Noted thinker and philosopher, J Krishnamurti, in his book “Education and the Significance of Life’ holds the following.
To bring about right education, we must obviously understand the meaning of life as a whole, for that we have to be able to think, not consistently, but directly and truly...We cannot understand existence abstractly or theoretically. To understand life is to understand ourselves and that is both the beginning and the end of education...the function of education is to create human being who are integrated and therefore intelligent...intelligence is the the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.
“The greatest need and most pressing problem for every individual is to have an integrated comprehension of life which will enable him (the individual) to meet its (world’s) ever increasing complexities (due to technological progress),” He adds while cautioning that without self-knowledge, technology can become a means of destroying human beings.
If one goes by what has been proposed by Krishnamurti, teachers would have to grow in their existential intelligence and acquire spontaneity in other eight intelligence as proposed by Howard Gardner to offer content for addressing diversity of learners through experimentation, verification, inquiring and action researching for their own life-long learning.
The blending of the proposals of Krishnamuti and Gardner can lead to the following framework for education in which both teachers and students become co-learners of life and learning by enhancing their intelligence.
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