BRIAN JENKINS*
Editors’ note: Sholai School, in Tamil Nadu, is an education centre inspired by Krishnamurti’s philosophy. In this interview, Alok Mathur queries its founder, Brian Jenkins, on the origins of the centre and different facets of its educational intent and practices.
When, where and how did Sholai School come into existence?
I came to south India from Britain in the 1980s in a spirit of humility to learn about the ways and lives of the local people here. I was also inclined to create a small school which would be an educational community wherein many activities could take place, and many skills learnt, and where the students would take part in caring for, creating and running the school. With the small inheritance left to me by my grandmother, I began looking for a place in India and found this sylvan seventy-acre valley surrounded by hills, eighteen kilometres from Kodaikanal.
In 1989, Sholai School, the Centre for Learning, Organic Agriculture and Appropriate Technologies (CLOAAT), was created on this beautiful piece of land, biologically diverse, having a wide variety of hardwood trees along with many coffee bushes, fruit trees and pepper. Being close to the reserve forest, elephant, gaur (Indian Bison), the endangered Malabar giant squirrel and mouse deer and many other wild animals too can be seen. Later we counted 133 species of birds.
Can you share something about yourself and why you started this school?
I grew up in Britain and worked as a schoolteacher to the Kikuyu people of Kenya before studying Social Anthropology at Sussex University. As a young man, I often wondered why there was so much disparity between the rich and the poor. I was greatly moved by the teachings and philosophy of J Krishnamurti. And this led me to become an educator. I joined Brockwood Park, the J Krishnamurti Educational Centre in Britain, and worked there for fourteen years. I enjoyed the serious discussions with Krishnamurti, and joined in the dialogues with David Bohm, the well-known scientist, who used to visit Brockwood regularly. I also visited and spent some time in other schools founded by Krishnamurti in India, including Rishi Valley School and the Valley School in Bengaluru. When I expressed a desire to start my own school, Krishnamurti advised me not to create a ‘blueprint’. While I do not claim any authority to convey Krishnamurti’s vision to others or even to those who worked with me to create Sholai School, I can say that I was much inspired by something Krishnamurti said in 1969:
The School, the Garden, the House, we build together, create together, the whole thing. The moment we form groups within this, we have stopped. The moment I compete with you, it is over…. After all, in the relationship between the teacher and the taught, if there is this sense of communication, that is, building together, learning together, then the whole thing changes. That is real communication.
In the beginning, there were two or three teachers, my two children, and nine local children. Later a boy from Ladakh and another from the Gulf joined us, and then the school grew gradually in strength as well as in its infrastructure. I did not have a master plan. First, we converted a small hut into a bedroom with a kitchen and a toilet nearby. Then as our numbers grew, we created a dining room and small classrooms and cottages for the teachers.
Today, the sprawling school campus also includes boys’ hostels, girls’ hostels, the library, a recycling room, the computer room, science labs, automobile workshops, the woodwork shop, the machine shed and farm buildings including a cow shed.
What is the background of your students? And of the teachers who have worked at Sholai?
Our students and teachers have come from a range of backgrounds, from Ladakh to Kanyakumari and from Mumbai to Kolkata. We have also had some teachers and young people from outside India. Initially the children seemed to be quite conditioned by the culture of malechauvinism, subtle or gross, but nowadays both boys and girls play badminton, silambatam and football. In all activities girls are as active as the boys.
Our non-teaching staff, many of them having learnt English, are interested in our students, and their inputs about the sensitivity and behaviour of the students are listened to. Very few schools maintain the community in this way. But being a remote community, the local people who have worked with us for twenty or more years appreciate that our school is different and certainly worth supporting.
Can you say something about the different aspects of education that have evolved at Sholai?
For the purpose of communicating with the school parents, we first talk about the emotional and social education of children.
Emotional and social education: We have children ranging from the very wealthy to children having disturbed family circumstances and those coming from poor families. Some children may be deeply hurt by their life experiences, other children can rise above ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. This is where the teacher begins his or her work, assisting the child to be watchful and aware of his grievances, his complaints, her delights, his anger, etc. Expressing oneself in drama is a valuable and good experience, but more than that, to know oneself, ‘warts and all’, is to help the child to be aware that she can empathize with another child (or adult) and learn together how to be thoughtful and kind to others. That is the broad field of emotional education, in which both teachers and students are learning together. This is in tune with Krishnamurti’s focus on emotional education, which is part and parcel of self-knowledge.
However young people are not perfect; and, aware that the same can be said of the adults, they question and sometimes defy the good intentions of the teachers. These are some of the challenges that inevitably arise in this small community. So, we often meet and talk over the problems.
Apart from this, we encourage the students to learn how to behave when in public: not shouting loudly in the school bus on a school trip, observing the changing countryside and not escaping into a world of second-rate pop music on earphones. We avoid being dictatorial, encouraging the students to think for themselves.
Relevant intellectual education: We draw on both Gandhi and Tagore, who saw education as an exploration in learning between human beings of different age levels and socio-economic backgrounds. They did not see technologies playing a big part in the development of those relationships. Krishnamurti pointed out, later, that with computers expanding their roles in society, what would human beings do with their brains? He emphasised careful observation of the world around us, along with self-knowledge. He was also highly sceptical of the cultural emphasis on competition and comparison or becoming more knowledgeable than the next man. He pointed out that knowledge is limited and does not lead to wisdom. So, learning in relationship with one another and with nature is crucial to our self-awareness.
Intellectual education, of course, includes a vast field of knowledge, and various areas of study can be connected. The school library is very well-stocked with a wide range of books, and students enjoy reading books that interest them. We also encourage them to care for the land and our connections with it. From time to time, we arrange educational school trips. Children who live in the hills should have an opportunity to swim in the sea and children living beside the seashore should experience climbing up the ghat roads and footpaths, seeing the vast patchwork of fields in the plains below. Students draw maps of the subcontinent and also of their own local area. While mapping the local area, they can link up with measurements. They learn ‘length, width and thickness’ in the imperial and metric systems, using tape measures, rulers, etc. They measure one another and weigh one another and themselves.
The conventional intellectual field is generally criss-crossed by comparison and competition. ‘I know more than you’ or ‘I have studied up to a higher level than you’ and so on. Human relationships, moreover, are generally based on these comparisons and fears. We need to be aware of our fears and insecurities; our tendencies to be competitive and aggressive. We talk over these issues with the teachers and students. We need to help teachers in dealing with these tendencies and to listen to the difficulties they face in doing this. Nowadays, the usual complaint is that the students no longer respect their teachers. We cannot turn the clock back. But can we not establish a different relationship in which the teachers are listening to the students, their problems and their insecurities, and helping them to understand that this is the common lot of humankind? In this regard, a film comes to mind: To Sir, With Love. It is centred around teenagers of mixed parentage (black, white and brown) in London, who are a rough lot. They were trying to make their teacher angry and succeeding, until he realized that the intellectual education, which they urgently required, needs to be more relevant and interesting in their own lives.
Physical and health education: Children need to experience a range of activities so as to be healthy, having a robust immune system, aware of what are the healthy foods they need to consume; neither being overweight, nor being under-weight. They need to know how to care for themselves, when unwell. So, they need to have some basic knowledge of Homeopathic and Ayurvedic medicines. To know nothing may be more foolish than having halfbaked knowledge, hence we need to be open, avoiding fixed conclusions and learning about what works for our bodies.
All the students learn to run…100 metres, 200 metres and 400 metres. Of course, being clear that there are differences among human beings, and there is no need to compare. While competitive sports are part of the wider culture, less aggressive and gentler activities are encouraged in the school including badminton, cross-country running and trekking. ‘Philosophical football’ is popular, wherein girls are also enthusiastic. Practical education and learning skills: This brings us to the fact that there is a broad diversity among young people in terms of what they enjoy learning. Some may enjoy reading, acquiring more knowledge, discussing and exploring intellectually. Others may prefer learning skills, such as organic farming, woodwork, building, mechanical engineering, pottery, cooking, art, etc. The teachers need to understand that teaching practical skills is not infra dig. Becoming competent in a practical skill assists the child to become more confident and attentive to the environment and to people around her. From thereon he or she can learn the intellectual components of the practical skills, without the need for pressure from the teacher.
In general gender should not play a role in the child’s involvement in a skill. Exposure to many experiences broadens the mind. So, boys too need to learn to cook, and girls learn woodwork or mechanical engineering. There are also skills involved in taking care of the campus. During the time of doing morning jobs, students segregate and recycle the waste of the community and assist in keeping the school neat and orderly. A specific skill that students at Sholai have also learnt is to rebuild vintage automobiles (because they are easier to work on) and are now repairing a large biogas drum.
What are some things you like to share with parents who send their children to your school?
Most schools are based on fear: ‘If we don’t use fear, how will we make sure that the students study hard and pass their exams?’ But in schools where there is no fear (or very much less fear), we see that the children really enjoy learning. I tell parents not to worry too much about their children’s future or what careers they will be fit for; because then the young person will choose an occupation to placate the parents or, occasionally, to defy their parents. Children who have good memories can ‘mug up’ for exams but will rarely have understood, nor enjoyed, the subjects they learn. So, I tell them, ‘do allow your child to choose what he or she wants to do in life.’ Giving him or her plenty of experiences in school will allow them to be clear about what they enjoy doing. At times they may change their course in life, and there is nothing wrong with that. Most young people nowadays look for a worthwhile occupation that will benefit the planet or benefit people living in poor or polluted communities. Is that not a good thing? At Sholai, we also support young people, especially those from poor families, in finding what is worthwhile for them to do in their lives.
Can you give some examples of what students from the school have done in their lives?
A student, X, from a poor family, involved himself deeply in a project undertaken by Sholai CLOAAT with the Ministry of Science and Technology, New Delhi. We contracted with a company in Hyderabad to use Geographical Information Systems. X, aged seventeen, quickly understood this new GIS Technology and created the main component of the project. It took us six years to finally complete the project, but it is recognized today as a serious exploration of Meaningful and Creative Rural Development supported by Appropriate Science and Technologies. X is now Vice-Principal of a school in Goa. When young people are given the freedom to learn and explore, they can do serious and valuable work.
Another former Sholai student, Y, was never very serious about studies after a teacher in his previous school hit him in the face. He enjoyed cracking jokes and playing football; but then failed his Cambridge A level exams. He was good with computers, so he went to Bengaluru to train himself, but did not enjoy the unhealthy life there. Being from a poor family, he wanted to earn to support his parents. Knowing his cheerful nature, we asked him to try out teaching at Sholai. We find he is learning fast to be a good teacher. In his free time, he is also learning to be an Equity Analyst. This may be a risky profession, especially if there is a financial meltdown in future, but then this would be true of many other callings too.
What is it that you wish for your students in their life ahead?
In a video with Rishi Valley students, Krishnamurti asked the students, ‘what are the basic needs in life?’. He was told: ‘food, clothing and shelter’. Then a young lady of twelve said: ‘Can we not include “fun”?’ He agreed: ‘Fun, food, clothing, and shelter it is.’ But the basic element of ‘conditioning’ often forces young people to do what society demands of them. That does not lead to ‘fun’ (in the sense of a meaningful life!). And yet ‘fun’ too can become a habit and an escape. So, the challenge nowadays is for sincere teachers to assist students in deepening their perception of life and to understand the many self-centred ways in which we are creating religious, political and psychological divisions among human beings, destroying nature and damaging the planet.
At Sholai, we have now been at it for thirty-five years. I think I can say that almost all the alumni love their old school and are mostly happy human beings.
* Brian Jenkins is the founder and head of Sholai School. He can be reached at contact@sholaischool.org