Krishnamurti - Talks with Students: Varanasi 1954

Talks with Students: Varanasi 1954

Source: The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume VIII

Copyright 2012 Krishnamurti Foundation of America

TALKS WITH STUDENTS

VARANASI, 1954

J. KRISHNAMURTI

Krishnamurti Foundation India

Publishers Note

This book contains authentic reports of J. Krishnamurtis talks and dialogues with students, held in Varanasi in January 1954. Fifteen of these talks were given at the Rajghat Besant School, which he had founded at the confluence of the Ganga and Varuna, and three at the Banaras Hindu University.

During his annual visits to India, from the 1930s till the 1980s, Krishnamurti made it a point to spend a few weeks at the residential school and address the students, teachers, parents, and the public. He gave talks, answered questions, engaged his listeners in free-wheeling dialogues, and met people individually or in small groups. In all these, he shared with them his central vision that education should not be separated from life and that it must help the young and the old to understand not merely the outer world, but also the inner world of human consciousness. Emphasizing that life is relationship, he said education must help the young to discover their right relationship with nature, with society, with fellow beings, with knowledge, and with themselves.

Speaking to the young, Krishnamurtis tone is affectionate, his language simple, and his manner uncompromisingly direct and urgent. He insists that students face facts, seeing the world the way it is and themselves the way they are. Students ask question and seek ready-made answers about the right way to live, and Krishnamurti explains that the truth about anything cannot be learnt through verbal definitions handed down by another. They have to understand for themselves the implications of their own questions and thus come upon clarity on their own.

Whereas traditionally schools have used fear and punishment as tools to control students, Krishnamurti denounces such methods, pointing out that fear corrodes the mind and prevents learning. Understanding fear is more important than passing examinations or getting degrees, he says. Comparison and competition have no place in his vision of education. Discipline, which generally means obedience and is regarded as a virtue, is really a form of violence and thwarts intelligence. For Krishnamurti, the real purpose of education is to awaken that intelligence which will help students to face the challenges of life when they leave school or college.

Students, teachers, parents, and others who read these talks will find that Krishnamurtis insights into education and life, besides being of immediate relevance, have a timeless quality.

Contents

Talks with Students at Rajghat, Varanasi

Talks with Students of Banaras Hindu University

What Is Education?

I suppose most of you understand English, although it does not matter if you do not, as your teachers and your elders understand it. Perhaps you would ask them afterwards to explain what I have been talking about; make a point of asking them, wont you? Because, what we are going to discuss for the next three or four weeks is very important; we are going to discuss what is education and what are its implications, not just passing examinations, but the whole implication of being educated. So, as we are going to talk about that every day, if you do not understand what I am saying now, please ask your teachers to explain it carefully. Also, after I have talked, perhaps you would ask questions. These talks are meant primarily for students, and if the older people want to ask questions, they should only ask questions that will help the students to understand, that will explain further the problem. To ask questions about their own personal problems will not help the students.

Dont you ask yourself why you are being educated? Do you know why you are being educated and what that education means? As we know, education is to go to school, to learn how to read and write, to pass examinations, and to play a few games; and after you leave school, you go to college, there again to study very, very hard for a few months or a few years, pass an examination and then get a job; and then you forget all about what you have learned. Is that not what we call education? Do you understand what I am talking about? Isnt that what we all do?

If you are girls, you pass a few examinations, B.A. or M.A., marry, and become cooks or something else, and then have children; and all the education that you have had for a number of years is useless. You know how to speak English, you are a little more clever, a little more tidy, a little more clean, that is all, is it not? And the boys get a technical job or become clerks or get some kind of government job, and that finishes it, does it not?

You see, what we call living is to get a job, to have children, to raise a family, and to be able to read newspapers or magazines, to discuss, to argue cleverly about something or other. That is what we call education, is it not? Have you noticed your own parents, your own elder people? They have passed examinations, they have got jobs, and they know how to read and write. Is that all that education means to us?

Education is something much more, is it not? It is to help you, not only to get a job in the world, but also to meet the world, is it not? You know what the world is. In the world there is competition. You know what competition meanseach man out for himself, struggling to get the best, pushing the others aside. In the world there are wars, there are class divisions and the fight between them. In the world every man is trying to get a better job, to keep on rising; if you are a clerk, you try to get a little higher, and so fight all the time. Have you not noticed it? If you have a car, you want a bigger car. So, there is that constant fight going on, not only within ourselves, but with all our neighbours. Then, there is a war which kills, which destroys people, like the last war, when millions were killed, wounded, or maimed.

Our life is all this political struggle. And also, life is religion, is it not? What we call religion is rituals, going to temples, putting on something like the sacred thread, mumbling some words, or following some guru. Life is also, is it not, the fear of dying, fear of living, fear of what people say and do not say, fear of not knowing where one is going, fear of losing a job, fear of opinion. So, life is something extraordinarily complex, is it not? You know what that word complex means? It is very intricate, it is not something simple, which you just follow; it is very, very difficult, a great many things are involved.

So, education is, is it not, to enable you to meet all these problems. You have to be educated so as to meet all these problems rightly. That is what education isnot merely to pass a few examinations in some silly subjects in which you are not at all interested. Proper education is to help the student to meet this life so that he understands it and wont succumb, wont be crushed under it as most of us are. People, ideas, public opinion, country, climate, foodall that is constantly pushing you in a particular direction in which society wants you to go. Your education must enable you to understand this pressure, not to yield to it, but to understand it and to break through it, so that you, as an individual, as a human being, are capable of a great deal of initiative, and not merely traditional thinking. That is real education.

You know that, for most of us, education consists in learning what to think. Your society tells you, your parents tell you, your neighbours tell you, your books tell you, your teachers tell you what to think. The machinery of what to think we call education, and that education only makes you mechanical, dull, stupid, uncreative. But if you knew how to think, not what to think, then you would not be mechanical, traditional, but live human beings; you would be great revolutionariesnot in the stupid sense of murdering people to get a better job or to push through a certain idea, but the revolution of knowing how to think rightly. That is very important. But, when we are at school, we never find out about all these things. The teachers themselves do not know. They only teach you how to read or what to read, and correct your English or mathematics. That is all their concern, and at the end of five or ten years, you are pushed out into this life about which you know nothing. Nobody has talked to you about it; or, if they have talked, they push you in certain directionseither to be a socialist, a communist, a congressite or some otherbut they never teach you or help you to understand and how to think out all these problems, not just at one moment during a certain number of years, but all the timewhich is education, is it not? After all, in a school of this kind that is what we must do, help you not merely to pass some stupid examinations, but to be able to meet life when you go out of this place, so that you are intelligent human beings, not mechanical, not Hindus or Muslims or Communists or some such thing.