Most learning in school fits into neat little boxes—boxes for subjects, timetables, learning objectives and outcomes. A label says: ‘learning happened in bounded slots, assigned to subjects, moved toward outcomes’.
Mathematics from 9.00 am to 10.00 am. Science from 10.00 am to 11.00 am. Even art and music get boxes—bounded, assessed, concluded.
But perhaps there is a learning that is far more essential than what these boxes can contain, and which we, in our preoccupation with boxes, are slowly making invisible. An intelligence that unfolds not only in the mind, but in the body’s real-time conversation with the physical world—an intelligence that is of the whole.
observations on play
There has to be a quality of spontaneity. That is, you have to discover yourself anew, see yourself as something that is changing all the time. If you can observe it, see it spontaneously, then the mechanistic process of memory has very little significance.
Krishnamurti in Benares, 1963, Talk 2
Every child gets two square pieces of paper: one black, the other white. They must create a composition using the two pieces of paper and a pair of scissors, without adding to or subtracting anything from what they have and applying the basic principle of reflection symmetry. The child cuts a square, and the paper responds. A shape emerges—and immediately, it creates a new condition. There is a negative space now, and a positive one. The next cut needs to respond to both. The composition is unfolding in real time, and the child is completely present to it—not planning, not executing, but observing and responding with complete attention.
The child’s being is completely involved—her hands, eyes and mind judging the results for the felt sense of beauty, proportion and harmony. And here is something worth thinking about—every child has an innate sense of aesthetics. An ability to sense if something is balanced, or not quite so. The ability to decide if a composition is complete, or still needs something. This cannot be taught; it appears to be in some meaningful way, biological—a capacity for perception that we carry within us even before anyone has named it for us.
The same dynamic is present in the process of tinkering. A group of children are engrossed in working together on building a ‘marble run’ out of paper: the marble is rolled through an elaborate network of paper ramps, loops and curves, gathering just the right amount of momentum to sail through the air, and land in a paper cup placed at a distance. It is an irresistible challenge! The children do not see the experiment as a physics lesson. In fact, it is blissfully devoid of jargon and definitions. They are observing how structures made with paper affect the trajectory of the marble, how the weight of the marble responds to the various forms, and how small changes produce disproportionate effects.
They have an intuition, test their ideas, watch what happens, and start again. Their body is involved in lifting, adjusting and sensing, and crucially, the paper structure and the marble talk back. The environment is not a passive backdrop. It is a co-creator of understanding. The child is learning how to converse with the physical world, and learning and responding in real time—they are sensing their way through observation and tinkering. As in the case of the paper composition exercise, there is no single way of creating a perfect marble run — no single way of doing things. Each child observes and responds to what they observe using his or her innate intelligence. They sense their way through the exercise, interacting with body, material and environment, responding to things as they unfold, without the pressure of a defined outcome. They play!
When there is no goal, no evaluation and no correct answer, the individual feels free to explore and play. The child with the paper and scissors is in fact playing, and so is the child with the marble run. Play is not the opposite of serious learning; it may be the original form of it. Play, which has a quality of spontaneity and is not based on accumulated ideas, is where the capacity for learning first appears and where it is most naturally sustained. But do we see play as the flowering of intelligence?
As an educator, I find myself wondering about what our preoccupation with ticking neat little boxes is doing to the flowering of intelligence in a child. While this type of education does not suppress intelligence, it never calls upon the innate creativity that we all have as human beings, letting it quietly atrophy instead.
What the body knows
But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.
J Krishnamurti
Before coming to the Krishnamurti schools as a young parent, my work as a design school graduate helped me interact closely with artisan communities in various parts of India for over a decade. It was an education far richer than any I had ever received in a classroom. There was much to be learnt from just observing an altogether different kind of intelligence at work in these communities—an intelligence that my own education had barely touched upon.
Most master artisans—weavers, potters, carpenters, metalworkers—do not begin with a detailed plan. They begin with material, and they respond to it. A weaver does not draw a pattern and then execute it; the pattern emerges through his accumulated knowledge of thread, tension and rhythm. A potter reads the clay—its moisture, its resistance—and adjusts the pressure of his shaping fingers in fractions of a second. This is not the result of using intuition but rather expertise—built through thousands of hours of embodied interaction with a medium—and it lives as much in the body as in the mind.
The philosopher Michael Polanyi called this ‘tacit knowledge’—we know more than we can say. But it goes further than that: this knowledge cannot be fully shared with others because it is not stored in the kind of propositional format that language can retrieve. It is stored in gesture, muscle memory, and the body’s learned capacity to perceive and respond. You cannot learn to ‘throw’ a pot only by reading about how to use a potter’s wheel. The knowledge only becomes available to your intelligence through your body’s repeated encounter with clay.
Yet, this ‘embodied intelligence’ is not just about body and material in isolation. It is a triangle: body, material and environment in continuous interaction. This is visible in how indigenous knowledge systems are structured—not as bodies of abstract principle, but as accumulated wisdom built through a sustained, attentive relationship with a specific environment. The farmer reads the soil; the fisherman reads the water: this is not folk wisdom but a sophisticated epistemic practice in which the environment is seen as an active participant in the process of knowing.
Schools, however, despite their best intentions do not leave room for the flowering of this kind of intelligence. They continue to function largely on a different premise: that the mind is the seat of learning, that the body is a more or less incidental vehicle for the mind, and that knowledge is something that can be stated, tested and recorded.
What makes us human
So what is the difference between the human brain and the computer? There isn’t any. I wonder if you see this. If a machine can do it, and the human brain can do it too, there is not much difference. But the human brain has some other quality: to find out what intelligence is. If the computer can do what the human brain can do, then we are not intelligent. There must be a quality of intelligence which only we can find out.
Krishnamurti in Madras, 1980, Talk 2
In recent times, there has been a growing argument for greater hands-on learning in schools. A case is made for more art education, for ‘maker’ spaces, for project-based learning, and for integrating the ‘head, heart and hands’. Those arguments have their place, but there is something far more urgent in the current moment that goes beyond pedagogy.
As Artificial Intelligence becomes capable of performing more and more complex cognitive tasks—pattern recognition, analysis, synthesis, even generation of text and image—there is the genuinely pressing question of what remains distinctly human. The answer that we arrive at too soon is ‘creativity’, and yet, AI generates, composes and designs materials too. The more specific and defensible answer is an altogether different capacity—embodied intelligence.
AI does not have a body. It does not have proprioception—the felt sense of where the body is in space, how a material resists or yields, what it feels like when something is about to break. It cannot be surprised by clay. It cannot feel the moment when a composition resolves. It processes
representations of the physical world, but it cannot inhabit it. The kind of intelligence that emerges from the body’s real-time interaction with material and environment is not something that can be replicated, because reading data is not the same as having an experience. Perhaps as educators we need to look more closely at what Krishnamurti was pointing out more than four decades ago: what makes us human, what intelligence is, and what kind of education might allow for the flowering of intelligence.
Hard questions
There are forms of learning that may genuinely need ticked boxes—that is, structure, sequence, and explicit instruction. But alongside it, or perhaps beneath it, education also needs something harder to name and still harder to defend; something that flowers spontaneously from the alchemy of the whole experience. It is far more subtle and nebulous, and resides in the realm of uncertainty, ambiguity and the unknown.
With the whole process of schooling so focused on regurgitating knowledge, ‘not knowing’ can seem almost an act of rebellion in learning and teaching. But are we as educators ready to step out of the neat little boxes that we have become so comfortable with to explore what sits outside them? Are we prepared to examine and inquire with an open mind, and remain open to changing our notions about education? Can we be open to an altogether different way of learning, where a child spends an afternoon playing and has nothing to show for it afterwards, and still accept this as learning? Can we accept that a teacher’s role may not be to instruct, but to provide suitable conditions and then get out of the way? Can we see that the natural flowering of observation, attention, care, and stimulating the innate sense of intelligence are ends in themselves—not just enrichment, but education!
Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery.
J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living, Vol.3.