(KRISHNAMURTI SI) Instigating Insight with Dialogue and Deep Inquiry: J. Krishnamurti’s Innovation for Higher Education

Abstract

This article describes Jiddu Krishnamurti’s dialogic approach and proposes that this innovative approach, with its unique features, offers a novel “insight education” for educators to adapt for use with their own curriculum. Following a brief introduction of Krishnamurti’s philosophy of education, emphasis is placed on Krishnamurti’s notion of insight and on his dialogic approach to instigating insight for education, as a facilitator of dialogue and deep inquiry with small groups. Since Krishnamurti had not, to my knowledge, explicitly discussed or written about the particular features or method of his dialogic approach, I have chosen to closely read a transcript of one dialogue Krishnamurti had in 1981 with a small group of American college students in California. I go on to describe some of the learned content (“curriculum”) covered in this one-hour dialogue, and then I describe specific features of Krishnamurti’s dialogic approach, as revealed in the transcript.