With the competitive education we receive which engenders fear, we are all burdened with fears of some kind, and fear is a dreadful thing which warps, twists and dulls our days
—J. Krishnamurti1
There is a question that is asked of those of us who were educated in Krishnamurti schools. Family members ask it when they notice we do not rush to compete. Employers ask it if they expect urgency or desperation from us. Were you prepared for life after school? Can you cope with the demands of the ‘real world’? We may even ask it of ourselves in moments of doubt or failure. Were those years that we spent learning to observe, to listen and to stay with uncertainty years in which something important was withheld from us? Perhaps it was the armour that everyone else seems to have been issued?
What follows is not a defence of Krishnamurti education, nor a claim that it succeeds where other models fail. It is an attempt to trace, through my time at KFI schools, the relationship between what the school cultivates, and the qualities that education makes possible.
I recall spending many hours as a primary school child with my father in Vasanta Vihar in Chennai. The greenery and silence. Oversized headphones wrapped around my head as I watched videos of Krishnamurti speaking to attentive students. I can still recall his voice, its tone and cadence—though I am sure that much of what he said went over my head. In the discussions that followed with my parents, one message stayed: competitiveness in education engenders fear. The fear and worry that a child feels about an academic outcome or a sporting performance is not just a product of that child’s personality or family background. It is a structural feature in most dominant educational institutions.
Fear
Within the question of preparedness is an assumption about what the world rewards: urgency, competitiveness and the readiness to outperform others. The question of preparation is really a question about comparison—am I ahead or behind?—and it assumes that readiness means readiness for competition. A world shaped by neoliberal forces—the expansion of markets, the commodification of time and the reduction of human worth to productivity—does reward these things. Fear is instilled early in educational institutions through comparison, and most powerfully by fusing external evaluation with self-worth. When a child’s sense of who he or she is becomes inseparable from where they stand in relation to others, the self is no longer something to be explored but something to be defended. This is often done because we assume, as adults, that the world will demand it of the child.
To a developing mind, the sustained pressure of competitive environments, sensitizes it to threat. Where a single stressful experience might pass, prolonged exposure to evaluation trains the nervous system to detect and amplify the slightest signs of a threat: a teacher’s tone of voice; a list of ranks posted in the classroom; a classmate who finishes first.2 This is not desensitization but rather its opposite; not the gradual dulling but rather a sharpening of the fear response. A child does not grow accustomed to such pressure. Instead, the pressure grows until threats appear even in benign situations. The compulsions that follow —urgency, competitiveness, belittling, bullying, cheating, withdrawal—are not failures of character. They are the predictable responses of a nervous system that has been trained to see danger everywhere. In this way, fear becomes an organizing principle: it shapes what children attend to, what they avoid and how they make decisions. Over time, the compulsions that this generates—the desire to perform well, compare oneself with others and secure approval—come to feel like needs.
As I reflect on my time at Krishnamurti schools, I can see that the educational environments there did not amplify these signals. Without constant ranking and comparison, my nervous system was not trained to be in a permanent state of vigilance. Having always felt psychologically safe in school, I was somehow able to recognize signs within myself if an environment triggered feelings of urgency and fear. I would mentally take a step back and observe it. Through this ability to observe, I developed what psychologists call ‘discriminant learning’—the ability to tell the difference between environments that genuinely require a fear response and those that do not.3
When the time came to choose a course of study at university, I perceived pressure from those around me to pursue something ‘safe’—something that would secure better employment and status. Instead, I made what some called a ‘risky’ choice. I chose to study psychology, a path that has led me to conduct clinical work and research with children and adolescents who have experienced maltreatment, childhood trauma and abandonment. Understanding how to help these children and those around them has become the focus of my professional life. My journey has prompted me to reflect on my upbringing, and the role of fear and courage in it.
Courage is often imagined in adversarial terms in competitive environments: the boldness to outperform others, take on more responsibility and push harder. But there is another kind of courage that is quieter and more difficult to name which has nothing to do with combativeness. It is the courage to listen to one’s own voice despite external pressures and the internal compulsions they produce. Not indifference to security, but enough distance from the cues of fear to ask what one is really drawn to do. My education did not make me immune to pressure but gave me the capacity to disengage from pressure long enough to make a choice that was mine.
It has not all been smooth sailing. I was slow to develop the reflexive competitiveness that professional environments may sometimes reward. In contexts that demanded combativeness, often mistaken for capability, I was at a disadvantage. But I could engage fully
in tasks and challenges without having to cope with corrosive fear. This has served me well in learning and growing both professionally and personally. I achieved this not because I never felt fear, but because fear was not allowed to determine what I should do. The most compelling effect of fear’s influence is its control of a child’s attention.
Attention
If fear is the engine of competitiveness and conditioning, directed attention is its steering mechanism. Fear-inducing environments do not merely frighten—they direct the mind. They capture one’s attention and orient it toward the threat of failure, the promise of approval and the measure of one’s standing against others. In this state, one is not paying attention to the world but rather to a system—scanning it for danger, calculating risk and managing perceptions to one’s benefit.
Consider a workplace meeting. Within minutes the room sorts itself along invisible lines of power: who speaks first; whose ideas are acknowledged; whose silence is read as deference and whose as dissent. The rejection of an idea becomes a verdict on one’s abilities. A grant or tender not funded becomes a personal indictment. Beneath surface collaboration is a constant, subconscious awareness of a threat that has nothing to do with physical danger. Attention is focussed on self-protection, reading the room and managing how one is perceived. The real world outside disappears. This is attention in captivity, which clearly does not end when schooling does. Fear becomes the invisible grid on which adult life is plotted.
What happens when attention is perpetually oriented toward such a threat? Russ Harris calls the downstream consequence ‘experiential avoidance’: the attempt to avoid or escape uncomfortable thoughts, feelings and sensations, even when doing so is costly or self-destructive.4 We develop strategies to flee the discomfort that life inevitably delivers, often through distraction or overwork. The avoidance works briefly but it narrows one’s life. We are so busy fleeing discomfort that we lose touch with what matters. The individual whose attention was controlled by fear in childhood becomes an adult whose time is spent in avoiding danger. The mechanism is the same: something outside the self determines where we pay attention.
I think about myself in Vasanta Vihar as a child. Much of what Krishnamurti said did not make sense to me then. Yet something else was happening. I was being attentive, but not because I had been told. No one was going to test me on it. There were no marks for noticing trees; no reward for being the most silent. My attention was simply available. That, I suspect, is what I learned without knowing it — not the content of the talks, but the quality of attention that the space around them made possible. And crucially, a lived experience of knowing that one can return—both physically and emotionally—to a place where one can be curious, make mistakes and fail, while continuing to be loved, cared for and accepted. While this is often described as courage and resilience, it is perhaps something quieter: a knowledge of being able to seek refuge in those parts of ourselves that such experiences create.
A Krishnamurti education offered something that directly countered the pattern of captured attention. In the silences of Asthachal, and those that followed morning assemblies; in the pauses built into the rhythm of the school day, we were given space— not instruction, not technique—but space to sit with whatever was there. The silence was not a task. It was an opening. In these moments, my attention was not being directed. It was being returned. I was allowed to discover that I had agency over my attention — and I could attend to my thoughts and feelings without feeling compelled to act on them.
What this practiced, without naming it, was something that contemporary psychology might call diffusion—the capacity to observe one’s own experience without being fused with it.4 We were learning, in the body and not just the intellect, that a thought is not a command, and a feeling is not an emergency. That discomfort can be noticed, sat with, and allowed to pass. Krishnamurti himself insisted that this quality of attention cannot be manufactured: ‘This attention then comes about naturally, easily, when you know you are inattentive. When you are aware that you are inattentive, not giving attention, being aware of that fact is being attentive, and you have nothing else to do.’5 The silences of the school day were not exercises in concentration. They were openings in which inattention could notice itself.
In the face of failure and loss that accompany adult life, I found myself able to attend to and observe the feelings that accompanied them. I did not need to seek refuge in destructive or unhealthy behaviours to avoid the pain. Not because I was disciplined, but because those silences had taught my nervous system something before my intellect could name it: that difficulty is survivable—that feelings, even terrible ones, move through you if you let them. Feelings of fear and sadness when they are recognised, do not lead to a fear of the emotions themselves. They remain feelings, now arising and then passing. The attention I learned to give to my own inner life is the same attention I learned to give to the world around me.
Freedom
I find myself most vulnerable to fear as a parent. When I think of my daughter, I wonder: Will she be safe? Will she be happy? How will she manage the trials of the future? The fear starts before the child is born and never fully subsides. Love for a child makes you vulnerable to fear in a way that nothing else does —because the stakes feel absolute. Insecurities about your own childhood, anxieties about your role as a parent, worries about your child’s future— trap you into cycles of being reactive, controlling and punitive. ‘You need to learn this’ or ‘Other children your age are already doing this.’ The language appears ordinary, but the mention of ‘falling behind’ turns the parent’s attention into a catastrophe for the child, who registers not the words but the parent’s fear. The child does not hear ‘Practice your reading’, but rather ‘Something is wrong, and it might be you.’
This is how fear is transmitted. A parent whose own education instilled an intolerance of uncertainty—whose nervous system was trained to scan for threats and act immediately—cannot easily hold still in the presence of a child’s difficulty. Captive to their own fear, such parents cannot be fully present for their children. The child, in turn, learns to recognize the structure of the parent’s anxiety, sees that the world requires vigilance, and that falling behind is dangerous because any difficulty is a sign of deficiency. In this way, a parent’s unexamined fear becomes a child’s first curriculum. It sensitises the child to a looming threat, not through any specific experience but from noting the parent’s tone, timing, and urgency. The fear becomes an atmosphere. Much of this is true for educators as well—because their fear of a poor performance from students leads them to build systems that perpetuate fear and compulsion. In this way, fear is passed on from institutions to parents and educators, and then onto the child. Each generation instils in the next the same intolerance of uncertainty, the same captivity of attention.
Theories of attachment describe a core caregiving capacity they call ‘being with’: the ability to remain emotionally present with a child’s distress—their fear, sadness, frustration—without rushing to fix, distract, minimise or control it.6 ‘Being with’ is not permissiveness. It is not passively letting things happen. It is staying connected to what the child is feeling, even when that feeling is uncomfortable for the parent. When a caregiver can do this, the child’s stress response settles—not because the difficulty has been removed, but because it is being held within a relationship. Over time, the child learns something profound: that emotions are tolerable, meaningful and manageable. The common reaction is for the adult to move too quickly into problem-solving or reassurance—to signal, without meaning to, that strong feelings are unsafe or unacceptable.
The Krishnamurti schools did not teach me ‘being with’ by name. Instead, I had a lived experience of it: the sense that I could meet what I was seeing, hearing, feeling without the compulsion to manage or resolve it. That capacity lent a certain emotional sovereignty— the ability to be present to difficulty without being governed by it. In culture classes, we were asked not to consume ideas but to just sit with them and notice what arose in us without rushing to judge, categorise or explain it away. The task, if it was a task at all, was to stay with the discomfort of not knowing what you thought, to manage the uncertainty of having a response that was just forming. Not the sharpening of argument but the willingness to remain open before reaching a conclusion. ‘Being with’ asks something simple and very hard: that you do not let your own fear organise the space between you and your child.
When I can meet my own fear without being driven by it, my daughter is released from the obligation to carry that fear. The space between my child and me opens. What fills it is not instruction or correction, but something closer to what the child needs: playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy. These are moments of freedom—in which the child is not being coerced or conditioned but allowed to attend to one’s own experience. To explore rather than defend, to be interested rather than afraid. Perhaps this is the education I received, and what my child requires: the freedom to struggle, to fail and to feel without the additional burden of managing a parent’s anxiety.
Conclusion
I believe attending Krishnamurti schools did not eliminate urgency or spare me from pain, nor did it grant me a permanent calm. What it did was simpler, and more lasting. It taught me to recognise when competition is driven by fear rather than genuine purpose. It gave me the capacity to stay present to difficulty—failure, loss, heartbreak —without collapsing into self-critical, ruminative thoughts or fleeing into avoidance. It showed me, even as a parent, that the gift of freedom one can offer a child is not from the removal of strife and difficulty, but the refusal to let fear govern a child’s world.
Krishnamurti wrote: ‘The observer is the observed; the thinker is thought. There is no thinking without thought; there is no thinker without all the thought that he has collected.’7
What does it mean to say the observer is the observed? It means that the fear I carry is not separate from me — it is not a problem to be solved by better preparation. The self that asks, ‘Am I ready?’, and the fear that drives the asking, are the same movement of thought. When we are truly attentive to the world that drives these questions, the fear and its related compulsions dissolve, allowing us to be free. This is not because the question is answered, but because the separation it assumes between self and world no longer holds.
The question of preparation is not whether we are ready for the world. We are, all of us, the world itself.
References
1. J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, M. Lutyens (ed.), Harper & Row, New York, 1969. 2. B.-C. Han, The Burnout Society, E. Butler (trans.), Stanford University Press., Stanford, 2015.
3. R.E. Clark, and S. Martin, Behavioral Neuroscience of Learning and Memory, Springer, New York, 2019.
4. R. Harris, The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living, Trumpeter Books, Boston, 2008.
5. J. Krishnamurti, The Awakening of Intelligence, Harper & Row, New York, 1973
6. K. T. Hoffman, , R. S. Marvin, G. Cooper, and B. Powell, B., ‘Changing toddlers’ and preschoolers’ attachment classifications: the Circle of Security intervention’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1017, 2006, 74(6).
7. J. Krishnamurti, J, A Flame of Learning: Krishnamurti with Teachers. Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, UK, 1993.