A land with no paths
It happens sometimes that the contributions, if
not more important, certainly more stimulating and provocative
that come across in any subject area so-called outsiders come
from authors, without the intellectual or academic certifications
deemed necessary according to the maintenance of the celebrators
status quo of knowledge. This is the case of the relationship
between Krishnamurti and the world of education. Born in India
in the late nineteenth century and died in California in 1986, a
thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti was a stateless person who did not
want to belong to any organization, nationality or religion.
Raised and educated as a child, to become a spiritual master,
himself, in 1929, rejecting the role of authority to award, broke
dramatically with this perspective. He will say right on that
occasion: "You remember the story of the devil and his
friend that walking, they see a man bending over, picking
something up off the ground and put it in your pocket. The friend
asked the devil: "What have you collected?". "A
piece of truth," replied the devil. "A bad deal for
you," said the friend. "Not at all," answered the
devil. "I will wait to organize it." I maintain that
truth is a pathless land and you can not get through any way, no
religion, no school. This is my point of view, and will adhere
fully and unconditionally. Because the truth is unlimited,
unconditional, unreachable by any road, can not be organized, and
no organization can be created to lead or coerce the other along
a particular path. " He devoted the rest of his life
traveling the world, talking to many people and talking with
students of schools established by him. What was really at the
heart of man Krishnamurti was the liberation from the
constraints, by submission to authority, passive acceptance of
any dogma, always insisting on the necessary rejection of all
authority, starting with their own, to see to the end how the
structure of society the individual conditions. He was under no
confidence in the ability to edit the various political
institutions, since these would come not from man's liberation,
but this possibility lies in man himself, is contained within him
the story of all humanity. The step is then aimed at the
liberation of the individual forms of voluntary servitude of
which is at once victim and author. Hence the interest in
educational processes. It is appropriate, however, a
preliminary clarification as to limit exposure to a specific
field - that of education, in fact - you may see a form
parcellizzante ultimately a specialized way to deal with man's
relationship to exist, in contrast to always advocated a
comprehensive approach by Krishnamurti. No coincidence that on
one occasion says: "If, by examining a flower, he ripped the
petals one by one, at the end of the flower is gone. You hold
parts of a flower, but those pieces are not the beauty of the
flower. " But it is also true that it has always been
central to his thinking, just the prospect of liberation from
oppressive social various devices, attention and analysis to the
various conditioning processes that cast the subject in terms of
unhappiness and inauthenticity . Not only that it remains beyond
any doubt that Krishnamurti has always been a relentless critic
to any tendency to codify and institutionalize the flow of life
without end, it is equally true that there is a place - the
school - which has not declined at all and indeed he worked to
make it suitable for children (or teenager). Moreover, we will
discuss the pedagogy will be free from fixations prescriptive,
preferring to call an observation innovative, active and
participating in silence, towards a multilateral training of the
person.
Educate to life
If contemporary pedagogical debate raised
Krishnamurti sometimes more of a concern and distrust, to the
point of view ignored the concrete proposals put in place, it
could not miss the other hand "a surprising convergence
between the needs of a scion so total Iconoclasm, and those that
the best contemporary pedagogy has been slowly maturing "(as
Aldo Visalberghi, a leading Italian scientists of education, of
Krishnamurti), identifying interesting analogies with the
pedagogical lines of Tolstoy, Dewey, Whitehead, Huxley, Rogers,
up to Illich. "Teaching is the profession of the higher
life," says our author, emphasizing the profound
responsibility that requires the activity, since the objective of
education is to facilitate the overall development of the human
being, and hence to the overall development of society. According
to Krishnamurti, the primary connotation of the human being
consists in the simultaneous coexistence of an irreducible
plurality of voltages, components and levels of listening and
seeking expression. Unlike the reductionist conceptions that can
induce acute lacerations in the evolution of the subject,
"education should achieve the integration of these separate
entities, in fact, without integration, life becomes a series of
conflicts and sorrows." Because the settings sectoral and
specialist in education also reveal their inherent limitations,
Krishnamurti offers an education that seeks to merge with the art
of living. The real is all that is happening - that is what he
insists, even during meetings and conversations with adults - so
there is never a moment when there is no learning, every action
embodies a movement education and the 'the whole process of life
is education. "The student who observes a leaf swaying in
the sun is attentive. At that time, force him to return to the
book amounts to discourage attention, and help to observe that
leaf makes it perfectly aware of the height of attention in which
there is no distraction. " The art of living manifests
and unfolds through the opening to the complexity of life by
means of a calm and clear perception, where there is no sign of
rejection or duality in the face of what is, to what is
happening, the mind that constantly occurs. According to
Krishnamurti the dualistic view, separate, and ultimately
oppositional expression that arises when we flee before what is,
when the reactive groups of the mind, than is the case, trigger
the expression of various influences and sustained assimilated by
the same mind to escape all'otherness, the radically new,
permanent stupor in front of the bare fact of existence. "To
live is to discover on their own what is true, and you can make
this discovery only when there is freedom, when inside you there
is a continuous revolution." And again: "Do not
imitate, but to discover, this is true education." From this
perspective should be taken critically dichotomy that might arise
between a noble albeit idealized values and models, on the
one hand, and the mere unfolding of reality, on the
other. Without realizing it, we entered into the question of
the relationship teacher / learner. Existence is relationship,
Krishnamurti said, like others before him, arguing that "to
understand ourselves we must be aware of our relationship not
only with people but also with things, with ideas and with
nature." The first step that will make the teacher,
according to his pedagogical perspective, each model will consist
nell'accantonare reference to accept the student is and not as it
should be: "Having the ratio is larger and more responsible
to have no images" . At this point it becomes possible to
abandon the educational cooperation, which gives way to one of
free inquiry in freedom, without barriers between one who knows
and who does not know, is the mirror each other in mutual and
shared responsibility. "You can go very far if you leave
from very close" to teachers Krishnamurti writes, "the
closest thing to yourself is your student." As we said
above, and in spite of all duality will then be possible to reach
out and touch the point at which the teaching, the teacher and
the one that is taught in the essential unity coincide,
destination and walk the entire testimony of life we left the
Indian thinker.
On these bases were built during the time of the
schools where you can apply and test these guidelines. The first
dates from the mid-twenties, today in India and many other
schools were opened on the principles proposed by Krishnamurti.
There is one even in Europe, Brockwood Park School, Hampshire,
England, active from '69, a residential community that is home to
dozens of students of both sexes, aged between 14 and 19 years,
from around the world. The ethos of these schools can be defined
as non-hierarchical, non-coercive, non-competitive, aiming at the
comprehensive care of the person, not only oriented to the
achievement of positive outcomes from the perspective of the
student's curriculum, but turning attention to the physical,
psychological, moral and spiritual person. In the words of a
teacher in these schools: "We teach what we know, but what
we are educating".
Federico Battistutta
Reading
Krishnamurti
The wide
opening quote of the speech of Krishnamurti's dissolution of the
organization that was promoting it as a new messiah has appeared
and reappeared over time in various texts, including the latest,
we recommend the special edition in Italian of "Bulletin of
the Krishnamurti Foundation", in June 1986. Krishnamurtiana
a biography, although at times hagiographic, however, accompanied
by witnesses, documents, pictures and letters was written by Mary
Lutyens, The Life and Death of Krishnamurti, Rome, Ubaldini,
1990. Krishnamurtiana extensive bibliography was prepared by
Susunaga Weeraperuma, A bibliography of the life and teaching of
Jiddu Krishnamurti, London-Leiden-Koln, Brill, 1974, later
supplemented by a Supplement to a bibliography of the life and
teaching of Jiddu Krishnamurti Bombay, Chetana, 1982. The
texts of Krishnamurti, in Italian translation, specifically
dedicated to education, from which it derives most of the
quotations in this article are the following: education and the
meaning of life, Rome, New Italy, 1958, Letters to schools ,
Rome, Ubaldini, 1983, A school for Life, Milan, Aequilibrium,
1988. Since 1997 there is an annual publication of the
Krishnamurti schools: "The Journal of the Krishnamurti
school" of which they have been is an anthology of texts in
Italian, in a single number, "Journal of the Krishnamurti
schools", No. 1 / 2002. With regard to the experience of
Brockwood Park School cf. Shila Morelli, Educating for life. The
case of Brockwood Park School, thesis, University of Milan,
academic year 2008/2009. Finally, to be interpreted in a
libertarian, with particular reference to the relationship
between the individual / company, cf. Emilia Rensi, instances of
"liberation" in Krishnamurti, "Will,"
n.12/1966.
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