On 19 August 2023, a one day workshop on education was held at the Paikambi Nigamananda High School. The school is located in a village called Paikambi in Gopiballavpur district in West Bengal and is roughly four hours drive from Kolkata. The workshop was facilitated by Piyali Basu who has had considerable experience as a teacher including many years of teaching at the Krishnamurti school at Rajghat, Varanasi. The workshop came about because of the passion of a friend who wants to take J Krishnamurti’s vision of education to non-urban areas where it would never otherwise reach. This is his third initiative (earlier we had workshops at Kolaghat and Dasagram).
We are also grateful to many others. An unassuming farmer at Paikambi, who runs Jagran Foundation, collaborated closely and brought it all together at Paikambi. Then there are other friends whose support made it possible to give books to the participants. The books ‘Bhabbar Kotha’ (Bengali translation of ‘Think on these things’) and ‘Educating the educator’ were given to the participants. In short, so many people played a part in bringing it all together.
It was an intense day at the workshop. While the focus was on the educator, we tried to think together about the intent of education? Without clarity on the fundamental intent of education, we tend to get lost in a maze of issues e.g. methods, systems, politics, ideologies and what not. So many questions came up from the teachers during the interactions. Is following a prescribed curriculum blocking the space to reach out and address the psychological needs of students? How can we integrate the psychological needs in education with the common curriculum? Are we caught up in a routine approach? How do we prioritize when resources in rural schools are so scarce?
A teacher at the school shared her life dilemmas too. Caring for young siblings, supporting parents, taking care of daily chores and also being an educator. As a teacher, how do I have the clarity to deal with it all? A young teacher asked if we can consider ‘ragging’ in a particular university as an isolated activity or do we see how it all starts when children are exposed to all the wrong influences within the family, the community? Is it possible to humanize the focus of education and create room for the students to express, to question, to share their feelings about what they absorb from their surroundings?
There is a chapter in the J Krishnamurti book Commentaries on Living titled ‘Without Goodness and Love, one is not educated.’ This probably sums it all up quite beautifully. In conclusion, Krishnamurti says: ‘You have teachers to instruct you in mathematics, in literature, and so on; but education is something deeper and wider than the mere gathering of information. Education is the cultivation of the mind so that action is not self-centred; it is learning throughout life to break down the walls which the mind builds in order to be secure, and from which arises fear with all its complexities.’
The intensity at the workshop was extraordinary and confirmed once again that city schools have so much to learn from educators in the poorer rural schools. This album of photos may provide the flavour of an extraordinary day.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/JknPhz77j3R49i1S6
Congratulations to the KFI team. The schoo looks beautiful and simple and the teachers seem quite eager to learn as I gathered from the reports . Wonderful .