There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The meaning of the quote
In 1919, a young Indian man in London named Jiddu Krishnamurti failed his university entrance exams for the third time. He never earned a degree, and he went on to spend more than 60 years giving talks about education.
Those failed exams didn’t end his education, because for him education never ended. Most of us treat it as something we finish. We collect certificates between the ages of 5 and 22, frame them and stop. Krishnamurti saw school as one small part of learning. The rest happens at work, in marriage, in raising children and in growing old.
He said this to schoolchildren. The quote comes from his talks with students at Rishi Valley School and Rajghat School in India, collected in the book On Education. In the same talk he warns that people build an image of themselves out of their jobs and achievements, and that this image dulls the mind. A person who thinks “I’m a graduate, so I’m done” has stopped learning.
Kimani Maruge grew up in Kenya too poor to pay school fees. When Kenya made primary school free in 2003, the former Mau Mau fighter decided it was his turn. On 12 January 2004, aged 84, he took his seat in Standard One at Kapkenduiywo Primary School in Eldoret, next to 5-year-olds.
By April he had passed his first end-of-term exams with straight A’s in English, Kiswahili and maths. The next year the school made him head boy. Guinness World Records lists him as the oldest person to begin primary school, and his story became the film The First Grader.
Maruge got his classroom at 84, but most of life’s lessons come without a teacher or a report card. Your first boss teaches you how to take criticism. A newborn teaches you patience at 3 a.m. Krishnamurti cared most about this kind of learning, where you watch your own reactions and find out who you are.
Action steps
A few small habits keep you learning once the certificates stop coming.
- Pick a skill you think you’ve finished learning.
Cooking, driving, your job or your own language. Ask someone better at it for one tip this week and use it. - Catch one of your reactions each day.
When you snap at someone or feel jealous, ask yourself what set it off. - Start something you feel too old for.
A language, an instrument or a short course. Maruge was 84 when he started Standard One.
Your last exam marked the end of one class. The rest of your education runs until your final day.
About the author
Krishnamurti’s teachers in south India wrote him off as slow and beat him, and the Theosophists who raised him to be a “World Teacher” watched him fail his exams in England. In 1929 he walked away from that role. He shut down the Order of the Star, the organisation built around him, and told its 3,000 members to find the truth for themselves.
In 1938 he met the English novelist Aldous Huxley in California, and the two became close friends. Huxley pushed him to write and later wrote the foreword to his book The First and Last Freedom.
In his 80s he held a series of conversations with the physicist David Bohm, and those talks became the book The Ending of Time. He also kept visiting the schools he had founded in India, including Rishi Valley and Rajghat, to talk with the students.
On 4 January 1986, at the age of 90, he gave his last public talk in Madras. He died 6 weeks later in Ojai, California.
The young man who failed his exams in London kept learning and teaching to the end of his life. You can find this quote in the book On Education, where his talks with the students of Rishi Valley and Rajghat are collected.
Resources
- On Education (Book)
- Education and the Significance of Life (Book)
- Think on These Things (Book)
- J. Krishnamurti Official Channel (YouTube)
- Urgency of Change, The Krishnamurti Podcast (Podcast)
- Oldest person to begin primary school (Article)
- Jiddu Krishnamurti (Wikipedia)
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