Teacher: To see, does one always have to be in that state?
Krishnamurti: If you do not see it now but demand to see it always, that is nonsense. The seeing once is the seed put in the earth, that will flower. But if you say that you must see it always, then you are back to the old formula.
Look what has happened: the old patterns of thinking with regard to teaching and freedom and order have been taken away from you. Therefore you are looking at problems differently. The difference is that your mind is now free to look, free to examine the issue of freedom and order. Now how will you convey to the child that you are not going to punish him, not going to reward him and yet he must be totally free and orderly?
Teacher: I think the teacher has the same problem as the child. He needs to operate from a field where he feels freedom and discipline go together. In his present thinking, he separates order and freedom. He says freedom is against order and order is against freedom.
Krishnamurti: I think we are missing something. When you see that the old methods of punishment and reward are dead, your mind becomes much more active. Because you have to solve this problem, your mind is alive. If it is alive, it will be in contact with the issue.
Because you are free and understand freedom, you will be punctual in your class and from freedom you will talk to the student and not from an idea. To talk from an idea, a formula, a concept is one thing, but to talk from an actual fact which you have seen - that the student must be free and therefore orderly - is totally different. When you as a teacher are free and orderly you are already communicating it, not only verbally but non-verbally and the student knows it immediately.
Once you see the fact that punishment and reward in any form are destructive, you never go back to them. By throwing them out, you yourself are disciplined and that discipline has come out of the freedom of examination. You communicate to the child the fact of that and not any idea. Then you have communicated to him not only verbally, but at a totally different level.
I think he is referring again to something he hinted at the beginning of this chapter (see talk to teachers, chapter 1, part1....and the comment to that entry):
ReplyDelete"If you are asked, as a teacher, what the intention of this school is would you be able to reply? I want to know what you are all trying to do, what you intend the student to be? Are you trying to shape him, condition him, force him in certain directions? Are you trying to teach the student mathematics, physics, giving him some information so that he is proficient technologically and can do well in a future career? Thousands of schools are doing this, all over the world - trying to make the student excellent technologically so that he becomes a good scientist, engineer, physicist and so on. Or are you trying to do something much more here? If it is much more, what is it?"
And now he is saying that unless we know that freedom ourselves we cannot speak FROM that freedom, but we will talk from theory
This is the question, where are we speaking, acting FROM?....is it the same question as Who are we really?
ReplyDeletebeautiful question......
ReplyDeleteIf order is not possible without the old methods, then the abandonment of those methods by the teachers would obviously put the whole process of education at risk. How can one teach a class if there is no order?
ReplyDeleteSo K. leaves the teachers with a tremendous challenge: "How will you convey to the child that you are not going to punish him, not going to reward him and yet he must be totally free and orderly?" Clearly, there is no possibility of conveying this, unless "you as a teacher are free and orderly", because you have seen "the fact that punishment and reward in any form are destructive".
K's suggestion that the examination and negation of the false means of establishing so-called discipline enables a different kind of discipline to come into being is truly striking.