Joy, profound responsibility: What makes 'teaching' the greatest profession

Jiddu Krishnamurti's book explores conditions that can help make teachers better at their profession. It stresses that freedom and love are essential for learning to happen

Teaching: The Greatest Profession

Author: Jiddu Krishnamurti

Publisher:  Krishnamurti Foundation India

Pages: 228

Price: Rs 295

Is teaching just another job that enables a person to earn money, fulfil their needs, take care of their family, and gain a respectable position in society? Or is it concerned with taking responsibility for what is happening in the world, and preparing the present generation for the future? Are teachers supposed to care only about their subject expertise, or venture beyond?

These are pertinent questions to ask on September 5, celebrated as Teachers’ Day to commemorate the birth anniversary of our former President Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who served as the Vice Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University and Andhra University, and taught at the University of Calcutta and the University of Oxford. If we do not engage with these questions seriously, Teachers’ Day will end up being a meaningless observance.

The questions posed above appear in a provocative book called Teaching: The Greatest Profession,  which is a collection of six previously unpublished discussions that philosopher and educationist Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) had with teachers at Rajghat Besant School in Varanasi, and Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle, in 1984. These are two of the numerous schools that he set up to put his vision of education into practice.

While the book will certainly offer intellectual fodder to researchers in departments of education at various universities, and curricular inputs to professionals who design courses for pre-service and in-service teachers, its most salient beneficiaries might be the teachers wondering whether they are in the right profession and if they ought to continue or quit.

Krishnamurti is not a feel-good preacher. He is keen to cut through superficialities, and get to the heart of the matter. He pushes teachers to examine the words that come out of their mouth and explain what they mean. He persuades them to disagree with him when they acquiesce out of habit or in the hope of ending a discussion. He might therefore come across as pushy, impatient, and even disrespectful to readers encountering his words for the first time.

In the first chapter titled “Teaching—the greatest profession”, Krishnamurti says, “Please realise this, all of you. There are computers in America, England, and France, which have been programmed by top mathematicians, top historians, and they can teach students without you or me or anybody. And what’s your place then?” This question is not meant to diminish or humiliate but to get them to reflect on how they relate to the students. In the second chapter titled “Will you put your heart into this?” Krishnamurti talks about establishing “a relationship of great confidence in each other” by being honest so that students are not afraid of teachers. He views freedom and love as essential conditions for learning to happen.

Krishnamurti was thinking about how technology can make teachers feel redundant back in 1984, and this issue has become even more pressing today as teachers struggle with the fleeting attention spans of students who are glued to electronic devices for most of their waking hours. Banning these devices or confiscating them does not seem to be a sustainable solution. These are coercive strategies that do not invite students to participate in examining the quality and quantity of attention they offer to different things and how this affects them.

Krishnamurti puts himself in the student’s shoes, and asks one of the teachers, “If you are urging me to pay attention to the book and I am watching the flower out of that window, there is conflict in me. Where there is conflict, there is no attention.” This book encourages teachers to think about how to help students understand their inner psychological world.

In the third chapter titled “Not to have a shadow of self-interest”, Krishnamurti argues that it is only through this inward exploration that students can begin to develop “an awareness of self-interest and its limitations and its proclivities and its contradictions”. As evident in the fifth chapter titled “Don’t think in terms of time”, Krishnamurti is interested in “a radical change in human consciousness” and not the revolutions of fascists and communists.

To him, there isn’t much of a difference since both impose authority and expect compliance. He believes that education must awaken the understanding that “every human being…goes through all kinds of deprivation, all kinds of sorrow, misery, loneliness, depression, anxiety, uncertainty”. This suffering is the common ground that humans share but the “illusion” of separateness makes them care only about distress that is framed and felt as personal. 

Understandably, the teachers that Krishnamurti is addressing are curious about the practical classroom applications of these discussions. In the fourth chapter titled “Not helping the students but watching them”, Krishnamurti tackles this concern skilfully. He makes a distinction between watching over students with affection and not like a hawk, and talks about becoming teachers who students can rely on and confide in. He talks about understanding discipline and cleanliness in terms of how to live with consideration for others.

In the sixth chapter titled “Just observing a fact or going beyond it”, Krishnamurti urges teachers to examine how humans seek security “in the illusion of a nation, in the illusion of gods, in the illusion of knowledge, in the illusion of somebody, an external agency trying to help you”. This is a fertile space of enquiry but one wonders if teachers are ready for it.

The reviewer is a journalist, educator, and cultural commentator. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X