Revealing the Spiritual Dimension
Karunavira believes that Buddhist teachers can bring the flavour of the Dharma into the classroom
Reprinted from Golden Drum 17.
Educational methods and practices have been the subject of a debate as old as history itself, one to which most of the world's great thinkers have contributed. Drawing on my experience as a primary school teacher, I want to explore the light that Buddhism has shone on good classroom practice.
It is over fourteen years since I nervously waited for my first class of London children to burst into the room. I was an idealistic young teacher bent on changing the world-from the children up. When I resigned as deputy headteacher of a beautiful Sussex school three years ago I was a Buddhist, still idealistic about changing the world, but with a clearer idea of how to go about it. I did not leave teaching because I was a Buddhist; teaching is very much in line with Right Livelihood. I reluctantly left teaching for a period to give more emphasis to my needs: to go on longer retreats, to study and work with other Buddhists. Now I combine part-time teaching with work at the Brighton Buddhist Centre.
When I first stumbled across the FWBO I found that it affirmed my vision of what education could and should be. For me education was an exciting process of direct investigation, observation, and reflection, and of growth based on these experiences. It had to do with getting down to ground level, investigating, for example, a crumbling wall or a local supermarket, drawing elements from it, painting and modeling it, measuring and describing it, writing factually and imaginatively about it, developing skills and ideas to communicate all this to others. As I became more involved in Buddhism I noticed that the underlying principle of starting from one's actual experience was common to both. The sort of education I was moving away from, consisting of ladling facts and figures into the heads of children, was more in line with the old religious model I had been raised on. I was trying to develop a more creative vision of education, but it was not until I encountered Buddhism that I realized that this vision was part of a much broader understanding of how people best grow and develop.
During my training I visited many schools where I could see how well an approach tied to direct experience worked, be it in the development of mathematical or artistic skills, or in the appreciation of fine books or religious and moral values. From this practical base a wider sense of the world and of its mysteries and wonders could proceed on safe foundations. Flights of fantasy and imagination are nourished by senses exercised in seeing, feeling, and hearing, by senses that are valued by the education process and which are therefore valued more in themselves. Within a year of starting work I was reaping the benefits of this style, enjoying working with difficult children in a creative way, and seeing how quickly skills and concepts could be meaningfully developed if based on first-hand experience.
There is a commonly held mis-understanding that Buddhism is a religion for heady intellectuals. But the Buddha urged his followers to test his teachings against their own experience. Buddhism emphasizes the need to reflect on and meditate with its teachings, to make these teachings resonate with one's own experience and thus make them more deeply one's own. Good primary classroom practice begins with a similar principle. The skills and concepts which you wish a child to acquire are most readily and fully assimilated if they resonate with the child's actual world, with things, places, and people that they can hear, see, and touch.
Why is there this seeming convergence of principles in Buddhism and good primary school practice? An examination of three dangers common to both may shed some light.
Firstly comes the danger of making assumptions and premature interpretations. Teaching has shown me again and again how wrong understandings quickly multiply from assumptions and poor interpretation. I have, for example, assumed that a class knows what a wood or a forest is like. The children have assumed that they know as well, because they have done a project about them, seen good videos about them, read books, and looked at the tree in the school playground. Actually standing in a deep wood in Suffolk with a group of awe-inspired ten-year-olds on an autumn day, I soon realized that very few of them had any idea of what trees could be like. A follow-up project was very enthusiastically taken up. When I mentioned words like 'oak', 'roots', or 'bough', the children and I had an experience in common related to it.
The message here is that one's own experience is valuable and can be used to evaluate other people's ideas and views. As adults too, learning to trust our own experience discourages premature judgments based on hearsay or stereo- typed preconception; it encourages empathy and compassion. It means that we must really look, really listen. The Buddhist practice of awareness stresses the integration of body, feelings, emotions, and thoughts. It is very important that the first level, of sensory inputs, is not undervalued and therefore underdeveloped. What message are we giving our children if their education is mostly based on what someone else said in a book or via a lens?
The second danger is of alienation and loss of motivation. Good classroom practice not only encourages an interactive dynamic between the child and the world but also offers an integrated curriculum in which the various subjects are felt to interweave and overlap. Thus skills and concepts gained in maths lessons can be experienced as useful in understanding trees, buildings, or one's own body. Artistic, literary, and scientific skills and concepts are all useful, and a creative mixture of them all can be planned so that they are not alienated from each other or from the child's experience of the world. Skills and concepts are thus experienced as tools that can give shape to the mystery that confronts the enquiring mind.
Today, the tendency to compartmentalize things and people results in an atomized society in which openness, trust, and generosity are often limited at best to the introverted cell of the nuclear family. Our education system should support the idea of interrelatedness so that necessary specialization at later dates does not lead to an overall narrowness. Children have a fantastic appetite for inquiry but if their schools make them jump through unrelated intellectual hoops, learn rules of thumb, or acquire facts in a way that is divorced from actual inquiry, then the appetite will wane.
Lastly comes the danger of failing to take into account our individual starting point. Working with children on projects that are based on direct experience enables individual talents and levels of skills to be more easily managed. Skills and concepts used as tools to understand experience will be deployed at a naturally appropriate level, and progress is assured. Conversely, asking children to practise a skill or concept divorced from actual inquiry, or unrelated to their world, is not only likely to lead to an alienated idea about the skill or concept but may not so readily be in accord with the child's ability. Experience of success is vital to the child's motivation; in-appropriate tasks can seriously hamper a child's progress.
For the Buddhist practitioner a similar principle holds true. Teachings and practices are most readily grasped if they spring from, or are informed by, our own experience. We need to take full stock of who and 'where' we are - and let this awareness resonate with who and where we would like to be.
The most specific way in which Buddhism influences my teaching is in the area of moral and religious education. Buddhism stresses practices which develop positive emotions like confidence, generosity, kindness, openness, and clarity. Religious and moral education starts with teachers and parents who embody these qualities. Children pick up a great deal-from dirty lolly-pop sticks to refined ideas and values. If a school's ethos is soundly based on kindness and awareness, the children will pick up these qualities. It is a long time before children need concern themselves with 'religion', and when this time does arise it is best met with as much direct experiential input as possible: visits by religious full-timers who can talk about their lives, hopes, and fears, visits to churches and religious sites of interest and to museums where holy books of great beauty are kept. Approached in the correct way, the great spiritual teachings of the world can be protected from the utilitarian claw, their beauty both in content and presentation valued for its own special sake. If this is done, then, when the child becomes an adult, his or her inquiring mind will be primed to seek out a path. Then the chance for a truly spiritual life is possible.
Thus at the primary school level, and I suspect beyond, there is no need for specific teaching of religious doctrine (whether Christian or Buddhist). Rather there is a need to reveal the spiritual dimension in all its breadth and fascination in as imaginative a way as possible. There is also a crucial need to present children with an ethos-at home and at school-which is perfumed with clarity and kindness. Children need to see teachers talking to each other with respect and warmth; they need to experience good communication themselves from the teachers. If this 'hidden curriculum' is informed by the teachers' practice of meditation and friendship the children will be able to absorb a rich moral education based almost entirely on direct experience. Thus the most important element in children's religious and moral education is the extent to which their teachers practise a religious and moral life.