Educating the Educator

During the year 1948, Krishnamurti held as usual a series of public talks in India, but in Bombay and Poona his talks were interspersed with meetings with teachers and parents. These special sessions took the form of Krishnamurti answering questions on education put to him by the audience.

As Krishnamurti emphasizes in his opening remarks, his chief, if not sole, concern is that it is ‘the educator who needs educating’. By which he means that the true teacher is not one who merely imparts information; he must first be rooted in self-knowledge and committed to bringing about a radical change in himself as a human being. ‘Our problem is not so much the child but the educator, who needs educating much more than the pupil. And to educate the educator is far more difficult than to educate the child, because the educator is already set, fixed’, avers Krishnamurti. Elsewhere he speaks in a similar vein to parents: ‘The educator is you; for the home environment is as important as the school environment. So you have to transform yourself first to give the right environment to the child.’