MY PATH THROUGH THE PATHLESS

Sudeshna Sinha did her post graduation in Economics from the University Of Calcutta.  She has been teaching Economics in High School for the past two decades in various schools in Kolkata and Dehra Dun. Love for nature and a thirst for inquiry are her special interests.

Though am not any famous leader but about 15 years ago, I too had a tryst with destiny.

Burdened with sorrow and disappointments, I was looking for ways to get rid of them; searching for answers. One day, I dropped in at 30 Deodar Street in Kolkata. The Krishnamurti Foundation, Kolkata Centre was housed there. I expected it to be just another library.  As I looked around, my gaze fell on a newsletter lying on a large wooden table.  There, I stumbled on a quote  which read ….’Truth Is a pathless land’.

I was very attracted to those words and from that moment, a new journey, a new quest began. Those words have had a huge impact. But it was somewhat like looking for Harry Potter’s Platform  9 3/4  where he would have got a train to Hogwart’s  Magic School. The difference is that Harry did find it !

I have been a school teacher most of my working life. I was drowned in my daily routine of taking classes, evaluating exam scripts, mingling with young high school students both inside and outside the classroom, enjoying their bubbling energy.  But inspite of everything, I often felt a certain inexplicable discontent deep in my heart.  I have been observing over the years certain aspects of school life, both for the teacher and the students.  Too much outer discipline, use of fear and authority to control students inside class rooms, lack of  contact with Nature , too much of rote learning, success, rewards, competition.

One day I read:

“The ignorant man is not the unlearned, but he who does not know himself, and the learned man is stupid when he relies on books, on knowledge and on authority to give him understanding. “

Education And the Significance of Life – Chapter 2 –J.Krishnamurti

Many questions started rising in my mind. Such as…. we can easily teach children Maths , Science or Geography or even swimming and Robotics. But how do they learn to deal with their frustrations, disappointments , anxieties, fears and insecurities ? Do we teach them to accept these as normal along with their academic subjects?

I observed how children are constantly being bombarded with more and more fears today.  They fear losing those close to them, being mediocre and being rejected by peers, etc.  And yet we all want our children to navigate through different life stages unscathed. Do we comprehend how adversely fear and insecurity can affect a child?

And then I read:

‘What we now call education is a matter of accumulating information and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. Such education offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and, like all escapes, it inevitably creates increasing misery. Conflict and confusion result from our own wrong relationship with people, things and ideas. Until we understand that relationship and alter it, mere learning, the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction.’

Education and Significance of life – Chapter 2 – The Right Kind Of Education. J Krishnamurti.

‘Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success.’

Education And Significance Of Life – Chapter 1 – J Krishnamurti.

Internally, I   was shaken. He has been speaking all this since1953 and still we continue in the same grind. Why? Why don’t we change? Why are the majority of schools still the same, going the old way? No, I do not have any mission to change the world. All I can do is take a good look at myself.  It is the educator who needs education,  Krishnamurti had emphasized.

‘Our problem is not so much the child but the educator, who needs educating much more than the pupil. And to educate the educator is far more difficult than to educate the child, because the educator is already set, fixed’.

Every time I read this, I look inward. Those dormant  seeds of discontent  lying  in me for years received some much needed  rain  and  sunshine  through the teachings, albeit  in the form of books and audios and videos.  But somehow my thirst to understand grew. I started frequenting the Krishnamurti  Centre, Kolkata, attending dialogues, retreats, listened to speakers , visited various study  centers outside of Kolkata. I took in as much as I could about what a K School meant through my occasional visits to the schools at Rajghat and Sahayadri and the head quarters in Chennai without any reason or motive in my mind what so ever.

I remember, in one of the talks of Mark Lee, in Kolkata in February 2020, he pointed out the revolutionary aspect of Krishnamurti’s teachings on education drawing a beautiful simile.  He said that while most schools  emphasize on filling the urn, Krishnamurti through his teachings and in his various schools stressed on emptying the urn.

As the words of Krishnamurti and others resonate in  me, they somehow  have the ability to  create  new spaces in me, opening up further open spaces  for enquiry and learning. I really don’t know how much it has  helped my career  but the bonding with my students has grown stronger. They understood my love and concern better and I understand theirs.

Over the years, from checking the percentage of students in their final exams as a measure of success, I have gladly moved on to examining the  flowering of goodness in the fertile  mind of each child.  In quieter moments, I keep wondering about and questioning the real meaning of Education, the possible meaning of ‘flowering of goodness ‘.

And as I read ‘To understand life is to understand ourselves and that is the beginning and end of Education’, I realize how much I am still clueless. I wonder if my journey has even begun. Has it?