Page 99 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

Krishnamurti, Education and Unlearning

kindness, meditation, courage are the powers latent within us—
powers which our relentless conditioning has relegated to the realm
of ‘potential’, ‘latent’, and inactive. But what can we do about it?
The question which K asked, and which we are asking as we begin
our educational attempt, is ‘What is education?’, and the corollary
question of ‘How do we educate?’ A literal sense of what it means
to educate is the direction of our effort. Most of us who have had
the experience of formal education share a common background
of experience. From its earliest stages the process involves a separa-
tive approach of teacher and student in which it is the student who
is to be acted upon. He is lacking in knowledge and must be filled.
She is unacquainted with proper behaviour and must be shaped.
They must be periodically tested to ensure that their condition-
ing is effective. They are compared and rewarded according to the
degree of their demonstrated embrace of this conditioning. Fur-
thermore, they are trained to fear the consequences of inadequate
acceptance, or ‘inappropriate’ questioning of this teaching process.
By the time we arrive at the higher levels of institutional education
we have not only become fully adapted to this process, but find we
have developed a certain dependence, a vested interest in furthering
this approach. Our career, acceptance in the community, even our
sense of self-worth become so intimately linked to the conditioned
view of who we are and what is of value, that any movement in an
alternative direction can be fearful. Although it is a problem faced
at different stages of life, often in middle age one starts to feel with
an increasing severity that neither the training of a lifetime, nor the
path on which it has placed us, has led to happiness. One starts to
feel that, throughout the process, no guidelines or instruction have
been directed toward the most fundamental desire of every person,
the attainment of happiness, and the search for meaning.
Krishnamurti once commented that “It is no sign of health to be
well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. The educational process
from its inception should not be about pouring facts, information,

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