'Your children are not your children':Educating the Spirit - 3rd extract.

I am sitting in the summer sun outside the barn that has been converted to create a schoolroom for twenty children, inside there is a high-ceilinged schoolroom, two toilets and at one end, a kitchen.  A redwood tree towers over the building, one of the landmark trees of the area, and there is a stillness in the air now that the laughter and activity of the children has ceased for the day.   The singing of birds in the surrounding woods and the call of a buzzard from far above is contained within that stillness. I look up to see the wide-winged birds wheeling through the blue on a warm flow of air; an expression of freedom and power.

I have been here for nearly a year now.  The grass we planted as seed in the autumn has grown to cover the mud of the Spring to create a large play space around the solid form of the old oak.  It is a place for young children to wander about, to sit and daydream, and to chase each other, to take a book and read or a piece of paper on which to draw.  We, the adults, learn together with the children, watching them, listening, laughing and being silent.  It is a good place; not idyllic for that is mere fantasy – usually thought up through some theory.  Nothing is rushed, there are few deadlines to be attained and there is plenty of time for questions.  If there are tears, anger or unhappiness we have the space to address all these emotions – sometimes with a gesture of affection, sometimes it takes patience and words.

Through economic circumstances I had to leave this school after only two years.  That was nearly ten years ago.  Occasionally I see those children.  They are friendly, bright and still enjoying learning, still clearly valuing the freedom, cooperation, space, affection and a love of learning we all experienced in that time.  For me those two years were a blessing.

…

‘Your children are not your children,

They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,

But seek not to make them like you.’

From The Prophet by Khalil Gibran  (1923)

I read this when I was in my late teens, many, many years ago.  Its meaning has resonated in me for all the time I have been a father, educator, and now a grandfather.  In my relationships with other parents, as a teacher and as a houseparent, I have met others with this outlook, but a much larger number to whom this way of looking at their children has no meaning at all.  These parents see their children as possessions, valuable, to be protected, but ultimately belonging to them.  This brings a mutual dependency; their children seek the approval of their parents and the parents want their children’s’ love to be expressed through obedience, conformity and achievement.  So, often the parent’s response is to indulge the child materially and to monitor their every move – there has been much written about the collapse of children’s engagement with nature (George Monbiot recently wrote in the Guardian that ‘Eleven to Fifteen year olds (in the UK) now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen).  These parents separate their children from others, putting them in competitive roles and creating further fragmentation in their relationships…….

I’ll be exploring this further as I examine whether there is another way to approach education rather than child-centred, parental choice or state dictatorship; something that encompasses consciousness and the world in which we live.

Questions and Answers:Educating the Spirit - 2nd extract.

Ten years ago I used to take our dog walking these country lanes.  His large, shaggy soulful frame is long gone and I am reminded, as I take the same walk, of his beautiful friendship.  This time through the heavy silent mist of a mid-November afternoon I am walking with an Indian friend from Canada.  He has been staying at the school for some time and we talk about his experiences and discoveries; he is researching for a book on a different approach to education and has gained fascinating insights from his interviews and conversations.  We walk slowly up the drive to the large house, the fields either side exude a soft stillness and the leaves fall in quiet flurries to the ground exposing the trees to their winter skeleton.  We are not hemmed in by the thick mist, there is not that cloying claustrophobia you can get in the cities and towns, instead there is an atmosphere of gentleness and peace.

The next day I am invited to spend the morning observing and interacting with several classes of students, girls and boys aged from thirteen to nineteen.  These students come from all over the world and have recently joined this particular school community; the only one of its kind in Europe.  Many are a long way from home.  The first two classes explore the role of peer counsellor through role play and reflection.  It is an opportunity to develop the process of listening and observation in respect of human behaviour; so responses to non-verbal as well as verbal expressions are discussed.  There is no authority in the classroom in the sense of an expert and the students are free to question any aspect of what is going on: the intelligence and sharpness of their observations is no surprise to me, but may be of some news to those who consider teenagers only to be capable of receiving knowledge rather than thinking for themselves.

During the human development classes I am given the opportunity of asking the student questions about their experiences of being listened to, which also includes reference to some participation in their own learning.  The vast majority of these students are in their first term at the school and, therefore, their memories are very recent.  Their background varies from home-schooling, through small ‘alternative’ schools, ‘regular’ schools, to one student who had come from a school in South America that had three thousand students. In general they had experienced limited communication with adults.  For some it would be purely about academics, others had relationships which led to broader and more meaningful conversations, a significant few talk about having no relationship beyond that common to most traditional hierarchical and disciplinarian schools.  Many say that they had articulated their thoughts, but had not often been listened to in a way that engendered some kind of response that acknowledged what they had been saying.  Some mention anger and frustration as being a regular facet of their lives with adults.

However, although an examination of their present situation is not an intention of my questioning, several talk of this:  the usage of adult’s first names making a significant difference; active involvement if the running of the school; the culture of the school that does not depend on a hierarchy and an acknowledgement that everyone is learning together.  These young people are relaxed, open and articulate - it is a delight to be with them.

Meanwhile, the UK Government is working hard to ensure the vast majority of children do not have access to a culture of learning in which they might participate fully.  No opportunity is given for them to even question what is going on.  Power is being used to promote a thoughtless, inhumane and ultimately useless approach to education dreamed up from a male-orientated, militaristic, narrowly academic ideology.   Education has become a battleground dominated by fear, distrust and frustration – hardly a creative environment in which both teacher and students can thrive.  We have become so obsessed with what goes on in our heads and what our hands can produce we have forgotten our hearts: for when the heart does not beat the brain can no longer function and the hand is still.

In this quotation it is important to understand ‘he’ is also ‘she’.

‘The true teacher is not he who has built up an impressive educational organization, nor he who is an instrument of the politicians, nor he who is bound to an ideal, a belief or a country.  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 authority and control of governments.  Such teachers have primary place in an enlightened civilization, for true culture is founded, not on the engineers and technicians, but on the educators.’                 J Krishnamurti Education and the Significance of Life (1953)

This is why I went into teaching, why I had to leave teaching and why I will return.

Educating the Spirit - draft beginning

This is the draft beginning of a book I am working on.  Any comments gratefully received.

Educating the Spirit: changing the way we think.

Chapter One:     Young Leaves

In the evening we are taken on a boat ride along the River Ganges into the city of Varanasi. This majestic river is soiled by the squalid lives of humanity, fetid clumps of matter float past and her banks are pitted with plastic and polystyrene.  Further on a blackened shape passes us with a crow is perched on it: a body only partially burnt and tossed into the river to save precious wood.  We pass ancient buildings, fiery corpses and garish hoardings: all life is here.  We moor at the edge of the old city and walk up the dusty, mud streets.

Earlier that day we had met a man who had been involved in education in Varanasi and other places in India for many years; we talked about the state of the world and education in particular.  This was in early 2011 when the global economic situation was disintegrating, the gap between rich and poor ever widening, the speed of environmental degradation was gathering pace as humanity desperately searched to unearth whatever resources the Earth had left.

“We need to educate the spirit,’ the man said.  He explained that he felt we have reduced learning to the mere gathering of knowledge in order to get a job, settle down and be secure; being only concerned with the mechanical.  The global crisis we are facing now is an inevitable and direct result of this approach, he felt.

In India, as in many parts of the world, education is seen as a means of obtaining results in a highly competitive world.  Education is big business; in all the towns and cities I have been to there are very many schools from those in converted houses to the opulent ‘international’ schools that boast every modern facility possible.  Parents want their children to become wealthy, to be economically secure and to have status in society; this all reflects well on them and the family.  Such is the intensity of feeling surrounding exam results that it can, all too often leads to tragic outcomes: we met a young lady whose best friend at school killed herself when she received her results as she felt that she had let down her family and life was not worth living any more.  This lady we met works with young people and is a passionate opponent of formal schooling and all it involves, citing this experience as pivotal in her thinking.

 Education is so often presented as being all about policy; about political interest, manipulation of people, and creating institutionalized failure for many against a background of a perception of success for the few.  This policy builds the notion of life as a race with winners and losers, and it begins even before we are born.  However,  I am writing about the individual, the single human, for that is who I have always come across in my teaching: individual students as well as individual teachers and parents.  For the vast majority of my teaching career I have been known by my first name in institutions where young people have not been required to wear uniforms and, to differing extents, formality was not used as a means of control.  The consequence of this was to give greater meaning to relationships between individuals and accentuate the fact that respect lay in the quality of these relationships, not in reverting to status and coercion.  The extraordinary diversity of character of students, teachers and parents contributed to the vitality, effectiveness and happiness of these places.  When this diversity was subjected to oppressive conformity, particularly through the pursuit of narrow academic success, then the delicate web of mutual respect broke down, leaving conventional punishment and reward processes as the means to encourage and motivate. However, when we talk about the spirit of the individual we are actually exploring the human spirit, human consciousness; so in this we move beyond the separation of individuals and their characteristics to that which unifies us all – our thoughts, feelings: life itself.  Therefore, in educating the individual human spirit we are in touch with all that is consciousness; and thus the individual takes on her or his proper significance

Violence and Hatred

It is cold, very cold and the show is lying heavily beside the roads, on the rooftops and on the pavements.  Krakow in Poland is a beautiful city and in the throes of a cold winter when the clear blue skies allow the sun to glisten on the long icicles that hang from the rooftops there is tremendous magic in the place.

Today, however, is a grey, misty day with no sign of fresh snow.  The fog seems to simultaneously rise from the ice and snow and drift down from the sullen sky.  Today is the day we are visiting Auschwitz, the concentration death camp operated by the Nazis in the Second World War.  We climb into the bus and are driven through the snow blanketed countryside.  The few people that we see as we move swiftly along the road are bent against the cruel wind and wrapped up in layers of clothing to keep them warm.  It is a day for reflection; to observe, listen and then to feel.

The car park is filling up as we arrive and we pull up beside another bus; this one is disgorging a crowd of students from another part of Europe – they are in high spirits as they wait to be organised.  We enter the visitor area and buy tickets.  Not for us the guided tour, we want to be apart from the crowds, to have some space to feel what happened there.

The cold is biting, clinging to our faces, dragging at our feet.  It is a welcome relief to go inside to view the exhibition of shoes, of human hair and to read the stories of those that were killed, see the photos of the imprisoned and their guardians.  Steadily the horror seeps into the brain:  here is the place people were put up against the wall and shot;  there are the gas chambers; these are the furnaces where living children met their end;  these are the workers dormitories, cold wooden and concrete; this the end of the railway line, where life finished before death came.

Walking out in the snow they can be seen, shuffling along, leaving no mark.  In the icy air their breathing creates the mist that clings.  My body is cold, uncomfortable, in the silence that still holds the ghosts of the dead.  It is warmer in the gas chambers and where the furnaces once reduced so much flesh and bone to ash.  A new horror emerges as I read about the cold efficiency of the factory of death and my mind slips unbidden from the shock of the killing to the lives of the killers – I become aware that I have more in common with them than the ragged skeletons.  Like many of these men who stare out from their photographs I am well-educated, privileged, with my roots in the dominant professional middle-class.  And it begins to dawn on me that I have within me the capability of cruelty, the level of fear and the lack of compassion to be part of such an institution of torture, destruction and death.  All I need is to be convinced of the rightness of the cause and to separate myself from the existence of other living beings.  I have done it; I could do it now – for I have learnt well, though I cannot remember the lessons.

We return to the car park at the same time as the students; they are returning to their bus in small groups, bowed by the cold and what they have seen and heard concerning the capabilities of the human race.  I sit with my wife and eldest son; I cannot speak as I look back and remember within the walls such echoes of violence, courage, desperation, misery, arrogance and sheer horror.

I ask the question: what is the road we can take that means that we are compassionate rather than cruel; even to the point of facing death rather than destroying another?

Listen

“Listen.”

“I am listening.”

“What do you hear?”

“Nothing.”

“How can you hear nothing?  Listen again.”

“I can hear a dog bark….  A car go past….  I can hear the rain on the window…. I can hear my neighbours breathing……..  I can hear my breathing……..I can hear my heart beating………I can hear the blood in my veins….”

We are sitting in the classroom.  It is a beautiful Spring day, warm enough to have the doors open and let the breeze come in.  The grass has that special tinge of green which comes when the new shoots outnumber the tired old brown leaves that are now so brittle.  The sky holds a blue of promise, of new life and fresh beginnings; and soft, white clouds glisten against the vivid background.

“Be still.  Take a deep breath.  What do you feel?”

“Air so cool, so new…..Freshness, like I am coming alive…..Connection to all that is outside…..I want to be outside!”

Stillness and silence came that day in a class of twenty girls and boys aged around thirteen years old for a brief moment.  Usually these children love to chat, but something about that day, that time, beckoned to them and touched a part of their humanity that is always there; even though the premature veneer of sophistication induced by the demands of an affluent 2ist Century lifestyle constantly threatens to drown this sensitivity.   Silence and stillness can be demanded, coerced, but it remains the product of regimentation through the inferior submitting to superior authority and therefore has no meaning.

Instead we begin with listening together.  It is through collective participation in listening that sensitivity and compassion can flower.  We undervalue the importance of listening in a world that clamours with noise and frenetic activity.

A Song: Last Will and Testament

A  Song:          Last Will and Testament

I don’t want to

Die a hard-wired, concrete,

Plastic-tubed, metallic death.

I don’t want to

Be surrounded with mechanical sounds drowning

Out the voices of

The wife and sons

I have loved for all these years.

I want to

Lie down on the hills,

On the snow covered mountains.

I want to

Hear voices

As the breeze blows through the long grass

Of the meadows.

I want to

Rest in the warm sands of the deserts

Or bathe in cool rivers.

I want to

sink in to the gently lapping seas,

drowning in its saltiness.

So please don’t

Put me in some ambulance

With flashing light and blaring siren

To be operated on

Under the cruel glare of hospital lights.

Leave me in the sun

Hold my hand through the pain

Until my breathing is no more.

Taking a Walk in the River

 We are in the rainforest of Southern India among the giant roots, the elephant dung, the unidentifiable song, the close heat and the leeches.  These attach themselves unobtrusively and gorge on our blood, transforming their sleek bodies to grotesque inflations of their former selves, clinging to their unwilling hosts with alarming tenacity.  They inhabit the ground of the forest and wait.

We have taken the path down the hillside through the land that has been reclaimed for the rainforest from the vast tea plantations.  All around are the sounds of living creatures, the cries of birds, the crash of the monkeys swinging through the branches and those noises that are identifiable only to those who inhabit that land.

Now we enter the river.  It swirls around our legs pulling strongly as walk against the current.  Our feet are bare and feel the soft mud beneath.  There is a difference to being in the river to that of being on it; on a boat you watch the water pass and the land change shape, whilst in the water you experience the movement and flow, observing the land more slowly and with greater attention.

We are following the path that many young people have taken on their stay in the rainforest.  Here, far away from their city environment, they participate in connecting with the force of nature that is the forest and all the life that it supports.  These children leave comfort and distraction behind and are plunged into an alien life.  However, their response is quickly one of energetic engagement for part of their education is the exploration of the relationship that exists between humanity and the natural world.  This experience, though only temporary, is vital to their understanding of their place in the world.  They discover that their individual existence is as an integral part of all that is living and, consequently, they are less likely to subscribe to the myth that the individual is the centre from which all action takes place.

…

In our data filled, success driven, judgemental world we are inclined to overlook the ordinary, the unremarkable, the small.  We are exhorted to ‘make a difference’, to ‘be the change’ and to ‘follow our dreams’ – all on a big scale.  These exhortations can make us feel powerless, useless against a tapestry of the charismatic, influential and successful role models set up as both inspirational and signposts of aspiration.  However, when you take a walk in the river your significance is revealed against the backdrop of nature and your existence is no less and no greater than the land that surrounds you and the water than flows past you.