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As a teacher who has spent
over ten years teaching senior
school students in those tumultuous years when they
are growing up, facing the pressures of a performance-dominated
society, I have time and again returned to the question
of the place of the larger vision of education - of this whole
concern with the art of living correctly - in my class. I have
also been wondering about the whole question of attention.
What am I really demanding from my students? Am I creating
an atmosphere where there is an invitation to attend rather than
the struggle to concentrate? How do I in practice respond to
the fact of preoccupation? I'm anxious about the content, the
pace of coverage and student response. The students often bring
a variety of emotions, performance anxieties and images of
themselves in relation to the content.
In observing the students before me, I began looking at
what really was going on in their minds. What do they do when
there is a pause? What do they do as soon as class ends? Do
they immediately switch to other things or is there a lingering
on matters pertaining to the class? Are they bursting to speak
about things that occupied their minds during class, which fear
or a sense of decorum kept in check? When I raise a question
and pause, giving time for thinking and digesting, what really is
the student doing? Is she trying to recall from memory some
vaguely remembered words? Is she trying to imagine/ visualize?
Or is she simply waiting for another person to answer, with the
mind wandering inattentively? What is the student's habitual
response to challenge? What does the student deem interesting
and what boring? What exactly is being covered up in this
blanket term called boredom?
I realize that my primary responsibility is to observe
carefully and point out what I see in a manner that invites the
student to look rather than judge. Scanning the faces in front
of me, I often notice a mind that is far away in a world of its
own. To ask the student (gently and with humour) to become
aware of, and share with his friends, what his thoughts were at
that moment and if he can, also share what set him off on that
particular train of thought, has been for me a fascinating thing.
Initially, there is guilt and a feeling of being pulled up. But with
time, and the absence of judgement, this becomes a fascinating
journey. I remember K saying in one of his talks that there is
no such thing as distraction, only the movement of the mind.
Drawing attention to the nature of the mind and its movements
and the remarkable variety of its responses to stimuli seems to
be a way of inviting students to attend to the functioning of
their minds, not just focussing on the content but looking at
the movement of the mind as a whole. K suggests that this
process can happen in every class and that it does not detract
from purposiveness; on the contrary, this is the process that is
vital to learning. This is the challenge.
I have also pursued this question of what students do when
faced with a question. I point out to students the variety of
ways in which they can respond and then ask them to watch
their own minds. What is the response? Is there an active
engaging with the question? Is there avoidance? Is there passive
waiting? Is there a repetition from memory? Is the response
merely verbal or is it actively connected to an underlying
concept, a picture of the world? In pursuing questions such as
these, I have found it possible to engage with students in a far
deeper way. It is possible for the student and teacher to really
look at the subtleties that come in the way of learning. It is
possible for genuine insights into the learning process to come
into being.
Very often, we talk of the teacher as a source of interest.
The onus is often on the teacher to generate interest and to
make the class interesting. I have wondered what it is that we are offering students in the process of
making them interested. At the superficial
level, there is the distinction between
interest and entertainment. Even if the
teacher is clear about not being an
entertainer, the question is: what really is
the invitation to the student? Is it to
cultivate a habit of conceptualization? Is it
an invitation to get absorbed in the content
and thereby eliminate the rest of the world?
Is it an invitation to strengthen the will and
thereby focus on the matter at hand? It
seems that the teacher needs to observe
what the processes in his classroom are and
how he is being received. This is intimately
connected with what students think
learning is. Being alert to this dimension
differs from being alert to performance,
understanding of content and the whole
host of things that go with, acquiring
knowledge.
The challenge of bringing
Krishnamurti to our classrooms is one of
not fragmenting the mastering of content
from the process of awareness - of saying
that to put one's mind to a subject, one need
not exclude the rest of the world. Bringing
the movement of the mind into the field of
active consideration gives it a focus and a
legitimacy which sharpens awareness.
I used to want buyers for my words.
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.
- Jelaluddin
Rumi
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom on the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- WE. Yeats, "Among School Children"
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