Two years ago, I contributed to a series of emails over several weeks amongst 150 Krishnamurti ‘educators’ around the world. This online ‘dialogue’ had been ignited by the question of what K would call his schools today. After reading it all I felt compelled to offer a different reading of the relationship between K and ‘alternative education’ in general, and ‘holistic education’ in particular, because the latter was largely uncritically equated to K’s teachings. I will make the case that it is essential to conceive of Krishnamurti education as distinct because its intent is of an altogether different nature.
My connection to the Krishnamurti world is that I was incredibly fortunate first to be a student at Brockwood Park School and, afterwards, had returned to be a teacher. In this contribution my aim is to deconstruct the notion of ‘holistic education’ as I investigate the meaning of the related notion of ‘wholeness’. I do so in the context of Krishnamurti’s educational vision and consider that its essence lies in its concern with an inner revolution, which has come under question in recent times.
Is Krishnamurti’s pedagogy holistic?
To start with it seems that we must clarify what K might have meant by ‘holistic’. My sense is that it is a jump to assume that K’s use of the term is the same as in ‘holistic education’, even though there is some connection between them. The point is not only to see where the two overlap but, more importantly, where they do not. Even though Krishnamurti does use the word ‘holistic’ from time to time—and the word ‘whole’ much more often—it seems to me critical to question what is meant by ‘wholeness’. I fear that such a notion may become all too idealistic, forgetting the quality of ‘the unknown’ that can be associated with it.
In his comprehensive study Holistic Education, Scott Forbes (former director of Brockwood Park School) analyses six thinkers in order to present its ‘ideas and nature’. Significantly, Krishnamurti is not among them. A perusal of the contents of this study reveals, perhaps unsurprisingly, that none of these thinkers seem to have been interested in a psychic revolution. Of course, ‘holistic education’ is intent on what it calls ‘ultimacy’. But even in the psychological context—for example in Abraham Maslow’s notion of ‘self-actualization’—it appears to be in many ways at odds with K’s questioning of the ‘self’. Could it be, then, that this inner revolution is the distinctive and central piece of a K education? After all, Krishnamurti did publish a book entitled The Only Revolution (1969) in which such an ‘interior change’ is front and centre.
One of the crucial questions is how this ‘revolution’ relates to the idea of ‘wholeness’. My source of inspiration in offering a possible answer is one of K’s most concise and notable statements on education: ‘The Intent of the Schools’. I was lucky to come across it when I was a student at Brockwood. In the last paragraph, K concludes with the clarity that is one of his trademarks: “This whole movement of inquiry into knowledge, into oneself, into the possibility of something beyond knowledge, brings about naturally a psychological revolution, and from this comes inevitably a totally different order in human relationship, which is society. The intelligent understanding of all this can bring about a profound change in the consciousness of mankind.”
So, it is not an ‘alternative’ that K wants to provide in his schools, but perhaps the alternative to what schools are usually assumed to be about: knowledge. What could be the alternative to knowing? That is, the alternative to conditioning that accompanies any accretion of knowledge. While K’s views may seem at first to align with the broad definition of ‘holistic education’ as the development of the whole person, it is a stretch to presume that such development leads to the kind of psychological revolution K is explicitly after.
Allow me to offer a brief reading of the five preceding paragraphs of that Krishnamurti educational statement in order to clarify what he might have meant by ‘whole’ and ‘holistic’. The statement describes a school as a place that is “whole, sane and intelligent” and notes that “Education in the modern world has been concerned with the cultivation, not of intelligence, but of intellect, of memory and its skills.” It continues: “Surely a school is a place where one learns about the totality, the wholeness of life. Academic excellence is absolutely necessary, but a school includes much more than that. It is a place where both the teacher and the taught explore not only the outer world, the world of knowledge, but also their own thinking, their behaviour.”
What is the ‘wholeness of life’ that K is talking about here? Perhaps the most problematic assumption amounts to the anthropomorphism of wholeness. So that ‘holistic education’ tends to reduce the wholeness in question to ‘the whole person’. The point, on the contrary, seems to be the active questioning of such a construct. To do so, K is here emphasizing the relational aspect of the process of what we might call the deconditioning of the person.
Questioning the self as it manifests in the known
I understand that varied conceptions of ‘holistic education’ include the cultivation of ‘inner’ traits, but as far as I can see, they are not explicitly about ending the self. Often enough, they are about doing quite the opposite. Think of all the ‘alternative’ approaches that go by the label of ‘learner-centred education’. Instead, let me paraphrase what Bill Taylor (former director of Brockwood) used to tell the staff: “What we want to impart to students is not self-confidence, but confidence without a self.”
It seems that by appealing to the pedagogical relationship between the teacher and the student, K is trying to address the false distinction between ‘the one who knows’ and ‘the one who doesn’t’, as a way to end conditioning. Inasmuch as “truth is a pathless land”, it seems nevertheless that it is via a relationship that values or demonstrates an appreciation for the unknown that truth might be accessed.
Krishnamurti goes on to say: “A school is a place where one learns the importance of knowledge and its limitations. It is a place where one learns to observe the world not from any particular point of view or conclusion. One learns to look at the whole of man’s endeavour, his search for beauty, his search for truth and for a way of living without conflict. Conflict is the very essence of violence. So far education has not been concerned with this, but in this school our intent is to understand actuality and its action without any preconceived ideals, theories or belief which bring about a contradictory attitude toward existence.”
What seems to be meant by ‘whole’ here is the profound questioning of the separation between the observer and the observed. So, it is the observer, the thinker, the person who thinks he or she knows, that is in part being questioned. Most ‘alternative’ education gives credence to some version of ‘experiential knowledge’—that knowledge should come from experience rather than be intellectually digested. K too is after a type of intelligence distinct from the intellect, but his endeavour, however, is to challenge the notions of both an ‘experiencer’ and of ‘knowledge’.
K points out that, “So far education has not been concerned with this.” Is he wrong? I see no evidence that outside the K schools there are other educational institutions explicitly dedicated to a mission of “freedom from the known.” Some educationalists like Eleanor Duckworth (of Harvard University) may seem to come close. She speaks of “the virtues of not knowing” and differentiates such a virtue from the automatic acquisition of information and knowing the right answer. Yet even here we don’t find an explicit intention to be free of conditioning.
The school is concerned with freedom and order. Freedom is not the expression of one’s own desire, choice or self-interest. That inevitably leads to disorder. Freedom of choice is not freedom, though it may appear so; nor is order conformity or imitation. Order can only come with the insight that to choose is itself the denial of freedom.
Here we find what is perhaps the most counter-intuitive and controversial, but also the most significant, affirmation in this statement. Namely, “that to choose is itself the denial of freedom.” This gets to the core of the ‘psychological revolution’ K is after. Choosing takes place from knowledge, whereas the freedom K is talking about is freedom from that very same knowledge.
K’s notion of freedom indirectly questions today’s increasing understanding of education as a commercial product to choose in the seemingly ever-expanding global market. K schools are not immune to this predicament. K schools in the West (Brockwood and Oak Grove) are having to resist the temptation to reduce ‘wholeness’ to a marketable commodity that competes with what is on offer at other ‘alternative schools’. To the extent that the K schools in India are largely elite places they may not have to contend for students, but they are not any less exposed to the danger of watering down K’s message precisely because of their relative success. Either way, then, given that all K schools need to stay true to their roots it seems we should double down on what seems to be a rather unique mission.
Editors’ Note: Lionel Claris’s complete article was originally more than twice the length that can be printed here. Hence, we have only printed an edited version of the first part of the article. Readers are invited to access the complete article online at: https://kfistudy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Claris-L._K-Journal-23_Wholeistic-Education_final.pdf