Page 105 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

The Sacred and the Everyday

caste. This struggle, and the contradictions it gives rise to, will
undoubtedly influence the shaping of a truly global outlook.

Education as a transformative process

For Krishnamurti, the major means of developing a global outlook,
and a spirit of connectedness in the everyday, is through education
that focuses on not only the development of cognitive abilities but
also on a process of self-inquiry and observation, on developing an
understanding of our psychological processes as educators and as
students.
The question this raises is, what kind of education does such
a perspective envisage? The American educator Howard Gard-
ner, as part of his work on multiple intelligences (Gardner 1999),
considers the possibility of ‘moral intelligence’ and emphasizes
the importance of education and schooling, alongside the family
and the community, for the development of such a morality. The
‘moral’ here is however not any kind of dogma to be enforced by
religion. It is more a matter of ‘individual conscience’, celebrating
an individual’s ability to cognize her responsibility to the earth and
to humanity. The moral domain in this sense is indicative of per-
sonal agency whereby the individual has a sense of purpose in the
context of relating to others and to their life processes. If the moral
is about individual agency, individuals would necessarily assume
responsibility in different ways.
To seek to nurture the moral as a form of intelligence through
educational processes and practices implies building what we may
call ethical subjectivities. In viewing the individual as charged with
moral agency, and the role of education in developing ethical sub-
jectivities, I am not however advocating that there is once again
a striving for the sacred or a reaching out to a ‘superior’ moral
phenomenon to beget a change. It is in the everyday that both the
moral and the change lie. Educational institutions inhere in soci-
ety and it is imperative that we view education as an exercise in

87