"It is only when you have no love that you have an ideal" ❤️

On Why the Teacher Needs Teaching More than the Student

#lovelyreads

Today, I got a lovely book as a gift from my vibrant colleague, Dr. Nirmal. It’s by J. Krishnamurti, and it’s titled, Educating the Educator. The book is a collection of reports from meetings that JK had with teachers and parents in India in 1948.

One uniqueness about this book is that, unlike most educational books that focus on child psychology or teaching methods, this shifts the entire focus to the transformation of the teacher.

We spend all our energy trying to “mould” children, but we ignore the fact that the person doing the moulding is often flawed, observes J. Krishnamurti.

So it is the educator, not the student, who is the central problem in education.

And I quote –

So our problem is not so much the child, the boy or the girl, but the teacher, the educator, who needs educating much more than the pupil.

So why does JK recommend the education of the educator?

Well, that’s because JK feels that, teachers and parents are often “set” or fixed in their ways, making them harder to educate than the children they teach. Having such “set ideals” - like trying to mould a child into a specific pattern - actually prevents a teacher from understanding the child as they currently are.

Ideals then, act as barriers. When we look at a child through the lens of an “ideal”, we stop observing the child as they actually are. That’s hence Krishnamurti calls ideals a “cheap escape” because it takes patience, care, and love to study a child’s behaviour, whereas it takes no effort to simply force them into a pattern of “truth”.

Liberating! 😊

And I quote JK–

“If I want to understand a child, I must not have an ideal of what he should be. To understand him, I must study him as he is.”

Moreover, J. Krishnamurti opines that, the reason for all the current crises that we find in the world - like war, conflict etc., - is a result of wrong values and education. In fact, he feels that, the existing education systems have failed miserably, because they have produced “the two most colossal and destructive wars in history”.

Interestingly, JK does not approve of state-controlled education. He warns that governments often don’t want people to think, arguing that, governments often want to create “perfect machines” or “automatons” rather than free, independent thinkers.

And I quote JK -

“Right education is obviously a danger to government, so it is a function of government to see that right education is not imparted.”

“They don’t want people to think, they want people to be automatons because then they can be told what to do.”

To conclude, we spend a lifetime trying to mould children into ‘good’ citizens, ‘successful’ professionals, or ‘ideal’ students. Krishnamurti suggests that we stop doing that! 😊 Instead, he opines that, the most profound act of education isn’t about moulding the child, but to break the mould of the educator.

Until we are free, we cannot teach freedom!