Issue 18 - January 2014

In one of the past letters we said that total responsibility is love.

A year ago, in November 2012, the Journal editorial team was sitting around in Ahalyaji's room, wrapping things up for the seventeenth issue.

How does one write about someone who, to begin with, was a total stranger and who, in less than a month, became more than a mother to you, and remained so, all her life?

Ahalya Chari was Principal of the Regional College of Education (now called Regional Institute of Education, Mysore, RIEM) in its early years when I joined the institution as a lecturer.

Memories of Ahalya Di remain fresh, crisp. Just a few days before she passed away, I spent a precious week with her.

The importance of self-knowledge is mentioned in many school mission statements, and this is not surprising.

In the literature class we were studying Lord of the Flies—a novel about a group of pre-adolescent school boys who crash land on a lonely island and fend for themselves in the absence of any adults.

In the summer before I started teaching, I sought out one of my own childhood teachers and asked, 'What is teaching? How do I support children in learning? What is it that I am trying to do?'

Environmental education is an ideal forum to put into practice some of the educational insights of Eleanor Duckworth.

What happened to all the children? I did not find anyone on my way here,' enquired my guest, who was visiting Rishi Valley after a gap of several years.

In the course of our lives, we seem to know things in two, rather different ways.

'What do you think dialogue is all about?'

I have always loved literature, largely because of the sentiments expressed in Dickinson's poem.

'Where are we going for excursions this year?' is invariably one of the early questions we face as the children return to begin a new year at Centre For Learning.

Two birds, inseparable companions, cling to the self-same tree. Of these, one eats the sweet fruit and the other looks on without eating.

When teaching academic philosophy, one never ceases to be amazed at how little a subject once termed 'the love of wisdom' has to do with 'wisdom', let alone 'love'.

We wake at dawn to the trilling calls of unfamiliar birds, go for a walk amidst the tea-bushes stretching row upon row on the steep slopes, bordered on the higher ridges by dense shola forests—an entirely new landscape!

'Why do we need to learn a dead language?' 'Where shall we ever use it?' 'Is Sanskrit relevant to today's world?'

After the middle school MAG (Mixed Age Group) Day at The School- KFI, I spoke with my colleague Akhila Seshadri about what went into the production of a pageant presented by students of her class on that occasion.

In this edited extract we find Krishnamurti opening up one of his favourite topics: authority. At the same time, the topic itself is linked to another: the awakening of intelligence.