about.” He told me that the parents are also very involved in the school. “We ask them whether they would really like your children to observe the world without competition.”

            I was dazed, giddy. I felt as if I were in the presence of a life-changing force, almost as if I were praying, or taking Holy Communion. Gautama’s words and his intensity about education hit me, and I sat back, stunned, looking behind him out the sunny window, listening to a bird that took this moment to sing. I rose with effort, breathless, as if I had just run a long distance, my head spinning. I had never heard a principal whose school I was going to tour, talk like this.

            We walked through several buildings with classrooms open to the air, somewhat dark, and sandy, classrooms, the children on mats, no desks. Each room had blackboards and chalk. Some student work was pinned to the walls, but it seemed haphazard, as if those who hung the work were in a hurry or as if display of one’s work didn’t matter, except in the art room. The art room seemed a sanctuary, and indeed, two teachers on break or grading papers sat there in its peace and calm, near the open-air sun shining on the vegetation outside.

            Tarit Bhattacharya, the art teacher, has written a book called The Child, Art, and Everyday Material. The room filled the eyes with such. Much student work was up, works of clay, straw, poster paint, drawings, collages. A bush with bright orange flowers shone in the sun through the open window. Two girls, in a special tutorial for the national art exam, quietly murmured. The humanities teacher was there, and the music teacher, Girija Ranarajam, entered. Tarit Bhattacharya explained that he thinks creativity is inherent in all children. “Many children are very creative even if they are not so good at maths. Something can be started for them. Art education has a role to play.” I agreed and left him my book on creativity.

            When we came to the dining room, Gautama said, “We cut off the legs of the tables and we got rid of the chairs. Children sit on mats and have conversation. It got rid of the noise and it’s much cleaner. It’s an acquaintance with their culture not to always sit on chairs. They might as well do what they probably do at home. Chairs and tables are not Indian custom.” He explained that he had become headmaster after a lot of thought and exploration. His training was in engineering. He said he thought that engineers make good school administrators because they are interested in how things work.

            I repeated what the tourist agent who had met us said, “The K.F.I. School? Those students get a one-way ticket to the United States.” Mr. Gautama said, “The school is well respected. About 20% are affluent. It asks a very small tuition—about 10,000 r. a year—$240.” He showed me the assembly hall, again a room without chairs, and brought me back to the art room where my orientation was taken over by teachers. His parting comment was memorable and seemed a response to the public perception of the school: “Krishnamurti said, ‘If five people turn their back on money and power, then your school has done its job.’”

            It was 10 a.m. and time for the tea break. I sat on a wall ledge in the center of the clearing, sipping sweetened tea.  Three sleeping dogs lay in the sun, oblivious to the whole school, its children, its teachers, its visitor, drinking tea about them. Did they belong to any person, or to the whole school? Gautama came over to me, and he said that the government was requiring the teachers in the school to be certified. They all have expertise in their subject matter, but not in the pedagogical training that leads to government pensions after many years of teaching. He then flew off to a meeting somewhere else.

            Girija resumed guiding my tour, and showed me the corridor where the high school students studied. I peeked into a mathematics room, where the students seemed to be doing trigonometry. Krishnamurti wrote on how to teach mathematics. He thought that the teacher must be able to perceive order and disorder in the universe through thought. “Let us say I am a teacher of mathematics. Mathematics is order, infinite order.” . . . Thought is capable of seeing the order of mathematics but this order is not the product of thought. . . . I myself must study this order and disorder before I can convey it to my pupils” (Letters, II, p. 42).

            Krishnamurti often disparaged book-learning, saying that it was only necessary for getting a technical job, but that learning from books is not true learning. In Education and the Significance of Life (1953), Krishnamurti wrote: “To be the right kind of educator, a teacher must constantly be freeing himself from books and laboratories; he must be ever watchful to see that the students do not make of him an example, an ideal, an authority.” 

            He felt strongly that a student should gain self-knowledge, and not necessarily book knowledge:  In Letters to the Schools, II, he wrote: “Learning has been the ancient tradition of man, not only from books, but about the nature and structure of the psychology of a human being.” In Education and the Significance of Life, Krishnamurti wrote: “The ignorant man is not the unlearned, but he who does not know himself, and the learned man is stupid when he relies on books, on knowledge, and on authority to give him understanding.”  Reading books is often escapism, and “Such education offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and, like all escapes, it inevitably creates increasing misery.” 

            In fact, in my reading of Krishnamurti, I find him giving no other human beings credence or reference as having had thoughts that are valuable to himself. But Krishnamurti himself communicated with the world through the word, both spoken, and written. Among others, I read several books by Krishnamurti on education: Education and the Significance of Life, and Krishnamurti on Education. Letters to Schools I, and II. Perhaps he disparaged book learning because the students would take book authors as authorities, instead of themselves.

            He wrote: “We have been taught to conform to the authority of a teacher, of a book, of a party, because it is profitable to do so.” In fact, Krishnamurti did not think the sacred books of various religions were to be trusted, viewing organized religion as a means of forcing conformity and of preserving the status quo: “Each religion has its own sacred book, its mediator, its priests and its ways of threatening and holding people,” he wrote in Education and the Significance of Life.  True religious education, he thought, is “to encourage the child to understand his own relationship to people, to things and to nature.”

            One could say that Krishnamurti should know: his family were Brahmins, the high caste from which religious leaders are drawn, and Krishnamurti took on the sacred thread at the proper age, six, in typical Indian ceremonial ritual, his Upanyanam. Krishnamurti’s father was a Theosophist. Madame Blavatsky, the co-founder of Theosophy, along with Colonel Olcott, an American Civil War veteran, had moved the headquarters to India in 1882, with an opinion that India was a country that paid more attention to spiritual matters than any other country. A compound of colonial style stucco houses had grown up along the Adyar River, behind high stone walls. Blavatsky died in 1890, at the age of 60.

            After Krishnamurti’s father retired on a very very small pension, he begged the world head of the Theosophists, Annie Besant, an educated social reformer who had converted to Theosophy after reading the controversial works of Madame Blavatsky, and C. W. Leadbeater, a former Catholic priest who had converted also, to let him be a secretary to one of them. They refused. Krishnamurti’s father finally moved himself and his three surviving sons to the gates of the Theosophical Society where they took up residence in a shabby hut outside the gates. Besant and Leadbeater finally relented.

            Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya would go down the river to watch the white folks bathe. Leadbeater, a clairvoyant, saw the scrawny, malarial young Krishnamurti, and noticed his aura. Saying that the boy had no selfishness in him, Leadbeater picked out Krishnamurti and began to groom him to be an orator and spiritual teacher.  After Krishnamurti was brutally caned by his schoolmaster to the extent that his psychic presence was damaged, Leadbeater persuaded the father to let the two boys live with him in the main house of the Theosophical Society compound. The year was 1909. Krishna was 13 years old.

K’s father was honored to have this attention by the Theosophical Society leaders paid to his sons at first, but then, when the scandal over Leadbeater’s relationships with young boys threatened the whole worldwide theosophical movement, he sued — and sued — and sued — for something resembling “alienation of affections.”   Leadbeater was always surrounded by boys who were his accolades, altar boys, and students. Lewd headlines accused Leadbeater of all manner of improper conduct.

            Biographer Mary Lutyens said, however, that all those boys seem to have married happily, and that Leadbeater shrugged off the accusations. Leadbeater defended himself by saying he was only trying to teach them the value of masturbation as a way of letting off steam, and of bathing the full body, naked, and not with a loin cloth on.  After long court battles, Besant won guardianship of the boys. Ironically, Besant herself had deserted her own children when she began to follow Theosophical teachings.

            Krishnamurti never attended formal classes in an upper school, though he did attend as a young child, just before and after his family moved to Madras, where the schoolmasters were of the kind that beat children, especially dreamy children like Krishna, who seemed to be often gazing out the open windows. He was often caned and sent outside. After Leadbeater took over, Krishnamurti had some tutors from among the young men who followed Theosophy. Several considered him dim-witted. The main tutor was Leadbeater, but the theosophists seemed to care most about his spiritual development, and he and Nitya often “flew” with Leadbeater to the astral plane in their sleep to visit the Masters of Theosophy. Mostly, Krishnamurti seems to have just studied on his own. The brothers were sent to England to prepare for taking the entrance examinations for Oxford.

            Nitya passed and entered law school, but Krishna failed the examination twice. He also failed the entrance examinations for Cambridge. Krishnamurti then sat for examinations at London University, but failed maths. He then attended lectures. He wrote many letters vowing to study more “philosophy, languages, and maths.”  He also spent time in France learning French and taking elocution lessons in order to be able to speak many languages to those they anticipated he would speak to as the chosen one. Facility in languages was among his strengths, and he studied Sanskrit. He often wrote to Besant and Leadbeater saying that he felt his education had been neglected.

            While he was in France he wrote a letter saying that he enjoyed Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and one summer when he was at a cabin on donated land in Ojai, California (which later became his home), his spiritual masters, during an evening visitation, told Krishna that he was ignoring his education, so he and the group began to memorize a Shakespearean sonnet a day.        

            Krishnamurti was a published poet, but he seemed to value poetry as a means of personal meditation, saying about poetry, “To depend on a person, a poem, or what you will, as a means of release from our worries and anxieties, though momentarily enriching, only creates further conflict and contradiction in our lives,” and “When one really wants to write a poem, one writes it, and if one has the technique, so much the better; but why stress what is but a means of communication if one has nothing to say?” Even without formal education, he was very literate, and served as editor of several publications of the Theosophical Society and he carried on a voluminous correspondence with friends and supplicants. In one of his letters he seemed to be surprised to recapture his gift of healing, saying that many student friends in London were visiting him with their aches and pains. 

            Krishna and Nitya were shuttled as guests from Theosophist to Theosophist, with never a place to live to call their own, and only a small allowance from the Theosophical Society, though they did have exclusive use of some digs in London, Austria, Germany, and Holland from time to time. They learned from some of these hosts how to eat well and how to dress expensively, with tailor made clothes, but when they made the long ocean voyages back and forth to India, and then to Australia, they were shunned and ridiculed as being “black” and for such well‑tailored clothes and well‑polished shoes. Many young women thought that Krishna was quite attractive — as well as the older women (as witness Besant and Lady Emily). In fact, it appears that he was always surrounded by admiring women. His eyes seem to have been the feature that attracted them. This was a good thing for a future leader of a spiritual society that was made up of mostly women, quite a few of them wealthy. Krishna fell in love with a woman of his own age only once; this was with Helen Knothe, a 17 year old American violin student, whom he met in Holland.

            In August of 1920, Krishnamurti began to undergo a “process,” as he called it, of spiritual transformation which lasted, off and on, an intense four years, focusing on a painful spiritual awakening through his spine. It began with a lump at the nape of his neck, and the pain literally threw him about the room for several hours each night, after which he would recover, only to have it happen at 6 p.m. the next night.  The only people who could comfort him were his brother Nitya and two young women, both unmarried. When one of the married women who was in his entourage tried to be with him during the evening “process,” she was cast out as being too impure.

            Both Krishnamurti and his retinue thought that this process was the kundalini energy arising, although they were not yoga masters, nor did they practice yoga except for exercise. Krishnamurti did not see a doctor during these periods, which took place for many days at Ojai, and later in Austria and in India. Seeing a doctor would have made the process stop, he felt, and he believed that the process was another step in his spiritual growth path. He would leave his body to the pain, and depart to another plane, to talk with the Masters, Maitreya, Buddha, and Jesus. The process was witnessed by several people, but by no medical doctors or psychiatrists.

            At the time, Krishnamurti was on the path to be the next World Leader of the Theosophists, the next great world spiritual leader, in the path of the great spiritual teachers of the world.  Krishnamurti would write to Leadbeater and to Besant about the process, asking them for explanations. Besant confirmed that Krishnamurti was indeed undergoing one of the last initiations to be the World Teacher. Here is an account of what would happen to him during the daily process, from an eyewitness, Lady Emily Lutyens:

Krishnaji went away as usual at 7 and was off till 8:40. He suffered a very great deal and his body groaned and wept. . . . Helen was very tired and not very well and the physical elemental [they believed that he left his body to visit with the master’s] seemed conscious of this and tried to control his groans — but at one time they were so bad that Krishna came back and asked what was happening. They said nothing and when he had gone again the physical elemental or whatever is in charge of the body was dreadfully distressed at having brought Krishna back and said Krishna had told him to control himself and he had done his best and could not help it. The Church bells begin to ring always about 8 o’clock and their noise causes him agony. Last night he fainted twice while they were ringing. (In Lutyens, 1975, pp. 176-177)^[1]

During the long years when the process was occurring, Krishnamurti wrote poems every day. Krishna also wrote letters to confidants, about hating to speak to the mammoth crowds who came to hear him. Nitya was diagnosed with both lungs to be tubercular. He died at age twenty-seven, in 1925, and Krishnamurti was alone, without family members near, for the rest of his long life. He never married, though he was always surrounded by gopis, young women, who compared themselves with the milkmaids who surrounded the Hindu god Krishna.

             On August 3, 1929, at Ommen Camp in Holland, Krishnamurti dissolved the group and refused to be considered the new World Teacher. Among the comments he made is this: “I say again that I have no disciples.” “Everyone of you is a disciple of the Truth if you understand the Truth and do not follow individuals.” “ Do not quote me afterwards as an authority. I refuse to be your crutch. I am not going to be brought into a cage for your worship.” He was 32. What he said then seems to be a keystone of his educational ideas.

            In 1926, Krishnamurti had sought to acquire land for a school in the Rishi Valley, close to where he was born. The land was finally acquired in 1928, and the school is still in existence, along with the school I visited in Chennai. He visited the schools as often as he could, and talked with the children and teachers. He was determined to influence changing the face of mass education to a more humane system, and small schools with small classes were among the essentials.

             At the K.F.I. School, teachers either leave in the first two years or stay for a long time. Once they find themselves in agreement, they stay. Teachers find the school is very demanding in terms of its commitment of time and energy, one reason being the many dialogues and discussions among teachers. A series of parent meetings where they discuss “Career Versus Calling” or “Leisure and Knowledge,” or “The Role of Television,” is held. Once a month a study group for parents discusses the works of Krishnamurti. This is voluntary.

             Gautama gave me some yearly reports with regard to how the philosophy is made practical. One student wrote about the Untouchables, the scavengers and sweepers omnipresent but almost invisible, an echo of my own thoughts as I watched the sweeper at the pool.

 They have A Right To Dream

Scavengers. The word brings to mind animals or birds feeding on carrion. But, sadly, there are human scavengers too. They are the Bhangis, or the scavenger race. A video was shown to us by parents of the school, on the Bhangis of Gujarat. The Bhangis are the lowest among the low in the social strata and widely considered to be pollutants. Recently a twelve year old Bhangi boy while watching the world cup matches on TV at a paan [bread] shop, accidentally touched the paan platter.

            The error cost him his sight. The paanwalla, infuriated at his wares being polluted, threw a bowl of lime at the boy’s face. He is now blinded for life. The Bhangis of Gujarat are so badly treated because of their profession. It is their job to collect human waste from illegal dry bathrooms. With only a metal piece they must scrape excreta into their tin cans, carry it out on their heads and deposit it at the dump. The sight of them cleaning excreta was revolting to us and it left us shaken and stirred.

            However, as we were reminded, we were only seeing it; the smell worsened it a hundred-fold. It must be added that though laws do exist banning dry toilets, in actual fact the Government does little about them. . . such practices exist even today. The aim is to start a nation-wide campaign abolishing their very existence. It is time to allow Bhangis to lead respectable lives. It is time to allow them to dream and to fulfil their dreams. Scavenging has to be abolished.

The students are expected to do community service and to have knowledge of the social problems of the area. At the rural education center, students make charts of diseases which affect the region, help people learn to count money and to make measurements, conduct surveys on villagers’ marital status, income and health conditions. Environmental education is also encouraged at the Krishnamurti schools. Students took part in debates on the building of a new hydroelectric dam, and protested its building on grounds that it would destroy indigenous wildlife. Students also do building work, gardening, beach-cleaning, and tree planting as well as bird-watching.

            Multi-grade grouping of students was being experimented with in the lower grades at the KFI School. Much discussion with parents, teachers, and students, about this means of grouping children took place before they tried it.  There is now a proposal to adopt the methodology in some 2000 schools spread over 20 mandals in 7 districts of the state.

            Students in Krishnamurti schools have discussions about their place in the world vis-a-vis their talents, privilege, accomplishments, caste of birth, and such. What does it mean to be accomplished? was one topic. A student wrote:

To understand the full implications of this, one needs to reflect on the flip side of this attitude. What happens to the human being who is not greatly accomplished? Does one have no regard for him? In fact this is exactly what one sees the world over. Is a different approach not possible? Is it not possible to respect a person simply as a human being? Implied in this is the act of listening: listening completely, without any censor coming in, listening without any barrier at all, with a mind that is naturally quiet, like the deep waters of a lake. Krishnamurti once told his audience, “Listening is one of the most important things in life ….’”(He used to refer to listening, looking and learning as the three great arts of life. What an extraordinary statement!) Perhaps here lies the key to our question: in listening lies respect; listening is respect. Can we listen to one another in this manner, with a complete absence of all barriers? And can we work towards bringing about a culture of listening in our schools?

            Students at Krishnamurti schools are encouraged to discuss, to meet, and to discuss again. Principal Gautama said that every change, every decision, takes a long long time, as nothing can be done authoritatively, and all people involved in the decision must have input.  Again and again, the writings of Krishnamurti are consulted.

            I made my way out of the KFI school compound to the street, where I entered to a moderate bustle; walking on the street and not on the sidewalk, among cattle, bicycles, strollers, a muttering madman, and stalls open in front selling tea, fruit, bread, and services, I passed several other schools of other persuasions, a Christian school, a Catholic girls’ school, a private primary school. When I tried to enter the grounds of the Theosophical Society, about a block down, I was turned away because it was closed. Even in December, it was very hot. I walked on the streets among the schoolgirls buying figs for a rupee in the dust and dirt, beeping, and noise, spittle and feces. My soul was lonely here, during this holiday season, far away from family holiday traditions. Annie Besant spent every winter here, and Krishnamurti was in residence over Christmas and New Year’s as well, almost every year of his life.

            The next day I found respite from my homesickness when I went back to the Theosophical Society, the gated, walled compound bought in the late 1800s by the Theosophists. Here I discovered a miraculous haven of tranquility in the melée. Near the library of the esoteric society, I sat doing a watercolor of a magnificent old tree, its branches spreading widely, shading the dappled green lawn beneath it.  As I sat, the tree became an individual to me, a special tree, not a tree among trees, but its own tree. As my eyes framed it and my pen and brush tried to be its rendered mirror, I reflected on all trees. The grounds contain, interspersed and labeled, in the international spirit of Theosophy, donated native trees from many countries, now mature and thriving. I felt a Krishnamurti-like meditation coming on, and in fact, after this day, I began my daily journals for the next few weeks in India, with such meditations.

            I entered the library, took off my shoes on the cool marble floor, and climbed to the reading room, which contains ancient religious texts from many religions. I didn’t have the special researcher permission to peruse these texts, but I was let into the small display room, where I saw several ancient holy manuscripts from various religions. Staring at these and watching people in African robes, Indian dhotis, and western dress enter the library gave me some idea of the research that this library supports.

            Bemused, I began to walk down the shady, lush lane. Autorickshaw and auto traffic has been banned or curtailed here, and I walked gratefully, enjoying the mightiness of world species grown up to shade the path. I paused on a bench next to a grove of palms and focused on the orange blossoms blooming by the side of the road, through which I could admire the palms.  I sat for a long time beneath the famous ancient banyan tree, second largest in India, site for many legendary Theosophist Society gatherings.

            As I walked, the crows took up a huge cry, and about twenty or thirty of them lighted on a few palm trees right next to my walk. In India, crows are always in the sound waves. I thought of legends of crows and ravens, the tricksters, the messengers, the Hermes of the natural world. This flock, which flew in to the banyan grove nearby the road where I was walking, who then loudly cawed at me for about ten minutes, and which then flew off, continued to engage my thought throughout 1999.

            In October, 1999, my undergraduate interdisciplinary studies creativity class went to our hometown Ohio cemetery, meditating on the dark side, and a raven did the same to one of my students, who was peacefully writing in her thought log, in long grass. He sat above her and scolded her. I told her about Raven, the trickster, and can’t help but think there are means and ways within the animal world which we can’t understand, but to which we must pay attention. Why did those crows in the Theosophical Society compound pause to speak near me, and why so many?

            Two small birds hopped on a log and an animal like a chipmunk scurried among them. The place was habited by a few workers, busy with brushes, brooms, carts, and bicycles, with messages being delivered, food being hauled, clearing being done. Few others appeared, except for an occasional Indian couple walking as if in romance, and a few elder gentlemen with pens stuck in the pockets of their flowing cotton shirts, gliding by me with serious faces intent on their thoughts, striding purposefully in their leather sandals. Four workers chatted with each other up on a bamboo scaffold, the women on top, thatching or fastening with cane leaves, the men below giving orders and pointing. I discovered that the place has its own post office, a cool, quiet building with no customers. Besant Station.

            The bookstore stands at the other side of the compound. In it were many works by the original Theosophists, as well as other works by Indian religious thinkers of Hindu and Buddhist persuasion. Theosophy itself purports to sponsor no specific beliefs. I bought several books by Krishnamurti, to begin a study of his philosophies of education, as well as his other thoughts. The books are lovely, with soft handmade paper covers, fitting comfortably into a purse or pocket, printed on tan paper. They cost about 45 rupees, a little over a U.S. dollar.

            Off and on all year, I studied my lovely small beautiful Krishnamurti books, using the meditations and journals as spiritual texts, as the intensity of the principal of the K.F.I. school would not leave my mind.

Figuring Out Krishnamurti’s Educational Philosophy: A Small Study

            Figuring out the educational philosophy of Krishnamurti was either too simple or too complex. I would start reading, and then get waylaid by thought. Sometimes one sentence was enough to start me off in cogitating, meditating, about what associations came to me from the sentence, but then, my unquiet mind began to think about everything but the sentences my eyes were reading. I was unable to finish any of the books, as everything seemed circular, and soon Krishnamurti’s sentences started sounding the same, ponderous and prescriptive in the manner of Indian philosophy.  I am an advanced reader, and I often read a book a day. Why couldn’t I put together what Krishnamurti was saying? Why couldn’t I synthesize this? I read sentence by sentence. Plodding. Slow.

            In order to summarize what he said about education, I designed myself a textual analysis study. I copied every fourth sentence of Education and the Significance of Life (1953), and the first 363 sentences of Letters to the Schools, II (1985) , his first and last books about education.  The reason I took every four sentences is that the first book is more comprehensive and, as I said, Krishnamurti seemed to repeat himself in different form, many times in each chapter. Then, in order to analyze an unbroken text, I copied an almost equal number of sentences, in the order written, from his last education book, Letters to the Schools, II. I then did searches in both texts for certain key words that kept seeming to pop up over and over. In my search, I found these frequencies:

In this manner, I was able to conduct an exegesis, and was able to analyze the words and their associated concepts and his use of them in company with other sentences containing the same words. I was able to decipher what he meant when he wrote a word by placing the sentences in proximity. For example, the adjective “right” was used in the phrase “right kind of education,” “right thinking,” and “right kind of educator.”

            In studying the sentences and words in their various combinations, I was able to choose 13 sentences that seem to most reflect Krishnamurti’s philosophy of education.  Several of these had many of the key words in them.

13 Sentences: KRISHNAMURTI ON EDUCATION

1. The right kind of educator, seeing the inward nature of freedom, helps each individual student to observe and understand his own self-projected values and impositions; he helps him to become aware of the conditioning influences about him, and of his own desires, both of which limit his mind and breed fear; he helps him, as he grows to manhood, to observe and understand himself in relation to all things, for it is the craving for self-fulfillment that brings endless conflict and sorrow.
2. The function of education is to create human beings who are integrated and therefore
3. Education then is freedom from conditioning, from its vast accumulated knowledge as tradition.
4. Fear perverts intelligence and is one of the causes of self-centered action.
5. If in their hearts the teachers have put away all fear and all desire for domination, then they can help the student towards creative understanding and freedom; but if there is a conscious or unconscious desire to guide him towards a particular goal, then obviously they are hindering his development.
6. Because he is devoted solely to the freedom and integration of the individual, the right kind of educator is deeply and truly religious; he does not belong to any sect, to any organized religion; he is free of beliefs and rituals, for he knows they are only illusions, fancies, superstitions projected by the desire of those who create them.
7. Intelligence is much greater than intellect; for it is the integration of reason and love; but there can be intelligence only when there is self-knowledge, the deep understanding of the total process of oneself.
8. One teaches because one sees that self-knowledge alone, and not the dogmas and rituals of organized religion, can bring about a tranquil mind; and that creation, truth, God, comes into being only when the “me” and the “mine” are transcended.
9. To be creative is not merely to produce poems, or statues, or children; it is to be in that state in which truth can come into being.
10. Truth comes into being when there is a complete cessation of thought; and thought ceases only when the self is absent, when the mind has ceased to create, that is, when it is no longer caught in its own pursuits.
11. The true teacher is inwardly rich and therefore asks nothing for himself; he is not ambitious and seeks no power in any form; he does not use teaching as a means of acquiring position or authority, and therefore he is free from the compulsion of society and the control of governments.
12. In thus helping the student towards freedom, the educator is changing his own values also; he too is beginning to be rid of the “me” and the “mine,” he too is flowering in love and goodness.
13. There [in a certain type of small school] the teacher can establish this relationship and there he is deeply involved with the flowering of human beings.

            Krishnamurti, in his books and letters, talked about schools where students understand that they are conditioned by society, that they approach ideas with a view towards realizing that there is a difference between knowledge, intelligence, and creativity. Knowledge is what is needed to do a job in order to make a living; intelligence is what one does with the knowledge; creativity is the process of doing something new.

            The right kind of education, K. thought, is an education that goes beyond the cultivation of technique. The right kind of education integrates the personality and frees the child. This takes a change of heart, and not a somewhat mechanistic acquisition of facts and techniques.

            Does this sound a little platitudinous?  Or too simple? Too much like the fabled progressivists? I read and re-read these ideas repeated in various forms with various elaborations and explanations: fear produces people who both have courage and who are cowardly. The best education takes place in small schools with very close relationships between the students and the teacher. The teacher learns with the student and is not the authority. Students are to be taught with love and with care, so that they can flower.

         Krishnamurti’s notions about education have to do with the metaphor of the flower in the garden, the school as a fertile place for children to grow, along with dedicated educators who will tutor them and bring them along at their own speed, without coercion.

            In looking at Krishnamurti’s own educational history, one can see that this, indeed, was how he was educated by the Theosophists, and, ironically, when he refused the mantle of being the World Teacher, he became a world teacher to all who would listen. He died February 17, 1986, in Ojai, at the age of 91, an age at which he had predicted he would die, back when he was experiencing the awakening “process” that turned him into a prophet and a seer for the twentieth century.  His views on education are worth study and consideration by those of us in the west. Perhaps this essay has given an introduction.

            When I got back to the hotel later that momentous afternoon in Chennai, I went over the bridge, past the bare-torsoed beggar with no arm setting up his station right at the edge of the single-lane path-over so as to be able to solicit all comers, threading through the crowds who swarmed by among the autos, motorbikes, and autorickshaws. The bridge overlooks a spillway with muddy water spurting through. On its bank I stopped to look at a small settlement of cane built huts for people of low caste, just beneath the bridge. A barefoot boy and his friend played by pulling debris from the water. A plastic bag. A plastic bottle. No school for them today.

References

            Krishnamurti, J. (1953). Education and the significance of life. Chennai, India: Krishnamurti Foundation of India.

            Krishnamurti, J. (1985). Letters to the schools, II. Chennai, India: Krishnamurti Foundation of India.

            Lutyens, M. (1975). Krishnamurti: The years of awakening. Boston: Shambhala.

^[1] All biographical information taken from Lutyens, 1975.

^[i] The author would like to thank the Faculty Development Program at Ashland University, especially Dr. Katherine Flanagan and Provost Mary Ellen Drushal, for putting into place the interdisciplinary studies global awareness grant by which this research was done.