Education that is significant to life nurtures integrated human beings and not success seeking ones.

My intention in writing this paper is not to accomplish another academic goal. I write with feeling for you and me and the world around us. I feel deeply about us changing who we are and the world we live in. I believe in the power of transformation that we can bring about in ourselves as humanity. Our transformation begins with honest self-knowledge. You and I need to get to know our selves. You and I are not separate. We are one. We can understand each other if we start by simply accepting and knowing each of individual selves. When we do that, we naturally extend to understand each other and the world around us. We then begin to see our integration and deep connection with all of life. This sense of integration, of being one, leads to all rightly compassionate action. Compassionate action ends the chaos, confusion and violence we live with today.
You and I as adults, have to do this hard work on our own. However, that does not need to be the case for our children. I believe that there is a kind of education that can nurture self-aware, integrated beings. This kind of education is significant to life and deeply connected with natural living. It is in contrast with mainstream education that is disconnected from real living. In this paper, I claim that our current mainstream education approach is aimed at bringing about success but that success is not the fulfilling end result of human existence. Instead, I claim that education that is significant to life can bring about integrated human beings. Integrated human beings alone can bring about right action in the world and experience lasting wholeness. I also provide a conceptual level explanation of how to bring about education that is significant to life. A fuller investigation of the specifics of this kind of education will be covered in a succeeding paper.
Society’s entire view of living is focused on success. We educate our young, choose our careers, do our jobs, struggle with social issues, make political decisions all with the eventual goal of being successful. Our standards of success are externally defined and we are slaves to these standards. This makes our entire existence a state of sufferance. Some people might say that we also care to be happy but even our happiness is externally motivated and most often tied to our success so really we are singularly focused on success. We measure success in terms of how much money we make, how materially luxurious our life is, how well we are perceived and how much we get appreciated by others. All of these measurements are external to us and so they make us externally dependent. In keeping with this, the large majority of our education is geared towards making our children successful. We cram as much information as possible into their heads so they might do well at tests, then go on to good colleges, get good jobs, make a lot of money and continue in the servitude of success. Our struggle for success makes us narrowly focused. We don’t see life as a whole; we see only those subjects, tests, careers, jobs, money and awards that bring us success. We don’t have the time to focus on relationships, joy, wisdom, and the whole web of life that we are intrinsically tied to. We deny ourselves the reality that we are a part of. This leads to distortion. We have a distorted view of life; we don’t see all of it. When we don’t see all of it, we don’t know how to deal with all of it. But, it comes at us, all the time. It has to. It is here and here to stay. We are the ones running away from it. And, when it comes at us, we close our eyes and don’t know how to respond. So, we react based on our distorted view of it. We feel pain and conflict in the process. We hide our pain and sweep conflicts under our veiled view of life. We let wars happen. Education can help us break out of this distortion if we can begin to see that education is a result of life and that it also what creates the life we live. It is integrally tied to life and for it to do right, it has to be significant to life.
Education that is significant to life is deeply connected to all of life. It does not compartmentalize life into academic subjects. It receives and observes life for what it is, not what it should or should not be. It allows real experiences that are connected with living to guide learning. It makes it possible for children to flow in the river of life, to feel it all, to let it go through them. It does not separate children from life. In order to receive life as a whole, we cannot have methods and systems. Methods and systems fragment life. “When we train our children according to a system of thought or a particular discipline, when we teach them to think within departmental divisions, we prevent them from growing into integrated men and women, and therefore they are incapable of thinking intelligently, which is to meet life as a whole.” (Krishnamurti, 1992, 24)
Every method is a set of rules based on past knowledge and driven by ideals of how something should be. The moment the past and a set of ideals come together, we are caught up in concepts and ideas. We are then not seeing what is. The only thing that is real is what is. That is life. Methods and rules are not what is. So, they cannot bring about education that is connected to life. Sure we need some minimal structure to organize ourselves in an educational environment but all of that structure needs to be driven by what is, what is really happening and how we can address it. The structure cannot be driven by ideals and ideas.
We won’t break out of using methods unless we understand why we use them in the first place. We use methods and ideals as crutches because we don’t have the strength to be on our own. We need methods to guide us. We can be on our own when we are without fear. When we are afraid of something, we need to protect ourselves. We protect ourselves by telling ourselves how something should be. We cling to an ideal. If we can see life for what it is and accept it for what it is, we may not be afraid and we may not seek ideals and methods. This can only happen when we feel all of life, including ourselves, such that we become completely aware of our selves, our feelings and experiences. When we see the movement of emotions, thoughts and actions that make us who we are, we become aware. When we understand ourselves, we are not afraid of our selves and our feelings. Then we don’t need ideals and methods. We can just be and be free. Self-knowledge alone brings about real freedom, which is not the right to choose to do whatever one wants. Such freedom is a state of mind. Knowing our selves, we shed fear and become free.
Children educated in connection with life understand themselves wholly. In understanding themselves deeply, they understand the other. They don’t see themselves as being separate from the rest of life. They see themselves as being one with it all, with all of life, with the plants, animals and all other people. They feel what the other feels. They are deeply integrated within themselves and with all of life around them. They are integrated human beings. They are whole inside and out. Their understanding and connection with life brings about real love. This love guides their actions. Only right actions can come from such a deeply found love. This ends the chaos that success-driven education creates.
What does it really mean to bring about education that is significant to life? While addressing this question in its entirety is beyond the scope of this paper, no discussion on education is complete without addressing how it can be brought about. To bring about education significant to life, it needs to be guided by what is natural. Nature is natural. Daily living activities are natural. Being connected with the earth that gives us our food is natural. Education needs to be connected, wholly to the natural world. Any structure that is created needs to be truly essential. The only structure that is essential is tied to daily living. Let daily living guide the structure then. Children need to spend time with the earth, growing their food, cooking it, knowing where it comes from and where it goes. These essential connections with nature and daily living create the live, whole environment in which a child’s curiosity flourishes and guides all other learning.
Children need to experience wholeness and meaning not only in connecting with nature and doing essential daily living activities but also in how they are treated. They need to feel free. We feel free when we are not afraid. Children are not afraid when there is no authority. But, can there be discipline and order without authority? Lasting discipline and order comes from within us. It cannot be externally imposed. When children see things for what they are, when they deal with natural consequences, they develop a sense of discipline and they create order that is real. For reality to be the guide, the environment cannot be contrived in any way. We contrive when we are not natural, when we indulge in the non-essential. A real, natural environment is free of contrivances. In such an environment children will follow their natural curiosity. They should be allowed to just be. “Let-be”, the approach explained by Abraham Maslow is the essential core of this. We need to trust the process that a child goes through in learning; going from curiosity, through exploration, into making mistakes and learning from them. We need to let it happen. We as adults need to hold the safe and loving space around them that creates the feeling of freedom that allows all this real learning to happen.
We also need to help them understand themselves. One result of understanding themselves, amongst the many others stated already is that they begin to recognize their passions. Their passions need to guide them into their vocations. A career followed without love for it, is imprisonment. Imprisonment leads to pain and conflict. Hence, we need to help children find those things that make them “flow” and have the kind of “optimal experiences” described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), in which they are one with what they are learning, in which they experience wholeness and joy. That needs to be the basis for defining a vocation and a career. A child at play is in a state of “flow”. When playing, children are wholly present, exploring with every last cell of their bodies, being present, losing sense of time, feeling no pain, hunger or thirst. They are as alive as we know them to be. Play needs to be at the heart of education that is significant to life. That is where children start experiencing “flow” and learning what it means to truly love something they do.
In such an education, the teacher is not passing on knowledge to a child. As Gibran (1971, 17) said so impact fully, “You may give them (children) your love but not your thoughts”. To do so, the teacher cannot be an authority. The teacher then is a guide that keeps the child true to her own curiosity and her own process of existence. The guide creates the space in which learning just happens. Such learning fosters self-reliance. The child learns not what to learn but how to learn. As Vinoba Bhave (1974, 74) says, such education gives the “Veda of Vedas, that is to say, the power to study the Vedas”. It develops the child’s inner wisdom and strength and those become the skills that guide all other learning. Such education is invisible. Vinoba Bhave (1974, 80) explains this invisible nature of education most beautifully when he says:

If you ask someone what they are drinking they may answer ‘tea’. There may also be sugar in it, but they never mention the sugar, never say they are drinking tea-and-sugar. The sweetness of the sugar permeates the tea, but the drinker drinks and says nothing about it. Education must be like the sugar, doing its work in secret. We can see the hands, nose, ears and tongue are active, but no one can see what the soul is doing. Our ears appear to be listening, our tongue appears to be talking. No matter what the appearance may be, it is not only the tongue that talks. In spite of appearances, it is not only the ears that hear. That which speaks and hears is the spirit within. And the spirit is invisible. The best education is similarly invisible. The more it is seen, the more imperfect it is.

Education can be this invisible when it is completely permeable to life. It cannot be separate from life in any way. Learning happens all the time, not just in schools and schools are not places that take children away from life. Such education is truly significant to life and it brings about the integration of life and the beings that live it.
We adults did not have the kind of education that I describe. Thankfully, we are still in school. We are in the school of life. If we can start getting to know ourselves by keeping ourselves connected to what is, we will give ourselves an education that is significant to life. This will lead to right actions from us for our children. Thus, creating the right education for our children starts with ourselves. If we are self-aware and free, we will create the same for our children. I know you understand all that I mean. The question is do you and I have the courage to step out of our patterned, fearful minds? More importantly, will we let ourselves step out? The choice is ours and the right one is self-evident. I am because you are (Zulu concept), so I hope you and I can make the choice we need to make because if we both don’t, neither of us will grow and neither will our children. Here’s to us all. Love. Reference:
Bhave, V. (1974). Education or Manipulation (71-80). In Childhood and Education.
Csikszentmihalyi, C. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
Gibran, K. (1971). Our Children (pp. 17-18). In The Prophet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Krishnamurti, J. (1992). Education and the Significance of Life. United Kingdom: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Krishnamurti, J. (2006). The Whole Movement of Life is Learning: J Krishnamurti’s Letters to His Schools. United Kingdom: Krishnamurti Foundation Trust.
Maslow, A. (1970). What is a Taoistic Teacher?. In L. J. Rubin, Facts and Feelings in the Classroom (pp. 149-170). New York: The Viking Press.