Monday 3 December 2012

'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.

Tuesday 20 November 2012

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.

Monday 5 November 2012

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

Wednesday 24 October 2012

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?


Tuesday 25 September 2012

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.

Tuesday 11 September 2012

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.

Wednesday 22 August 2012

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.

Tuesday 24 July 2012

India


This was written in 1990, 19 years after I first travelled to India. This proved to be the first of many visits since.  I consider my many trips to India to have been an enormous privilege where the intensity of learning has been balanced by an apparent constant lack of comprehension.  And where the all too visible effects of human indifference and suffering are intensified by the depth of affection I have received – often to my continuing surprise. 


Two weeks in India.  The cities are horrifying the noise of the traffic with its constant hooting and anarchic progress is abominable.  The stench of the roadside dumps littered with vegetable matter of all kinds, intermingled with articles such as bits of old shoes, assaults the nostrils incessantly.  It is a place of smells: spices, food cooking, excrement and urine, blooming flowers, incense.

Noise: chatter, shouting, traffic, animals, bells, horns, birdsong, coughing, spitting.  Silence:  walking through countryside, walking in the quiet lanes of some ancient town, sitting by the pond in a village.  The animals, people, birds merge and are part of the living earth.  We meet villagers, water buffalo, and goats moving easily along the dusty paths.  Expanding beauty and peace in a land of rock, trees and scrub.  Open skies, wheeling birds, clear light and the lost tread of bare feet.

This is a land of paradox, the rich and living closely together in apparent ignorance.  The horror of the cities and the beauty of the countryside.  The capabilities of the intellectuals and the illiteracy of so many.  The exquisite craftsmanship and the plethora of appalling, garish plastic.  The reverence for life and the wanton killing.  The affection of individuals and the fear in the crowds.

T o sit and listen to drumming, singing and watch the graceful movement of the dancers.  To feel the freedom and lack of inhibition, and to be away from passive entertainment and to be part of it all.

Travelling over the badly made up roads, weaving like a drunken cyclist through the crowded streets, just missing the nose of a donkey.  Beware any innocent who might stray into our pathway.  Driving straight at the lumbering trucks, the arrogant camels and patient oxen.  Cutting back in at the last minute.

Lying back on the first class bunk in a dirty, dusty carriage.  No light, just the sound of the train.  Throwing us about, tossed like leaves in the wind.  Occasionally we stop, voices sound close.  Coughing, spitting, eerie sounds of the night.  We start up again, slowly, jerkily, grinding into action.  The morning light begins to make its way through the shutters and another day dawns.  Through the rattling gloom the sun makes its way bringing brilliant blue and searing heat.

In the city it is difficult to look beyond the squalor, filth and human degradation.  But in the eyes of the beggar girl, the proud bearing of the holy man, the flash of the sari and the turban, vivid explosions in a brown dusty haze there is a different world. 

In the country there is the upright swinging walk of women expertly balancing unfeasible loads, the smile of the child and the weather-beaten walnut faces of men….



In the river of life I have moved from the rushing shallows that vigorously plunge from the mountains to the deeper, slow moving progress towards the sea.  How far away from its completion I am it is impossible to tell.  There is unspoken richness from my long marriage, my grown up children, my young grandchildren and my friends far and wide. 

As the river gathers richness as it journeys through the land creating fertile soil in its final stages, then humanity has that possibility to acknowledge the debt of gratitude and to give back whatever can be given.  Not through superiority of knowledge or experience, but out of the humility of understanding the fragility of all life.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

To be Young.


He is sixteen years old and from Turkey; she is also sixteen and comes from St. Lucia. Shaded from the ferocious Rajasthan sun by the branches of a few trees, a group of young people and three adults from a school in England are visiting India to explore and observe what life is like in a different culture.  The girl and boy are loudly discussing the merits of flat screen televisions.  They are arguing about size, make, quality of picture and sound, comparing the rooms they have in there respective homes given to visual entertainment.  They are oblivious to their surroundings.

A thin man, whose dark face seems to have been etched from the desert rock, talks to us with passion of the work they are doing to ensure that water reaches the fields enabling the people of the village to grow the crops that will sustain their lives.   A little way beyond a group of women are digging out a trench in the stone littered dry earth through which a pathetic dribble of water is running.  Their saris dazzle in the glare of the sun.
 Sometimes, he says, the monsoon sends us so little rain that we have to pay for tankers to bring in water, but that is just for the people to drink.  Drilling has become too expensive, and, anyway, often the ground water is found to contain arsenic, fluoride or is too saline to be able to support food crops.
The boy and girl have been gently reminded where they are and their conversation, which has digressed to films they have seen recently, comes to a close and they join the main group.  Another boy asks for water for he is thirsty and he has already consumed the contents of his water bottle.  It is hot and it is not yet midday.


We quickly blame the young for the shortcomings we see in them.  As parents we want to control, protect, manipulate, own and love them.  Sometimes we see them as extensions of ourselves; too often we forget that they are individual, independent members of the human species.

The vast majority of my schooling took place during the 1960s.  To be young in that decade was to be aware of the growing excitement, colour and richness of life; influences came from all over the world and there appeared to be endless possibilities.   It became clear that it was not necessary to conform to post war expectations and a unifying spirit amongst the young seemed to exist that I could feel, even from the claustrophobic and cloistered surroundings of a boy’s boarding school.  For a brief time there was a sense of equality, search for peace, care for the world and concern for each other, blossoming as values for a generation.  However, all too quickly these delicate flowers withered and died as these values were packaged and made into saleable commodities; for there was money to be made from the empty ‘ everything is beautiful’ mantra in all its fantastical trappings.  There was also the ugly side; the drugs that created lives lived on make-believe; the exploitation of naivety and the desperate disappointment of dreams unfulfilled. 

Now, freedom is viewed as having choice not as a state of mind, aspiration is considered as an important aspect of young people’s thinking and worth is only given to the thing that will bring material success.  The education system serves as the ‘materialistic exploitation of young people’ and ‘being well-educated means economically effective or successful’ (quotations from a recent conversation with the Principal of an alternative school in India).  The future can be described as a grim place or be given the illusion of a paradise; each extreme is a story built on falsehood.  However, if we view education is an ‘exploration into what is happening today without the barrier of condemnation’ (from the same conversation), then we move into a different realm.  This is not dependent on ideals, not part of an ideology, but is an active and vital process of finding out, of discovery.

Listening is exploration.  Not just listening to others, but listening to yourself; not out of a selfish individualism, but out of the realisation that what you feel – the love, fear, loneliness, hope, faith, joy- is the common to all of humanity.  Involving young people in the act of listening may be a key to joining with them in finding freedom them from the tyranny of anxiety, aspiration, despair and suffering.

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Trust and Affection




The dog, thin and tired, walks in to the room and lies down with a sigh of contentment.  Its lightly breathing black and white body does not appear to distract any of the group of fifteen children seated in a circle around it.  The dog is quite comfortable on the hard concrete surface and the children are at ease sitting cross-legged on threadbare rugs.  The teacher sits among the children and at first I am not aware that she is there, as I try to maintain a relaxed position on the impossibly unforgiving ground.  The children are aged between thirteen and fourteen years, girls and boys sit together and some quietly chatter.  Then a silence, not one that is enforced neither one that comes instantly from some regimented reaction.  This silence is natural and brings an air of calm expectancy; certainly the dog is at ease as it stirs, in a fluid movement shifting position.

Despite the discomfort I am experiencing, I sit fascinated listening to the free flowing conversation amongst the children.  Occasionally there is laughter; from time to time there is quiet, neither awkward nor giving space to shuffling embarrassment.  The teacher interjects, questions, challenges, but she is not in control.  There is respect, trust and affection.  Some children switch off for a time; some whisper to each other, however, there is no disruption.  There is a silence at the end of the lesson that brings the children together, sitting straight backed, unforced and in good humour.  The teacher smiles, she thanks the children and they leave chattering and laughing.  Two children stay behind and sit next to the teacher, talking intensely in low voices.  She holds the boy’s hand, the girl rests her hand on the teacher’s arm; there is a different feeling here.

It is time for me to go.  I raise myself somewhat painfully from the rug; I am a sufferer from stiff joints and too much time sitting on chairs.  As I make my way to the heat outside to yet again be subjected to the burning sun, the dog yawns, stretches and effortlessly gets on to its feet.  It joins me with a wag of its tail and we walk together from the concrete to the hot sand.  There we say our goodbyes as I go for cup of chai and the dog goes in search of water.
 ‘While we want our students to internalise the ‘right’ principles, if we have any humility we also want them to be able to go beyond our values and develop their own moral sense.  One way to accomplish this is to make time for frequent and open dialogue among students and teachers, in an environment of trust and affection.  This guarantees nothing, of course!  Yet it seems only right that young people be given the opportunity to challenge adults and be challenged in return, and most school environments make this difficult, if not impossible.’              
‘In our schools and classrooms, we generally reward ability rather than effort, and most systems outside school function in a similar way.  If we believe it is worthwhile to question these deeply rooted practices, again it seems we need to engage our students in open dialogue about these issues.  Here, we as teachers are not giving them our rules; rather, we are sharing the complexity of human life in the hope that they can go beyond us.’   Kamala Mukunda  ‘ What Did You Ask At School Today?’ published in India in 2009 by Collins
I am working on a proposal to bring dialogue into education in the UK arising from my experience as a teacher, my observations and conversations in India and my connections with the work of J Krishnamurti and Rabindranath Tagore.  I am proposing to entitle this ‘Conversations on Living:  talking together with Young People’.  I shall be exploring further ideas in this area in future blogs and commenting on each step taken.

Tuesday 15 May 2012

Exploitation and Freedom


One is aware of the increasing violence: systemic, institutionalised and accepted as a matter of course.  All religions preach peace, but many form an integral part of this aggression as they are divided, factionalised and have, in the past, contributed to some of the most spectacularly violent passages of human history.  A materialistic outlook breeds violence.  It searches for its own gain, devouring everything in its mechanistic blunderings.  The earth is exploited, animals are exploited, and all that is living is exploited for profit of the few.  This is the value of the modern world: everything has its price and we are all consumers paying whatever we are charged.

There is tremendous exploitation and, consequently violence in the education system in the UK.  Competition is the underlying motivational force; school pitted against school through league tables; young people forced to perform against narrow measurement of success; standardised tests are the guidelines of learning and data driven decisions ignore the intricate diversity of human abilities.  Conformity is ensured by an inspectorate that disempowers educators, dehumanises children and squeezes the process of learning into consumable packages.  The political mantra of ‘raising standards’ exists to convince the electorate that central Government  should be the sole arbiter of how our young are educated.  History shows that the instigation of a centrally controlled education is a very effective way of brainwashing a whole society.

Language is very revealing if you want to understand what has happened in education.  Young people are now ‘learners’ who ‘access the curriculum’ which teachers ‘deliver’ – all terms that indicate that learning is a matter of the consumption of knowledge.  Parents are given the illusion of choice and that they are encouraged to complain about their children’s education as if it was something they had purchased from the supermarket.  They want to see at what level their child is performing: a term better used for animals in a circus or actors on a stage.  So education is a transaction of knowledge and skills, not the exploration of life.  In this operation, or perhaps business deal, the teacher gives as an authority and the student receives gratefully so that she or he may become a fully operational economic unit in an aggressively material world.

The child must be only three or four years old.  A few moments ago his older sisters passed us laughing and chattering excitedly, pausing to glance shyly in our direction.  This little boy is strolling slowly towards us staring with the direct gaze of absorbed fascination.   It is quite early in the morning and the air is still cool.  Around us is the noise of so many birds going about their business.  But the boy has no awareness of this.  He sees only the pink faces, reddened by the past few days’ exposure to the increasing heat of the sun, and it is quite likely in this dusty remote part of the country that in his short life he has rarely come across Westerners; he appears to be enthralled.  We are not accustomed to being held by such an unwavering stare.  He has slowed to almost standing, but there is no sense of fear or anxiety, just freedom and wonder.  His shirt is a dirty blue and his shorts are ragged and stained, he wears nothing on his feet.  Behind him the lane stretches back to the village, he is making his way to the fields where his parents are working; high with sugar cane ready for harvesting.  His sisters are almost there.

We are close now, still his gaze holds us, a look of such innocence it is if we are touching a life unsullied by suffering.  In a moment we both move in an involuntary gesture of respect, folding our hands in formal greeting.  Bringing his hands together with a clap, he laughs with delight.  An instant of such stillness and perfection we are lifted up into his world of pure joy.  It passes and we are left with the perfume of something that will never be repeated.

Now the little boy has broken into a run to join his older sister who has turned back, realising that her brother is not with them.  On turning to watch them we are rewarded with smiles and waves.  Then they disappear into the field.  Such is the experience of freedom.


Saturday 5 May 2012

Life's passing.


Although the sound of the engine is obtrusive and cuts out much of what can be heard from the shore, the fact that we are in the middle of the Ganges moving steadily towards the city of Varanasi brings intense joy and wonder.  Ahead is the vast iron bridge supporting both the passage of road and rail traffic.  Some years ago we had crossed the river on the bridge a man and his young daughter with us in the carriage; as we passed above the sacred water they swiftly and unobtrusively closed their palms together and, pressing their fingers to their foreheads, said a prayer to the river.  It is a revered being.

Along the banks of the wide stretch of water there is much life, cows are wallowing knee deep in the mud, children playing on the shore and dogs picking through the rubbish washing up on the sands.  A little way from our boat floats a blackened shape, on top sits a large crow staring defiantly out as if to challenge anyone to take its prize.  After some moments gazing at this spectacle, which I take as a large log floating along borne by the current, I realise that it is in fact a corpse blackened and misshapen from being partially burnt, undoubtedly further downstream on the steps of the city’s burning ghats.  And that the fierce bird is not defending its means of travel, but its potential food.  Here is the death of a human being in its throwaway form; the family of the dead may not have been able to afford enough wood, or, once the family have left the burning pyre the body may have been thrown into the river.  For the poor human life is cheap wherever you are and even death has little dignity.  

We travel along the edge of the ancient city, its tightly packed buildings appearing to tumble towards the water.  By the edge are piles of wood waiting to be used and next to them the smouldering fires of  the dead whose ashes will soon be consigned to the slow moving river.  Nearby people are immersing themselves, washing away the past in rituals of purification.

Impermanence is death: the dying of the leaves, the plants and all that is living.  Impermanence is also rebirth: new shoots, young life, the newborn.  We may strenuously try to deny this circle, to prolong existence, to worship youth, fearful of the changes that we see before us.  But we are also blind to the beauty of life’s passing, to the wisdom of age and to the acceptance of our own mortality.  The sweet sounds of melancholy fill much great music and poetry acknowledging the passage of earthly time and our fleeting existence, as well as sharpening our awareness of the temporary suffering that we all must feel.  For sorrow itself is also impermanent.

How can we come to terms with this?  How do we engage and learn about impermanence?  It seems to me that the observation and connection with nature is key this understanding.  Many small children will see a dead animal or bird and  respond to it; questioning its passing and relating that to their own existence.  Watching the seasons change, connecting with all ages and being aware of the constant movement of life without succumbing to the illusion that we can control our existence teaches us to maintain balance and experience the joy of living; even if we live in the city.

As human beings we are strange in our approach to death.  Our militaristic societies that are always prepared for or involved in war spending vast amounts on creating and devising more and more efficient ways of killing.  Political ends seem to justify wholesale slaughter of people we will never see and do not understand.  We glorify killing and raise as heroes the killers as long as their cause is our cause.  But I wonder how many mothers bring their children into the world, care for them and love them so that these children will be blown apart  or will destroy the lives of others.  Whilst some scientists are working tirelessly for the alleviation of the suffering of humanity, many others are putting similar energy into methods of untold destruction; ensuring that we are quite capable of destroying all human life.

So I want to end this with the questions of the relationship between death and violence, and death and peace.  Do we consider the importance of living peacefully?  If so how does this impact on the way we educate each other, as friends, parents, students and teachers?

Monday 23 April 2012

Change


‘Each type of living being is distinct and different.  But when we pierce the veil of difference, we see unity in all beings’   Svetsavatan Upanishad (400-200 BCE)

I am not always too keen to use quotations.  It is impressive in terms of demonstrating how well read we are and where other people’s thinking coincides with ours.  However, there can be a tendency to rely on the wisdom of others and for our own thinking to be second hand, holding ourselves to be inferior to those whose reputation and provenance are extremely impressive.  Nevertheless, as if to prove that nothing we say is new, but still has to be said, I refer you to this ancient verse from India and leave you to ponder on the far-reaching possibilities of this understanding entering our consciousness.
Meanwhile, can we consider the impermanence of all life?  This is another fact that should it enter our consciousness would transform the way we approach many things, not least the way we learn and how we act. 
Delhi station is dimly lit and foreboding to us as we look for the right train.  It is quite a few years ago and I am taking our eldest son to board the train to Bangalore after spending three weeks with him and a group of younger students in Rajasthan.  Although we had not been together the whole time, we continued to enjoy each other’s company and share the delights and disturbance of much that we were experiencing, and being with each other in such circumstances brought a new closeness.

Rats run over the track and emerge from a hole near our feet.  We do not have much to talk about now.  For me this is the first time of leaving a child of ours alone in a country so many miles from home.  For him he is making an epic journey that will take him many hours.  He will be met at Bangalore by a friend, but between then and now there is that empty, unknown space and in the darkness there is a need for courage.
The train pulls up loudly creaking and groaning as it slows down.  We find his berth on a carriage thronging with people.  Someone is already lying on the hard, dark bed, but gets off without complaint.  We make sure that all that is needed is present: the chain to fasten his bag to the bed for safety; water enough to keep him going for the long journey; some food.  However, he is feeling sick and at times he shakes with nerves, an involuntary spasm.  Amid the noise of chatter from families and individuals in the carriage we say our goodbyes and he sits on the bed looking around him, wide-eyed with wonder and trepidation. 

What can I say - I who have been an integral part of his protection, of his growth and whose blood flows through his veins?  I feel that I am being broken up.  We hug and leave each other; there is excitement, unspoken emotion and not a little fear.  The train grudgingly pulls away and I watch his face in the gloom.  He is gone.  And I am overwhelmed by the memory of the two year old boy taking his first steps in the park, laughing with joy, his arms held out in front of him to steady the fall that will come.
There is nothing sentimental about the fact that everything changes and all that is living dies.  To bring a child into the world is to engage at first hand with an extraordinary vulnerability and to be exposed to the possibility of intense suffering.  However, that child is all children, not your possession and you are relating to all things growing.
So what significance does this have to our learning and to education?

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Fear and Heat

I entered teaching governed by fear: fear of making mistakes; fear of authority and fear of the children.  What if I lost control?  What if they answered me back or questioned what I was doing?  What if they did not like me?  Despite my reading all being about the work of J Krishnamurti, AS Neill together with many other of the writers on progressive education in late 1960s and early 1970s, the reality was that I had serious doubts about my abilities - I was a casualty of the British Public School Regime for Boys, immature, uncertain and isolated.

Instinctively I did not want to separate myself from the children I was teaching, but I had to hide behind something in order to function effectively.  Consequently, I was only able to meet the students through the persona I was adopting in order to conform to the environment I was working in and I was becoming dehumanised.  The strain was considerable and after nine years I was ready to leave teaching.  I was giving and receiving the constant message of separation and that the very action of learning served only to increase that sense of remoteness.  However, things were changing and they were changing through the diversity and immediacy of personal experience and reflection.
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It is hot and humid: very hot, and we have been traveling in the bus for some hours.  Now it is time to stop and step outside with the teachers who are familiar with the people and the place.  This is a community; a village off the main road, a community of the lowest cast, the uneducated and, often, still the reviled.  A small group of people sit in the shade of the farmhouse, red-bricked and flat-roofed; they are all, women, children and men - painfully thin.  One man has fresh bandages on his arms and legs; covering the wounds of a motorbike accident we are told.

We are shown round by the teachers, for this is their rural education centre where they bring the children to explore the countryside, plant and grow rice and vegetables and talk with the villagers.  I feel as though I am one gargantuan sweaty, white mound – so uneasy, so ungainly under the stark glare of the sun.  Then a woman is asked to show you round the farm.  She moves away quickly and lithely, her emaciated body swaying rhythmically under her tattered sari.  With a grin she beckons us to follow; so we do. She chatters to us in a language we don’t understand.  But I incline my head sagely as she gestures over the fields and she giggles at our lack of comprehension.  She moves so easily, undeterred by the heat and I lumber behind like an elephant in the desert.  Then the tall, fair headed boy, only just twenty one, who is with us hits his head with a resounding thud on the branch of the tree she has just passed under.  She stops him, gets him to bend forward and rubs his head to take away the pain.  He is embarrassed, she laughs, and he laughs.

Eventually, we return to the farmhouse and sit on the disk of concrete that surrounds the tree, giving some shade from the sun, but no respite from the heat.  Another greedy gulp from the nearly empty water bottle, I am conscious of the people watching and I wonder how they get their clean water. A rat scuttles out of a pile of rubbish nearby and a dog with very little fur and mottled skin stretched over thin ribs comes crawling towards me on its belly, slowly wagging its tail and pleading with its eyes that I will not give it another beating like the one it got when we arrived - to shut up its barking.  I dare not touch it, but it leaps lightly up behind me and sits down to scratch itself.  I see the flies burrowing beneath the skin of its neck seeking to hatch their maggots in its barely living flesh.  My stomach and all my sensibilities recoil in horror; fear and dismay, for I have had dogs at home that I have loved.

It appears that my discomfort has been observed and a coconut is cut from the palm tree, the top expertly removed and the watery-white milk exposed.  I am handed the coconut with a smile and I drink.  But I drink in such a way so as not to touch the nut with my lips and most of the liquid runs down my mouth and forms a sticky mess in my beard – much to the amusement of the onlookers.  They fetch an aluminium cup and pour the liquid from the nut.  But the cup is filthy and the outside is glutinous from previous use and it must harbour every germ and all the bacteria that live on this planet – but they are watching.  So I drink and the cup hovers imperceptibly from my lips and again the milk gently dribbles into my beard.

All the time I am so painfully aware of all I have, how easy life is for me and what taken for granted privileges I experience.  I feel guilty, but I want to leave and I feel ashamed of all my feelings.  I smile as I leave and press my hands together bowing slightly in my goodbyes; for I have been humbled and the arrogance that comes from my upbringing has been replaced forever by an understanding that cannot be put into words and the experience of learning from the heart.
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What does it mean - to learn from the heart?

Saturday 14 April 2012

The River


We are sitting in the meeting room of the temple.  The room is dominated by a large raised platform, cushioned and covered by a white sheet.  We are sat on chairs in the lower part of the room and look out past the platform, through the intricately latticed windows on to the Ganga, the sacred slow-moving silent river.  We are there to have a conversation with the Head of the Hanuman Temple, a Professor of Civil Engineering and a tireless worker in the seemingly hopeless task of cleaning up the great body of water. 
He sits in front of us dressed in white long kurta and lungi.  He has short thick white hair, a white moustache and bright piercing eyes.  For an hour we are drawn in to an almost poetic story that takes us right back to before religion had a name through to how modern discoveries in Quantum Physics echo many observations of nature in ancient cultures.  We talk through time and about time.  We follow human existence and its dependency upon four situations – adequate resources, personal fulfilment, service to others and union with the Supreme Being: acknowledging there may be other ways of expressing the last point.  And we recognise that all existence depends on diversity and it is our responsibility to care for this diversity.
We are left with the statement that as there are two banks of the river there are two strands of human thought – the religious and the scientific.  If the banks meet then there is no river, when humanity thinks
holistically it will be possible for the water in the river to be clean again.

There are times when a conversation destroys the space that separates you from the world.
Our predominant way of looking at things is through separation and this is remarkably evident in our view of children.  We do not see ourselves in the child nor do we observe the child in us.  We physically divide children, by gender, by age, by ability, by relative wealth and ultimately by creating competitive environments in which they are expected to learn.  And we psychologically divide them by pitting one against another.  The dominant way of thinking, which is to categorise and break things down into parts, is particular harmful when directed towards children, their learning and, consequently, their behaviour.  There is a good illustration of the danger of separating things into their respective parts told by well-known holistic scientists: ‘salt is made up of sodium and chloride, which on their own are poisonous.  However, when combined together as salt it is an essential element of supporting all animal life’.  A holistic approach to living maintains creativity and connection.

This separation is very evident in the relationship between the teacher and the student, the adult and the child, which is so often a struggle for control and authority, the one who knows and the other who is ignorant.  The consequence of this is isolation and polarisation leading to the current obsession with standards, testing, inspection and all that goes with de-humanising children.

Thursday 5 April 2012

A beginning.


I am using this blog as a forum to explore education; to put forward ideas that may not be fully formed in their expression; to create a conversation; and to form the basis for further, more complete writing. My intention is for these blogs to form a continuous process of inquiry.  Each blog will be short and end with questions to be considered in the next time of writing.

I am sitting under a thatched roof supported by bamboo poles roped together.  In front of me there are about two hundred children and adults of all ages.  The sides of the building are open and the sun shines through the green leaves on to the red sand below.  Large black crows loudly call their harsh guttural sounds.

The children and adults are singing an ancient Vedic chant and the sound fills the space spilling out into surroundings.  Some of the children do not sing; others sing with great energy softly beating time, hand on knee; some smile, sharing something with their neighbour.  The song is about peace, about universal peace: ‘let all things be peaceful’.

At the end there is silence.  All sit in an unforced stillness.  Until a boy in a white kurta gets up, a signal for the day to commence.
I am writing about learning, about approaches to learning and how these attitudes influence education.  My own thinking is mainly informed from the East, primarily India: through reading the works of several prominent educators from the last century and through travelling extensively in India; there having had many challenging conversations and observing a wide variety of approaches to education being put into practice.  In addition to these experiences, I have worked for over twenty-five years in three of the major independent ‘informal, progressive’ schools in England; I am also a husband, father and grandfather.

What underpins all learning?  Perhaps we should begin with exploring the indivisibility of all life, looking at the depth of the actuality of interdependence.  You and I are the same, breathing, made of skin and bone, experiencing joy and suffering, being born and dying: this is no theoretic construct.  I watch and listen to you – I learn.  Not just about you, but equally about me.

There is a stream of understanding that flows through much of Oriental thought that recognises humanity as an integral element of life on Earth.  Some indigenous communities do not even have the use of the separate ‘I’ in their language’, instead they define themselves by ‘we’.  There is also an acknowledgement that we are related to all existence and that this relationship is based on a communion not on separation.  There is recognition of a universal consciousness and, consequently, a holistic view of living and dying.

If an individual really feels this connection rather than acknowledging interdependence as an idea, then what significance does this sense of being have for learning and, consequently, education?  What, then, is the relationship between the teacher and the student?  And what damage is being done by the notion of separation?