Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The meaning of the quote
In the 1930s, an English school wrote to the parents of 7-year-old Gillian Lynne to say they thought she had a learning disorder. She couldn’t sit still or keep her mind on her lessons.
Her mother took her to a specialist. Gillian sat on her hands for 20 minutes while he listened to the list of problems. Then he told Gillian he needed a private word with her mother, switched on the radio on his desk and led her mother out of the room. Outside the room, he asked her to watch. Gillian was already on her feet, dancing.
Sir Ken Robinson shares what the doctor said next in his TED talk Do schools kill creativity?
“Mrs Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”
Her mother did. Gillian went on to dance with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, which later became the Royal Ballet. She also choreographed the musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.
The school saw a problem to fix, and the doctor saw a girl who needed to move.
That kind of seeing is what Jiddu Krishnamurti means by intelligence. He describes it as the ability to see what is essential, what is in front of you, instead of what you expect or have been told is there. Waking up that ability, in yourself and in other people, is what he calls education.
He wrote it in his 1953 book Education and the Significance of Life. The line comes straight after his complaint that we treat exams and degrees as proof of intelligence and end up with clever minds that dodge the basic questions about life.
Seeing what is
Most of the time we look at a label instead of the person or the problem. A toddler throws his plate on the floor at 6 p.m. and the word “naughty” arrives before anything else. Look again and you see he skipped his nap and dinner is an hour late.
A teenager decides she’s bad at maths, when the facts say she missed fractions in year 5 and every topic since has been built on them. “Bad at maths” can’t be fixed, but a gap in fractions can.
In the same passage, Krishnamurti says intelligence doesn’t come from books or from piling up information. Someone with 3 degrees can still look at a crying child and see only noise.
Waking it up
The doctor didn’t teach Gillian a single step. He gave her music and an empty room, then stepped back and paid attention. Krishnamurti believed education works the same way. A parent or teacher can make room for clear seeing and keep labels from burying it.
In yourself, it starts with catching the label before it settles. A teacher can open the door, but you have to walk through it on your own.
Action steps
Work through these steps with one label you’ve been carrying about yourself or someone close to you.
- Pick the label.
Choose one you use a lot, like lazy or bad at maths. - Write down what you’ve seen.
Stick to facts you could show someone, like “Skipped homework 3 nights this week, all after football practice.” - Act on the facts.
Make one change the facts point to, like moving homework before football or going back to the topic where the trouble started. Then watch what happens.
Gillian Lynne’s doctor worked out who she was in the time it took to switch on a radio and step outside.
All he did was look.
About the author
As a boy in south India, Jiddu Krishnamurti was sickly and dreamy. His teachers thought he was slow and beat him regularly, and his father beat him at home.
In April 1909, when Krishnamurti was 13, Charles Leadbeater, a leader of the Theosophical Society, spotted him on the Society’s beach by the Adyar River in Madras. Leadbeater claimed the boy had the most selfless aura he had ever seen and announced the boy would be the vehicle for the World Teacher, a spiritual guide the Society expected to come and lead humanity.
The Society took him in. Ernest Wood, who helped him with his homework, found him particularly slow-witted, yet within 6 months he could speak and write English well. Later, in England, he failed the university entrance exam 3 times, while his younger brother Nitya passed on his first try.
By his 30s, Krishnamurti had a whole organisation built around him, the Order of the Star, with donated land and a castle in the Netherlands. In 1929, aged 34, he stood up at the Order’s camp in Ommen and shut it down. No organisation, he said, could lead anyone to the truth.
“I maintain that truth is a pathless land.”
He told his followers to look for the truth themselves instead of following anyone, including him. Then he gave the castle and 5,000 acres of land back to the people who had donated them.
He spent the rest of his life speaking to audiences around the world and founded schools in India, England and California, starting with Rishi Valley School near his birthplace. He died in Ojai, California, in 1986, at the age of 90.
Like Gillian Lynne, he was a child his school had written off. In 1953, the boy who failed his university entrance exams wrote Education and the Significance of Life, where you can find this quote alongside his ideas on what schools should be for.
Resources
- Education and the Significance of Life (Book)
- Do schools kill creativity? (YouTube)
- Dancer needed to move to think (Podcast)
- J. Krishnamurti Online (Website)
- I learned much from my teachers (Article)
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