The Link #26 - Our Children and the Real World

The following is an edited version of an article that appeared in the 2006 issue of the CFL Newsletter, a publication of the Centre for Learning, a Krishnamurtiinspired school in Bangalore, India. Venkatesh Onkar is a teacher at CFL.

Is CFL an idealistic, utopian bubble isolated from the values that the real world holds dear? Are our children too protected from harsh realities? These are not rhetorical questions from a hypothetical anxious parent. One of the key concerns of the adults in the school, both parents and teachers, is to question and challenge the terms of our engagement with the world, including social processes and individuals. This questioning is one of the ways of assessing our own sense of responsibility for our environment and the social and political events that go on around us.

The posing of the question itself contains some problems. One, of course, is the term 'real world'. Which real world do we mean? Perhaps, primarily, it is the world of middleclass Indian education, competition and achievement – the professional world that represents, to most of us, security, order and meaning. Or, maybe it is the real – some might say realer – world of poverty, deprivation and suffering that afflicts most of humanity today. Or, we might mean the world of our own emotions and their imperatives. Can we expect our children to engage deeply with all of these complex and clashing realities? Or do we only want them to cope, to take care of themselves and their interests while muddling through life as best they can?

Of course, our children are protected – from brutality, from crushing judgement, from the vagaries of arbitrarily exercised power, from the extremes of the physical environment. Such a basic sense of protection is obviously the starting point for an education that has meaning for the child as well as the adult. This is not to deny the efforts of those who wish to secure the well-being of the child at a much more basic level, that of everyday sustenance and health. But the scope of our visions and questions is very different and addresses the most naked and powerful drives that the human psyche throws up: the drives of pleasure, pain, insecurity and fear. From these there is ultimately no protection.

as subjects of our own enquiry, we are forever in flux

With regard to the ‘real world’ of professional achievement, it is clear that this represents a very small fraction of human experience and expectation. To get caught in fulfilling the dreams and visions of this reality seems, ultimately, somewhat narcissistic and selfindulgent. Our children need to acquire skills and an education appropriate to their interests and abilities, and no doubt these are conditioned by social background and expectations. However, we feel it is wise not to enter into and feed this loop of achievement and success. We would like our children to be sceptical about the imperatives of this drive and the glittering careers and security it seems to promise – a tantalizing glitter and security that are most often out of reach.

It is perhaps more meaningful to engage with the second tier of possible ‘real worlds’: that of the physical and social suffering around us. We do not want our community to be one of mere do-gooders; we would like our children to learn to look at the nature of the human crisis in a compassionate, clear and indeed practical way, while at the same time questioning their, and our, lifestyles and assumptions about the material world, consumption, social structures and the environment. Awareness and involvement such as this come naturally when we experience lifestyles and challenges different from those we are familiar with. This is one of the purposes of the long excursions that the children go on every year. It has also been the drive behind the senior-school programme, with its view towards a socially-driven learning.

In the midst of the planning and structuring, however, we do not lose sight of the fact that the most basic learning has to do with ourselves, our conditioning, the conflicts in our minds and the social expression they have, the nature of our hopes, desires, ambitions and frustrations, and what it means to live a fundamentally deep and peaceful life. Learning, in other words, about our own emotional imperatives.

In a recent dialogue class, a child asked, with some frustration: What is this learning and why should I do it? This, of course, is the problem: learning about oneself cannot be defined precisely. As subjects of our own enquiry, we are forever in flux, and there is no end to learning; and such learning, by its nature, cannot have a goal. The moment we point ourselves toward a goal, we are no longer interested in this mysterious self-enquiry but rather in what we can achieve and become.

If such a process of learning is initiated, the question of protection from the ‘real world’ becomes: How can I respond to difficult situations in an intelligent manner? The situation may be one of intense hostility or conflict, corruption or dilemma, but can I respond to it with integrity while learning about my own imperatives – the way I take sides, the assumptions that I make, the stereotypes and emotions that fill my brain? If this kind of learning can take place, then we are, perhaps, beginning to meet the real challenges of life, rather than trying to define ‘real’ and ‘protected’ environments.

Venkatesh Onkar, 2006