The purpose, the aim and drive of these schools, is to equip the child
with the most excellent technological proficiency so that the student
may function with clarity and efficiency in the modern world.
A far more important purpose than this is to create the right climate
and environment so that the child may develop fully as a complete
human being. This means giving the child the opportunity to flower in
goodness so that he or she is rightly related to people, things and
ideas, to the whole of life. To live is to be related. There is no right
relationship to anything if there is not the right feeling for beauty, a
response to nature, to music and art — a highly developed aesthetic
sense.
I think it is fairly clear that competitive education and the development
of the student in that process.... is very, very destructive.
We must be very clear in ourselves what we want – clear that a human
being must be the total human being, not just a technological human
being. If we concentrate very much on examinations, on technological
information, on making the child clever, proficient in acquiring
knowledge while we neglect the other side, then the child will grow up
into a one-sided human being. When we talk about a total human
being, we mean not only a human being with inward understanding,
with a capacity to explore, to examine his or her inward state and the
capacity of going beyond it, but also someone who is good in what he
does outwardly. The two must go together.
That is the issue in education:
to see that when the child leaves the school, he is well-established in
goodness, both outwardly and inwardly.
~ J Krishnamurti
