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.

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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. 

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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.

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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?

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?

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.

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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.

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.

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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?