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BR79CJLD2 - Why do we get educated?
Brockwood Park, UK - 28 September 1979
Conversation with J-L. Dewez D2



0:22 Jean-Louis Dewez: Would it be possible to speak – how to put the question? – I wish we would speak, during a good part of this discussion, about the problem of education. Education, and schools such as this one, seem to be something so terribly fragile compared to…
0:53 K: Something enormous, yes.
0:56 D: There is this opposition between what we talked about this morning, self-knowledge, which seems to be a process which everyone has to do for himself, and on the other side, for instance, scientific knowledge, which accumulates. And now human beings find themselves with enormous power, and from generation to generation humanity accumulates power, but, for all that, man is no wiser than he was 10,000 years ago. But humanity has never had so much power and knowledge about nature. This power of destruction is so huge that one doesn’t see very clearly the fragile problem of education. One is tempted to join political movements, to try to act, because the situation is imperiled, even. Could we place the problem of education and self-knowledge in the context of the situation as it is today and that of action?
2:34 K: Sir, why do we get educated? Throughout the world, practically everybody goes through school, college, university, jobs, work, marriage, children. All that. Why do we get educated at all? Just to follow the pattern, follow what one’s grandfather, or grandmother, the pattern the past generation has set, and we just follow them? Class division, national division, family division, and this constant struggle, conflict, battle outside, battle inside, is the pattern. And education, perhaps, technological and otherwise, is something outside, and the other thing goes on. Do you understand what I mean?

D: Yes, I understand.
4:20 K: As you just now said, psychologically, man has been what he has been for 10,000, or a million years, conflict, misery, unhappiness. We never touch that side at all, and we’re acquiring more and more and more knowledge about the outside world and nothing about what is happening to us, which is destroying the world outside of us. As you know, we’ve got schools in different parts of the world and I have always asked why we get educated, to be scientists, to be doctors, to be carpenters, businessmen. They are not going to change the world. They will modify the environment, but, psychologically, they are like other human beings who have existed for a million years. Right? That’s so obvious. Slightly modified. So, is education merely the acquiring of knowledge so that we can act skillfully in the world that has been set before us? If you had a child, what is the future for him?
6:45 D: I have a child, who is 16 months old.
6:51 K: In a tremendously competitive world, in colleges, university, in school, the whole pattern is to compete. If you’re not capable of competing, and reach a certain level, you are just thrown out. You become a labourer or a carpenter, a plumber, a mechanic, this or that and nothing else. So, education, as it is now, prepares the few who are very clever to reach the top, politically, religiously, economically. The rest drag on. Is that why we send our children to school? You see them here. What for?
7:59 D: We say to ourselves that if they learn a lot of things they will have a better position, a bit more power to protect themselves against the world.
8:16 K: Either sustain things as they are, maintain status quo, totalitarianism, capitalism, keep things as they are, modify them, change them a little bit here and a little bit there. Is that all education is?
8:47 D: One who studies, let’s say, economics, I suppose sincerely hopes that with the knowledge of economics he is going to change something, create a fairer society… At least, he hopes so.
9:03 K: Sir, you know all the history of the Russian Revolution, look what it has ended up in, bureaucracy, tyranny. When you look at the world, objectively, not from your scientific or business point of view, but as it is, the uncertainty, fear, lack of jobs, overpopulation, national divisions, wars and all the terror that’s going on, what is the future of one’s children? You understand? What do we educate them for? So, we have to question – if one has a son or daughter – what is the thing that you want them to grow into? They are growing into this. I don’t know if you have talked to children, students, as I have, they’re really frightened of this. You understand? They’re really frightened of all that. They are frightened, they don’t know what to do, so they escape into some nonsense, drugs, all the rest of it. So, when you take the whole world as a unit and look at it, what should we do? If you are the elder statesman, a man who is capable of changing certain things, what would you do? Because the men in position, in power, they don’t want anything else. You understand? They won’t change. So, what does...? What will your children want? A good society, in which they can live happily, peacefully, without all this terrible conflict. A certain sense of physical, moral security. Right? Can schools prepare that, prepare them to live a life, so that they will bring about a good society?
12:43 D: At the moment, school prepares them for exams, and a good position.
12:52 K: It prepares them to maintain this corrupt world. That’s our education. If you look in the totalitarian world, all the world over, it is to maintain this terrible, disorderly, disoriented, disintegrating society.
13:21 D: There is also the idea that one will be able to bring something only after having understood all the sciences and all that.
13:30 K: How? In the meantime, your children will be killed. Right? They live theoretically, in theories, the actuality is this, what is actually going on in our daily life is this, conflict between man and woman, conflict between positions, nations. You follow, sir? You know all this. And we educate them to fit into that.
14:19 D: Education, then, is just a race to get the good position over there, in front of the line.

K: In front of the others.
14:30 D: One then tries to put his child in a good school, so he arrives ahead.
14:35 K: Polytechnics, you know, like in France. So, the problem is, can we educate, bring about right kind of education so that the student, the educator and the educated bring about a good society? That is really the problem. The Greeks talked about good society. The ancient Hindus talked about a good society and certain groups of them lived that way, for a certain time. Of course, it’s all gone. A good society meant somewhere in the future. You understand what I’m saying? Sometime, we are going to create it. And it never comes into being.

D: Like a paradise.
15:47 K: So, can education bring this about, a good society, in the sense, where human beings are happy, not everlastingly battling each other?
16:05 D: Before we go into the question, can education bring this about, aren’t we first tempted to say, let’s act more effectively? Having seen all this, isn’t one tempted to join reformers? This is the problem. If one really wants to go into how important the problem of education is, one should first go into the problem of action, reform and revolution.
16:44 K: Yes, sir. Reform and bring about an action which will reform this. Right? Which means what? That is, to re-form.
17:08 D: Remake the form.
17:11 K: Re-form the same thing. That’s why, sir, when we talked about self-knowledge, knowing oneself, there is the real source of radical revolution. Not physical revolution – that has never produced anything.
17:46 D: There have been many examples of small revolutions. I have seen some operate in communities, people who say, ‘Enough of this society’. Then they get together, I know, I’ve seen it, even participated, and they establish a pattern of how one should live. They say, ‘We’re going to live together, but we won’t have this, and we won’t have that’, and they begin. I don’t know if you have seen any, but the result is that everything begins all over again, someone becomes the leader, a paternalist.
18:25 K: There it is, organisation begins.
18:28 D: Though they started with a pattern, a good idea of how should society be, it becomes a sort of revolution. ‘I am here and I want to be there, I want to live entirely differently’. And the result is… I don’t know of any community managing to live differently.
18:46 K: I’ve known such communities. I have tried once. It never succeeds.
19:00 D: That may be a good image of revolution on a country’s scale. In the end, what makes society is not the constitution or the pattern.
19:12 K: That means organisation does not change man.
19:19 D: However, that’s what Marxists were hoping for.
19:22 K: Look!
19:25 D: Does society make man? That’s the hypothesis. ‘If we change society, in several generations, man will be changed’.
19:38 K: I have discussed, had dialogues with communists all over the world. They come to a certain point and say, ‘You’re perfectly right’, but they won’t go beyond it.
19:55 D: Probably sincerely. There’s a blockage.
20:00 K: It’s like talking with a Catholic. Catholics and communists are both the same, with different clothes.
20:16 D: So, one can actually see, through these examples, like communities or revolutions throughout history, lately in Cambodia, that even the largest attempts to change the world, to rebuilt a different pattern of society...
20:39 K: It never works.
20:45 D: And yet, apart from that, self-knowledge seems…
20:57 K: Sir, when once we recognise intelligently that the world is me, that we, I, have created the world, the mess, the confusion, the violence – once we recognise that, as a fact, not as an idea, then the study of oneself is the real education. Because that will change society. It seems we have made organisations into kind of godheads, something divine to be organised.
22:04 D: One wants to organise the exterior, it’s the same thing...
22:14 K: So, come back to the question. Can we educate our children to be good citizens? Not good in the sense that they conform. So that their lives are good, that they’re not violent and all the rest of it. Otherwise, you can’t produce a good society. You will never produce it, however well-organised everything is. Sir, look at the totalitarian world. They started out wanting to create a new society without class, without armies.

D: With good ideas.
23:24 K: They said government must disappear. And look!
23:32 D: They find outward reasons, like others might attack them. It’s the same with us finding outward reasons to accumulate barriers.
23:47 K: So, you see, we have got a tremendous problem. The children are conditioned by their parents. The children are conditioned by the society in which they live, by their friends, by their grandmother... They come to the school, being conditioned, and that conditioning remains, and you are piling up knowledge on him. He must be a scientist, a doctor, an engineer and so on. But his consciousness is conditioned.
24:37 D: Yes, but here I think there is a delicate point, because take for instance the Marxists. They accept the idea that we are conditioned by the world, our parents, our culture, but, watch out, because their conclusion is that if children were taken very young and put in a good environment… Let’s take an example. My son is a-year-and-half-old. Suppose I bring him here and he lives here. He’ll nevertheless come upon problems of conditioning, wherever he lives. Even if he lives with you, he’ll come upon problems of conditioning.
25:22 K: That’s the problem, sir. Can the educator’s consciousness and the consciousness of the student be changed? The change is right education, not merely learning mathematics.
25:57 D: Mathematics and all that, these are mechanisms. It’s a bit like chess game, there are rules, you must apply them. Like mathematics, there is a set of rules, you know how to use them, or you don’t. But this is not going to help you in your life, psychologically, and in your relationships with others. That’s obvious.
26:26 K: So, if you are an educator, that would be your problem. You want to create a good society. Good, in the sense, a society without conflict, where we would live in peace, which doesn’t mean you become a vegetable, an automaton, but a society where man can be totally secure.
27:08 D: Psychologically.

K: Psychologically, yes. They want security merely outwardly. All of them. I’ve listened to the Conservatives, Liberals, Labour, Communist – they’re all concerned with giving security outwardly.
27:28 D: It’s important, the problem of providing security.
27:31 K: Yes, but that very security they want outside is causing the lack of security in oneself.
27:46 D: There is a danger, because the educator who wants a good society, for himself and for the children with him, might have a preconceived idea of what is a good society.
28:03 K: No, sir, you can’t have... That’s why, if you… A good society can be described, planned out. ‘In principle, it should be this or that’. But that’s an idea. Which means you are making the student conform to the idea which you have established, which is the same thing in another direction. You understand?
28:41 D: Meaning that a ‘good society’, set in stone, can never exist. It’s only in the relationship between you and me, that I learn through feeling whether the relationship is right or not. But how can educators tackle such a problem, because there’s a risk that they might seek security in that, or seek power for themselves?

K: That’s right. That means, the educator needs education. Not acquiring more B.As, M.As and PhDs and all that – he has to be educated psychologically. And that education can only take place when both student and teacher see their responsibility. You see, nobody wants to go into all this. They don’t care what happens to their children as long as they’ve got a little money, a little position. That’s all.
30:18 D: But to go into all that you need a little time, to enquire. But the parents say, ‘That school takes time to look at that. But if one takes time, one doesn’t study enough, so one won’t be among the top in society’. So, they say, ‘I’ll choose a school where you study all day where no time is wasted in reflecting, because the child must come top, for his own good’. And it is for the child’s ‘good’ that schools become sorts of prisons.
30:54 K: Places of conditioning.
30:57 D: That’s it, to educate is often considered the same as to condition. To condition them to allow them to react suitably whenever required.
31:08 K: So, sir. This is a very serious matter and there are very few people want to be serious. So, what shall we do? What shall a serious man do, who has children and feels the responsibility for those children, not just send them off to school, but the responsibility to see that the children themselves become responsible to create a good society? First, the parents have their problems. Both of them are occupied, because both of them want more money, more, more, more. They are slaves to commercialism. When they are little children, they are petted, looked after, afterwards, thrown out.
32:44 D: School becomes a nursery.

K: Yes.
32:48 D: You are even obliged to bring the child very early and pick him up late in the evening because one lives so far away.
32:58 K: You see, sir, all that indicates the lack of love – you understand? – and responsibility. I mean, if you look at it – you send your children to a good school. Then they are trained to join the military, for two years service. So, they are conditioned to kill, and the other side is also conditioned. And this is called ‘loving my children’. You understand?
34:01 D: But the problem is, if I have a child and I want him to have a good position, I have to get him do his homework in the evening so he’ll be first to enter college, and later he’ll become a leader. And I tell myself, I’ve done my job as a father, because I helped him get to a position where he will be secure, because he’ll have power.
34:33 K: You want him to have outward security, inwardly, he has no security. He is attached to something, to his wife, his furniture, somebody, and that attachment indicates insecurity.
35:01 D: Of course, ‘I could lose it all…’
35:07 K: He wants outward security, and inwardly he has no security, therefore, the inward action is much more real than the other. So, he destroys the outward security. That’s what’s happening in the world. Look, sir, each nation wants security. They’re both separate. Look what they are producing. I don’t… I mean... They are so stupid in all this! Which probably means they’re only concerned with their own lives, for a short period of time. I live for 50, 60 or 80 years – that’s all, the rest… After me, comes the flood.
36:22 D: The flood is about to wash away the biggest part of humanity. The West appears to be a fairly comfortable place, for the time being, but actually, the world is completely ablaze.
36:45 K: Sir, do you know how much the world is spending on armaments? 400,000 million dollars a year. You understand?

D: Yes. And each one does it for security.
37:12 K: And that is going to destroy him! Therefore, sir, self-knowledge, knowing oneself very deeply, brings an extraordinary security. Not the security of attachment.
37:36 D: Nor that of power.

K: No. The security of intelligence.

D: Right action.
37:47 K: And that is going to change the relationship between human beings, all that. Now, we have talked about this. Who is going to listen to all this? Who’s going to say, ‘My God, this is so true, I will give my life to this’? Or, ‘It is a marvellous idea. It will never happen. I’ll carry on with my job and my attachments’. The people at the top won’t listen. The religious people won’t listen. The scientist won’t listen. So, the ordinary man who says, ‘Perhaps, there may be truth in this. For God’s sake, let’s do something about it’.
39:09 D: Somebody sees that and… Let’s relate this to the problem of school and the problem of working on oneself or letting this work occur, while relating with the student, etc.
39:30 K: No, sir. The teacher, the educator, and the student must be in right relationship. There is no teacher on a platform, with the student down below. You understand? Because they’re both conditioned. If a teacher who wants... all the rest of it. He says, ‘I am conditioned, you are conditioned, let’s both talk about it, free ourselves from it. Apart from the subject you’re learning, this is our chief concern’. No government school will support this. No religious colleges or schools are going to support this. They want their own thing perpetuated.
40:38 D: Perpetuated or change direction.

K: It’s always the same direction. Sir, we are all so frightened. Because – why? If I will do this, what will happen? I’ll lose my job. I may lose my house, so, forget about it. They don’t see the danger of what they are doing.
41:35 D: But what can the educator do? Or rather, what can man do for man, there’s the educator and student, but in the end, that’s not what matters most. There are two human beings, the problem of conditioning and trying to face that in our relationship. How is that possible? What can someone do for someone else?
42:09 K: Sir, no.

D: Nothing.
42:12 K: No, wait, wait. Suppose you are conditioned and suppose I am conditioned. The conditioning is the same.
42:30 D: The source is the same.

K: That’s right. You may be conditioned as a Frenchman, another may be conditioned as a Hindu, with all his nonsense, and the Frenchman has all his nonsense. So, the conditioning, the source, the basic thing is common to each. Right? You agree? Of course, you have to. The Frenchman is an integral part of the other, psychologically. He may be more affluent, cleverer, more this or that, have better food, but intrinsically they are… If he sees that, then the one who investigates into self-knowledge, knowing himself, is affecting the other, too. You understand?
43:41 D: But this research, which runs parallel with education, with the teaching of academics… When one teaches a particular subject, there is a gradual approach, you start with simple exercises, then with problems, then with other things… But this is completely different.

K: Sir, can’t both be done?
44:13 D: That’s the question.
44:15 K: In a school, both should be done. The study of oneself and of subjects. Of course, that can be done.
44:30 D: But won’t the two processes be treated in the same way?
44:34 K: No! We must be very clear about it. I’m not going to teach you how to look at yourself, in the way I teach you mathematics, but we can both see, in the mirror of our relationship, actually what we are.
44:57 D: There’s still a danger. The child may say, ‘He knows about mathematics, so he can teach me self-knowledge in the same way’, for instance.
45:06 K: It’ll be my knowledge, not yours. Sir, that’s why we said, psychologically, we must put aside all authority. Right? I don’t know if you see that.

D: Yes, very clearly.
45:36 K: All authority.

D: Which means I am alone.
45:41 K: No, you are not alone, you are the rest of the world. You’re an integral part of the rest of humanity, therefore, you’re not alone.
45:58 D: Yes, but I am alone to do something, to understand.
46:03 K: No, sir. If once you understand the truth that you are an integral part, you are the world, in essence, then how can you be alone? You’re alone when you are seeking security in a job. That is your isolation.
46:34 D: Alone in the battle.
46:38 K: Yes, alone in the battle. But, you see... This is a tremendous problem, sir. We have lost all respect. Respect. Not because you’re a governor, a prime minister, president or big money, the quality of respect. Which comes with love. We have lost that. Our love is sensation, now. Pleasure, sex. That’s what we call love.
47:43 D: This is a subject which has at all times been connected with education, which is the problem of morality. People have said, ‘If I want a good society, I must learn moral principles’. ‘Do this, don’t do that, have respect...’ – that’s not what you mean by ‘respect’, but this was used in the past, in ‘good schools’. In so-called ‘good schools’ one would learn about morality, then people were expected to exercise their will to go through that kind of relationship.
48:20 K: Love has no morality, it is love. People who try to be moral have no love in their heart. ‘This is right behaviour, this is wrong behavior. You must control yourself, restrain yourself’. That’s what they call morality. ‘Sacrifice yourself’. Love isn’t that, that’s too cheap! You see, sir, that’s what I’m saying. Look, sir. They go to church, they take mass, and they worship some image they have created. They have created that image.

D: They don’t think so, but…
49:25 K: In India, it is the same. In the Asiatic world they have created the image out of their own confusion, misery, something different from themselves, and they love that. It’s their own projection. The churches, organisations say, ‘That is love. Love God’. And the other side – what do you call them? – existentialists and humanists, and the others say, man is conditioned. You can’t change it, you can modify it, you can change it slightly, but not radically. So, they go on. You follow, sir? And the clever ones, the intellectuals, support both. Or the communists. You understand?
50:47 D: The problem of the children coming to this school or any other school, it isn’t that they are going to be taught… They are going to be taught scientific disciplines, but that’s not the main subject.

K: We are going to do both. Scientific disciplines and help them to understand themselves. Not according to somebody – themselves, which is me!
51:22 D: Helping them to understand themselves… aren’t they going to expect exercises, as for any other discipline?
51:32 K: Look, sir, you are the educator, and I am your student. You are aware that you are conditioned, and you help me to be aware of my conditioning. Right? Talk about it. Before you teach sciences or physics or mathematics, give 10 or 15 minutes to this. Say, ‘Look, sit down. Let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about whether you and I can free ourselves from our fears, from the whole psychological structure, with our fears, dogmas, theories and anxieties, loneliness’. I’d say, ‘Let’s talk about it’, then carry on with mathematics. But teaching mathematics, I’m aware I’m also helping him, psychologically.
52:49 D: When one teaches, and one happens to make a mistake, the student is aware of it. Just a spelling mistake, perhaps. Then one is able to see one’s reactions in facing mistakes. For instance, one has assumed the position of the one who knows, who doesn’t make mistakes, but at this point the teacher is just like anyone else, mistaken in his own subject. Then he himself learns, by seeing how he reacts to his mistake.
53:30 K: That’s right.
53:32 D: Is he going to explain, justify, rationalise his mistake or…
53:37 K: So, sir, the world is this – you understand? The world outside is created by each one of us. Right? And to change that and to bring about a good society, each one must change, psychologically. Which doesn’t mean I stand alone, because I am the world, basically.
54:07 D: You are concerned, you are the world.
54:10 K: It’s my responsibility. My intelligence says, ‘I have created this. To change that, I must change myself’. Not according to experts or specialists. I must educate myself to observe myself. That’s the discipline I have.
54:38 D: We’re back to the discussion we had this morning, thought cannot observe itself.

K: No, that’s it. But it can become aware of the arising of thought. Of course, that’s simple enough.
55:04 D: So then, education includes on the one hand, the learning of the mechanisms of each subject, which are important in daily life, and also, what we see operating in the teacher-student relationship, which is called intelligence. But it seems there are different forms of intelligence.
55:33 K: No. There’s only one intelligence. It’s not my intelligence and yours, there is intelligence.
55:52 D: Official schools, all educators, believe they transmit intelligence. They try to convey intelligence.

K: It’s the intelligence of thought! Which is to be very clever, competitive, achieve a result.
56:13 D: Speed, agility...

K: Yes, all that. So, we come down to a very simple thing, sir. We human beings are responsible for this mess, this madness that’s going on in the world. We are responsible. Not the politicians, they are like us. No organisation is going to change it. I have to change the human quality of the mind. The human quality of the mind is the mind I have. My mind is the mind of the world. Because this mind suffers, is anxious, and the world goes through that. Nobody is concerned with the whole world, each one is concerned with himself. They think there is security in isolation. There isn’t.
57:40 D: Oneself and a small group, family, a small group around oneself.
57:55 K: In isolation, there is no security. So, each nation is isolating itself, like each person is isolating himself. To see this and say, ‘Right, I’m going to do something in myself’. That’s simple, but they won’t. They will, if it is put clearly, definitely in front of them.