Listening to students
The boy continued, ‘Because I am a nerd…!’ The teacher looked at him incredulously and said, ‘But you are not. You are fine!’ She was surprised by her own quick and heartfelt response. The child’s nonchalant acceptance of the way he was being addressed by his classmates irked her. What had once been a distressing remark had now lost its sting, and he no longer seemed affected by it. After all, he had been listening to these comments every day. He said he had found it especially difficult when younger students also joined his classmates’ chorus of ‘Nerd! Nerd! Nerd,’ surprised and hurt that they were students he had never met and consequently did not know him at all. Now he seemed to have resigned himself to the fact that it was something beyond his control, believing it was sensible to keep his reactions to himself. Recovering her composure, the teacher asked, ‘Can you tell me who is supposed to be a nerd?’ The child quickly replied: ‘Someone who reads all the time and is not good at sports.’ The teacher was once again struck by his response and felt most unsettled. She wondered whether the child had arrived at such a conclusion by himself, or other students had told him this. She had more questions but decided to wait and watch the situation instead.
On another occasion, an older student—who had not met the deadline for completing her project work—remarked, ‘I cannot subscribe to this “hustle culture”; it’s mindless, this rushing from one thing to another because of formal requirements.’ And another time, a student protested, ‘Why can’t boys grow long hair? Why do only girls have the advantage of more options?’ Her students’ feelings weighed on the teacher’s mind. They conveyed to her not only how those individuals preferred to act, but also their need to break away from set patterns and explore other possibilities of personal expression, without having to be anxious about a teacher’s disapproval or ensuing consequences. She acknowledged the relevance of these feelings and recognized them as emerging concerns of the times: the opposition to the ‘hustle culture’ narrative, which promotes the idea that there is always more to strive for, or to being evaluated based on one’s gender and sexuality.
So, when another student argued, ‘I want to stay in the Art Room and study other subjects. Why can’t spaces in school be available to everyone at all times?’ she wondered what students really seek every day. Was it companionship, a warm conversation and quiet acknowledgement? She walked along with her students, careful about not overstepping certain boundaries and merely restating norms. While this was difficult for her, she felt concerned and was genuinely interested in the issues they raised. It made sense to her to remain open to their needs, in case she missed something important.
Just then the student who wished to stay in the Art Room pressed for closure: ‘It is very unfair. Why can’t we decide where we want to study?’ What the teacher heard in those words was a plea for freedom; the freedom to act individually out of personal choice. The weight of her students’ expectations and the number of times she had lately found herself attending to such situations made her somewhat anxious, for they had not only become more frequent, but the demands also had a rather unnerving quality. Listening to the demand for ‘freedom,’ she recognized a voice that was not limited to the world of children and adolescents. Its pitch and tone were sharp and assertive, and gathered intensity by drawing upon personal experiences too. What exactly triggered this need to be seen and heard? Perhaps it pointed to an unspoken desire to have secure spaces where one felt nurtured and from which one could draw sustenance.
The boy who was labelled a ‘nerd’ had wondered what would happen if he told his friends that he enjoyed singing more than football. He feared he might lose many of them and be pigeonholed as a certain ‘type’ or worse. After all, there are labels for everything and everyone, often for no fault of the individual: ‘goody two-shoes’; ‘snitch’; ‘psycho’; ‘mental’! He had heard his friends call others these names and many more. The teacher for her part wondered whether this new assertiveness in her students was just a part of growing up, or a rather stark and unsettling reflection of the society we live in. She asked the boy how many friends he had, to which he responded with glee, ‘Of course, there are three of us! You know what, creating a group creates another group of those who are not a part of it!’
The world of affiliation
Adults also navigate a world that is full of diverse personalities and seek spaces that allow for both self-expression and social exchange. Belonging to a group offers an individual not only a sense of identity, but also a rationale for acting in certain ways. Each group has unique markers — symbols of affiliation that then become extensions of the individual — and offer the individual a place as a unique member of a community. The differences of opinion, colours of thought, and shades of behaviour found in groups contribute to the texture and strength of a society. Diversity stimulates thought to begin with, but as more groups emerge, so does a sharpened vision, one that begins to categorise individuals and collectives into fixed emotional and ideological aggregates and labels them accordingly.
A binary vision selects and isolates some and engages only with what it finds relevant. It seeks to understand society by mapping broader patterns of behaviour in people and sorting individual expressions of thought into recognizable forms of social behaviour. This is the most superficial form of engagement found in society, and results in a highly subjective understanding of human feelings and reactions. As a process, it involves creating mind maps (or algorithms) that record footprints of associations and responses, rendering them finite, legible and graspable. It becomes both a description of the actual experience and an abstraction of lived realities.
In this abstract scenario, when individuals exercise choice and personalize experiences, their choice of certain options tends to introduce or reinforce associated norms and expectations, which then become general reference points for judging others’ choices and according social approval. In a world of expanding choices, more and more trajectories are continually formed, crisscrossing around individual affinities. It is like the glistening trail left by a snail, silent, solitary, making tentative discoveries across an unfamiliar terrain. A single person can be any one or many of these: teacher, athlete, theatre artist, parent, chef, environmentalist, singer, librarian and believer in gender equality.
The measure of freedom
For the young, who are still growing physically, emotionally and mentally, the freedom to explore is a basic need, regulated and necessitated by the natural process of growth. It is distinct from what is externally designed, curated around individual interests, and which offers various contexts of social engagement. It is the inner drive of the young that stimulates their exploration of the environment, and which in turn is awakened by such explorations.
As a child discovers the world, she finds herself following well-laid ‘paths’ across the unfamiliar terrain of social interaction. Here she spends considerable time observing how others respond to what she does and how she behaves. Gradually, she begins to organize her experiences, along with the emotions and expressions of thought that accompany them, into types. She also discerns which of them elicit approval from her immediate social group. Classifying experiences this way is an act of becoming aware, both of one’s environment and one’s own thinking. However, when other people’s biases begin to control her, her subtle assertion of her own preferences begins to alter the natural bent of her sense-making. As each one traverses along this path of exploration of interests, ideas and people, there is often a tightening grip of beliefs and opinions that are immediately gratifying, while other challenging ones are left out.
Likewise, exercising choice gives a new meaning to the experience of ‘freedom.’ Freedom of choice now lies in the corridors of a marketplace, where one can find something so perfectly aligned to one’s desires that it cannot easily be disregarded. If one loses interest in the item later, one can always go back to ‘Choice land’ and have the pleasure of choosing again. As sociologist Nikolas Rose writes in his book The Powers of Freedom:
Modern individuals are not merely ‘free to choose,’ but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice. They must interpret their past and dream their future as outcomes of choices made or choices still to make.
This aspect of freedom has a trajectory that views self-growth as an end in itself. It creates a new vocabulary of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ that evaluates how freedom is realized in terms of the choices made by the individual.
Through participation in social interactions, a young adult becomes deeply aware of a world beyond the self. This awareness often brings with it a growing sense of aloneness, but also a sense that social integration may be possible through first identifying one’s own abilities and vulnerabilities. A feeling of separation can lead to intense anxiety and insecurity, especially if it does not nudge the individual towards forming new associations or sensing how to relate to the world. A true measure of freedom, then, is the extent of openness one develops not through exercising specific skills, but through discerning the social character of one’s experiences; and becoming aware of the impact of one’s own habits of thinking and acting on one’s social interactions.
Being alone
A senior school student once asked me, ‘What defines good? How can I sustain those good qualities when times are bad or hard? How can I interact in society without contributing to its corrupt ways?’ Of late, young people increasingly feel that the world is becoming a lonely place, where one is left alone with one’s own questions and thoughts. Much of this student’s anxiety stemmed from the fact that after the oncoming school exams, he would need to enter a new and unfamiliar space: university life. His question clearly points to the diminishing spaces to sustain fuller conversations. It is also indicative of a growing urge to connect and break barriers.…and that he was not quite sure how to go about it.
In response to the question, ‘What is the definition of a good world?’ Krishnamurti challenges the very notion of a ‘good world’, and cautions against getting caught up in definitions and words:
Now, why does the mind ask such a question? What is the definition of a good world? The statement is clear; you can look it up in the dictionary and there you will find a definition. We think that by finding a definition we have understood the problem. This is how we are trained; we think we understand when we have a definition. But definition is not understanding; on the contrary, it is the most destructive way of thinking. Why do you want to know the definition of the good world? We have to understand what the word implies, and we have to create a world which is good. It is no good being carried away by words. We are always taught from childhood what to think, but never how to think.
If education is meant to be preparation for life, how important is it to build one’s relationship with the world? For a young adult, experiencing the breadth of human life and some of its realities first-hand not only nurtures a more complex world view, but also creates awareness of one’s own place within it. Education must engage the student entirely, not merely in the description of actual issues and problems that people face, but by carefully examining different perspectives, help in developing a deeper understanding and better articulation of concerns and questions. The challenge for educators lies in creating a space where there is possibility of listening to the different assumptions, including one’s own, and becoming aware of different patterns of resistance that arise from within. Such spaces hold deep meaning for students. When a greater interest in reason is kindled in them, they develop an open approach to learning, and do not hesitate to scrutinize even their own ideas or raise questions in the interest of achieving clarity. Such an approach requires both the ability to be alone and to listen attentively. Aloneness, here, is linked to exercising one’s mind to be sensitive and observing one’s inner responses while engaging with others.
A student once recounted: ‘Initially, I also found myself doing what a group does or changing what I actually like to do or what I say, because of what other people think or like. My thinking at that time was that if I do this, it will help build connections with people and help me relate to them. Like if someone likes a particular movie, you might say you like the same movie even if you don’t actually like it. I realized soon that I can’t live many lives like this. What I did instead was to have a conversation about why each of us actually likes or dislikes the movie. After all that is also a connection, isn’t it? Some people I found were stuck with their opinions. I think in that case it is necessary to help them understand their rigidness also, like I mentioned earlier. After my realization of all that I mentioned, I have tried to apply these things, yet sometimes I still get caught in the same mess, but since I am conscious about it, I am able to catch myself and remember.’
When an observed external reality resonates with internal patterns of thought, it sparks greater interest and freedom in studying the reasons for the phenomenon or situation, rather than merely articulating ideals of what one should do or how one should act. As Krishnamurti notes, ‘If I can understand the actual thing as it is then I can deal with it, then I can break it down.’ He suggests further that one is ‘truly related only when one is alone’. In this context, being ‘truly related’ means meeting a fact directly, when one’s mind is inwardly quiet and can therefore genuinely relate to a given situation. The quality of one’s responses would then be quite distinctive, not something determined by what might have been internalized from the social groups one is part of.