Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry

A. Kumar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137315816
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

2013 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Review Kumar asks in this volume: Since characteristic features of human consciousness - fear, conditioning, and fragmentation - work against the educational experience, how can we re-imagine curriculum as a space for meditative inquiry and allow it to provide transformative educational experiences to teachers and their students?

C H A P T E R 1

KRISHNAMURTI, MACDONALD, AND MYSELF

INTRODUCTION

This book has emerged as a result of my engagement with the profound works of Jiddu Krishnamurti and James Macdonald. There are three aspects of their ideas that provided a strong foundation to understanding curriculum as meditative inquiry. First, both men consider the individual—not systems, theories, methods, plans, or tests—to be the core of education. In their view the highest function of education is to provide grounds for self-understanding and self-transformation. Second, both of them recognize the deleterious effects of conditioning influences, fear, discipline, authority, and fragmentation on the growth and development of children, on the one hand, and the positive role of listening, dialogue, and understanding for transformative teaching and learning, on the other hand. Both Krishnamurti and Macdonald consider individual and social change as inseparable processes. While they recognize the urgent need for social transformation, they think that the most significant role education can play is to provide opportunities to teachers and their students so that they may understand their consciousness and transform it, which, in turn, will transform society. Given their tremendous contribution to my research as well as due to a general lack of knowledge about their lives and works in education literature, I provide brief biographical introductions about them in this chapter. I also provide a brief autobiographical statement to recognize significant people and ideas, including Krishnamurti and Macdonald, who, in many ways have inspired my thinking and practice as a human being and an educator.

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI: TRUTH IS A PATHLESS LAND

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986)—a widely regarded philosopher, educator, and institution builder—was born to a Hindu Brahmin family in Madanapalle, India on May 12, 1895. At the age of 14 he was “discovered” to have a “unique aura that contained no selfishness” by a theosophist and psychic, Charles Leadbeater (Jayakar 1986, 24). Subsequently, Krishnamurti was adopted by Annie Beasent, the then president of the Theosophical Society,¹ who was also an ardent social reformer and participant in India’s struggle for independence from the British Raj. In 1911, at the age of 16, Krishnamurti was taken to England where he was to be educated and prepared to be a “vehicle” for the arrival of the Lord Maiterya, the “World Teacher.” For his entire adolescence and youth, theosophists prepared Krishnamurti as the “vehicle” for the arrival of the “World Teacher,” which certainly involved a strictly disciplined life. However, Krishnamurti reported later that although he was being conditioned heavily by the theosophists, in his innermost self he was going through a silent revolution (Jayakar 1986; Lutyens 1990). He was constantly questioning all kinds of beliefs and rituals, orthodoxies and superstitions, authority and hierarchy.

At the age of 27 in 1922, Krishnamurti went through a “life changing” experience at Ojai Valley, California involving severe pain in his back and brain for several days. His biographer and close friend, Pupul Jayakar (1986, 47), describes the process as the awakening of Kundalini energy.² His experience completely disillusioned Krishnamurti of the place of any authority in psychological and religious matters. In 1929, at the age of 33, Krishnamurti dissolved the “Order of the Star in the East,”³ which he was a president of and declared:

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. (Krishnamurti 1929)

In essence, Krishnamurti maintained throughout his life what he said in his “Dissolution Speech.” This speech was a paradigm shift that shook the entire theosophical society including Annie Besant. This speech was the beginning of the enfoldment of the unique teachings that were completely bereft of any organized belief and a sense of authority and for which Krishnamurti is respected by people the world over including theosophists. However, at the time of the dissolution of the order theosophists disliked such a decision on the part of Krishnamurti who they were preparing to become their “Teacher.” Annie Beasent, who considered Krishnamurti her son, was extremely worried about the future of Krishnamurti for she believed that he knew nothing of the way the world works. On her request a few theosophists left the Theosophical Society and took the responsibility to take care of the social life of Krishnamurti. For the next few years Krishnamurti went into complete isolation in Ojai Valley, California.

It was after World War II that Krishnamurti’s teachings began to take shape. He traveled throughout the world engaging common people, scholars, teachers, and students in a dialogical encounter regarding the need to recognize the crisis in human consciousness and the urgency of its transformation to create a peaceful world. He maintained a thoroughly original perception into life’s numerous problems. He declared that he was nobody’s teacher but a “simple man” who wants to point toward something “sacred” in life, untouched and uncontaminated by thought. This “sacred” one may call “Truth,” “God,” or “Reality,” which one has to discover within one’s own self through constant awareness of one’s behavior, thoughts, and emotions and one’s relationship to people and nature.

In his lifetime Krishnamurti traveled worldwide and spoke for over 60 years on vital issues concerning the future of humanity and published over 70 books. During the last 40 years of his life, on average, Krishnamurti gave a hundred talks every year (Martin 1997). Broadly, his works are comprised of his authored texts, talks, question and answer series, and dialogues. Some of his important works include First and the Last Freedom (1954) (with a magnificent foreword by Aldous Huxley), Education and the Significance of Life (1953), The Ending of Time (1985) (which is collection of his dialogues with theoretical physicist David Bohm), A Wholly Different Way of Living (2000) (which is a collection of his dialogues with Professor Allan W. Anderson of San Diego State University), three volumes of Commentaries On Living, and Collected Works (Vol. 1–17). Major themes that characterize Krishnamurti’s writings, public talks, and dialogues with students, teachers, and scholars include education, meditation, fear, self-knowledge, psychological revolution, world crisis, peace, truth, intelligence, consciousness, time, and creativity.

During the 1950s while North American curriculum theory and school education was still working under the dominance of Ralph Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (1949) and serving the demands of industrialization, militarization, and consumerism, Krishnamurti by means of his Education and the Significance of Life (1953) had already critiqued the nature and character of a positivistic, behavioristic, and capitalistic, or more succinctly, materialistic education, centered on the principles of reward and punishment and technical efficiency. Krishnamurti’s insights into the nature and purpose of education are contained in more than ten books.⁴ Of them, he authored three (Education As Service, 1912; Education and the Significance of Life, 1953; and Whole Movement of Life is Learning: J. Krishnamurti’s Letters to His Schools, 2006)⁵ while others⁶ are based on his dialogues and talks with students, teachers, parents, and scholars. As an institution builder, Krishnamurti established several schools, study centers, and foundations in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America that continue to survive as one of the most significant alternative educational institutions in the world.⁷ By means of his writings and talks, dialogues with people the world over, and through establishing alternative schools and study centers, Krishnamurti shared a significant vision of education.

On the one hand, Krishnamurti’s vision of education criticizes modern educational institutions that cultivate in children fear through emphasizing discipline, authority, and conformity; instill the poison of ambitions and competitiveness; influence delicate minds with destructive conditioning; and create a deep-rooted fragmented personality structure. On the other hand, his life’s work lays the foundation of a “right kind of education,” which, instead of fear, becoming, conditioning, and fragmentation, nurtures meditative inquiry or awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, and actions to bring about self-knowledge and thereby psychological and social transformation.

Krishnamurti influenced people worldwide including physicists (David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, and George Sudarshan), authors (Mary Cadogon, Joseph Campbell, Howard Fast, Kahlil Gibran, Aldous Huxley, Iris Murdoch, Henry Miller, George Bernard Shaw, and Alan Watts), biologists (Jonas Salk, Rupert Sheldrake, and Maurice Wilkins), psychiatrists (Hedda Bolgar, Ruben Feldman-Gonzalez, John Hidley, David Shainberg, and Benjamin Weinniger), philosophers (Allan W. Anderson, Nalini Bhushan, Raymond Martin, Jacob Needleman, Walpola Rahula, Ravi Ravindra, Hillary Rodrigues, Eugene Schallert, Huston Smith, and Renee Weber), creative artists (Sidney Field, Anta Loos, Michael Mendizza, Van Morrison, Alan Rowlands, Leopold Stokowski, and Beatrice Wood), and educators (Scott Forbes, Krishan Kumar, Karen Meyer, Jack Miller, Jane Piirto, and Meenakshi Thapan), among others.⁸ Toward the end of his life Krishnamurti was also invited to deliver a lecture at the United Nations in the year 1984⁹ and was awarded a UN Peace Medal. Krishnamurti died of pancreatic cancer on February 17, 1986 in Ojai Valley, California.¹⁰

JAMES MACDONALD: PERSON IN THE CURRICULUM

James Bradley Macdonald, the “great curriculum theorist” (Pinar 2009c, 190), was born on March 11, 1925, to a prominent family in Delavan, Wisconsin.¹¹ Macdonald’s father’s engagement with “intellectually stimulating activities” and his mother’s “strong beliefs about fairness and equality and justice which she constantly communicated to her children” (Burke 1985, 87) had a strong impact on Macdonald’s life, as is explicit from his own intellectual vitality and emphasis on social justice and change.

Macdonald’s formal schooling began earlier than intended due to the untimely death of his older sister. While he was a good student, he was constantly reminded at school that he was not scoring as high grades as his sister did or as his potential indicated. Macdonald considered these views “stupid.” Instead of worrying about grades he “involved himself in many activities [drama, football, and social contacts] that were interesting and exciting” (Burke 1985, 86). This explains Macdonald’s abhorrence of technological rationality, “ideology of achievement” (Macdonald [1971b] 1995) or “accumulative consumptive psychology of schools” (Macdonald [1975c] 1995), on the one hand, and his appreciation of “openness,” “aesthetics,” and “playfulness” (Macdonald [1964] 1995), on the other hand.

Macdonald’s higher education began with his admission into Whitewater State University in Whitewater, Wisconsin as an engineering major. Macdonald had to leave his studies and join the Navy after just one semester due to World War II. It was during his posts in Guinea and the Philippines that Macdonald resisted against racism in the military, especially toward blacks, and concluded that much of the military was “bureaucratic idiocy” (Burke 1985, 90)! No doubt it was during his years in the military that Macdonald learnt about the problems of bureaucratic, disciplinary, hierarchical, and authoritative organizations. How schools act, in many ways, as military organizations is explicit in his many writings (Macdonald [1971a] 1995).

After returning from the war on G. I. Bill, Macdonald rejoined college as a history and sociology major with a minor in political science. Macdonald greatly enjoyed history classes because they provided him with the “opportunity to explore the background of events, to think about relationship, and to wonder” (Burke 1985, 90). Macdonald was deeply influenced by a sociology professor who taught a class of five hundred students. Macdonald was amazed with his ability to probe deeply and invite students to probe further in such an enormous classroom. Contrary to his experiences in history and sociology, he abhorred a professor of economics who dictated notes from his notebook (Burke 1985). In my understanding, it is here that Macdonald realized the problems of behaviorist approaches to teaching, on the one hand, and the significance of “person in the curriculum” and “meditative thinking,” on the other hand, which are reflected all through his writings.

Macdonald took his first education course with Professor John Rothney, who emphasized a holistic approach to understanding the relationship among cognitive, affective, and social domains. This course was transformative for Macdonald in many ways. He learnt many problematic aspects of the public education system, such as the unrestrained use of authority and its dehumanizing effects on students and teachers (Burke 1985). These concerns are apparent in his vision of education that he developed later as a curriculum theorist.

While four years in college earned Macdonald a secondary teaching certificate, he knew, based on his school teaching experience, that the profession was not a best fit for him. He realized that the teachers and students were primarily concerned with grades rather than subject matter. Disillusioned, Macdonald seriously considered studying sociology in graduate school. However, due to a half-hour-long engaging conference with Professor Virgil Herrick, director of a new program in the area of elementary education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (UWM), Macdonald was convinced that he should remain in the field of education. After a year of teaching as a fourth grade teacher in a school in Park Forest (Illinois) where he enjoyed good relationships with parents, and served as an elected chairman of the local chapter of the National Education Association, Macdonald returned to Madison to finish his Master’s degree and, subsequently, joined the doctoral program in the same university (Burke 1985).

Doctoral studies at the UWM was pivotal for Macdonald in many ways. He enjoyed a rich learning environment where many dimensions of curriculum, teaching, and learning were discussed and debated. It was also here that Macdonald found his lifelong friend and colleague, Dwayne Huebner. Both Macdonald and Huebner, who according to Pinar et al. (1995) were two major figures of the curriculum reconceptualization movement in North America, inspired each other’s thinking and writing. Both of them worked under the supervision of Virgil Herrick, who they highly regarded. Notably, Macdonald did his doctoral dissertation—“Some Contributions of a General Behavior Theory for Curriculum” (1956)—in the tradition of positivistic research, a tradition against which he himself fought later in his distinguished career.

Macdonald’s first university appointment was as assistant professor in Curriculum and Extension at the University of Texas-Austin where he worked during 1956–1957. Being here, Macdonald was influenced by special education classrooms that embodied significant aspects of a progressive education, such as, valuing and respecting individual needs and an open and caring environment. It was in these classrooms that Macdonald thought “good liberal education” (Burke 1985, 97) was taking place.

From 1957–1959, Macdonald worked at New York University. He was invited there to direct a graduate program to certi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• 1.   Krishnamurti, Macdonald, and Myself
• 2.   On the Nature of Consciousness
• 3.   On the Nature of Education
• 4.   On the Nature of Meditative Inquiry
• 5.   On the Nature of Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Index