It is June and the rains are late. In a Class 2 room of a small-town government school, the ceiling fan turns slowly over warm, heavy air. The new teacher writes a word on the green board and holds out the chalk. A girl in the second row knows the word. She stands, takes three steps towards the board and stops. Her shoulders have climbed up towards her ears, and her fingers are twisting the hem of her frock. Last year’s teacher kept a wooden ruler on the table. The new teacher does not know that. The girl’s body does.
Nothing is wrong with her reading. Something has not yet happened between her and the woman holding the chalk, and the Indian traditions have a word for it.
What śraddhā means
Śraddhā (trust, faith, a confident leaning towards something) is usually rendered as faith, which hides more than it shows. The word shares an ancient root with the Latin credo, “I believe”, and the etymologists gloss that root as “to put one’s heart” somewhere. Śraddhā is not first a proposition you hold in your head. It is where you have placed your heart, and so where your whole self is leaning.
The Bhagavad Gītā makes it a condition of knowing. “Śraddhāvān labhate jñānam”, the one who has śraddhā gains knowledge, it says in the fourth chapter. In the seventeenth it says that a person is made of their śraddhā, and is whatever their śraddhā is. Trust is not something a learner has. It is part of what a learner is.
Not obedience, but a movement towards
Indian schools have often heard all this as a demand for obedience. The old texts resist that reading. In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, the boy Naciketas watches his father give away cows that have drunk their last water and given their last milk. Śraddhā, the text says, entered the boy. And what does śraddhā make him do? It makes him question his father.
The Caṅkī Sutta of the Pali canon describes how a seeker comes to learn from a teacher. First he watches the teacher and sees that the man is free of greed, aversion and delusion. Only then does he place his conviction in him. With conviction he goes to him and grows close to him. Growing close, he lends ear. Then he hears, remembers, weighs and makes an effort, until at last he realises the truth with his body. Look at how the sequence begins. Trust is a walk across a room, a body sitting nearer, an ear turned towards a voice. It is a movement before it is a thought, which is exactly what we would expect if thinking is not only in the head.
What trust does to a learning body
Celeste Kidd and her colleagues ran the famous marshmallow test with young children, with a twist. Before it began, an adult either kept or broke two small promises to the child. Children who had met the reliable adult waited about four times longer before eating the marshmallow. What looked like self-control was a sensible judgement about whether grown-ups keep their word.
James Coan and his colleagues placed married women in a brain scanner under the threat of a mild electric shock. Holding their husband’s hand quietened the brain’s threat response across a wide area. A stranger’s hand helped less, and the better the marriage, the stronger the calming effect. These were adults, not children, but the lesson travels. A trusted hand changes what fear does inside the body. In schools, a large review of 99 studies by Debora Roorda and her colleagues found that warm teacher-student relationships go with greater engagement and, less strongly, with better achievement.
Where this series parts ways
The usual case for trust in education is instrumental. Build rapport, and children behave better and score higher. This treats trust as oil for the machinery of instruction. Śraddhā says something deeper. A frightened child is not a learner who happens to be anxious. Her body is busy with protection, with the signals of a tight stomach and a racing heart, and her attention has gone to the ruler, not the word. Trust is the ground a learning body stands on, and no method can be laid on top of ground that is not there.
And the texts are clear about the direction of the debt. The listener in the sutta watches the teacher first. Naciketas trusts enough to argue. Śraddhā is offered to someone who has earned it, never extracted by punishment or by the authority of a chair at the front of the room. So the question turns back on us. How many of our classrooms ask children for śraddhā without ever having earned it?
Back in that Class 2 room, the girl is still standing a metre from the board. She is not refusing to learn. She is deciding, with her shoulders and her feet, whether this teacher is safe. What would the teacher have to do, with her voice, her hands and her waiting, before those last three steps become possible?
Put it into practice: P4 Greeting each child by name, with the eyes · P1 The threshold: how children cross into the classroom · P25 Wait time: giving children room to speak
Read next: R44 Touch, safety and the readiness to learn · R28 Krishnamurti: fear, attention and freedom
Notes
- Bhagavad Gītā 4.39, Sanskrit text and English translation, Shlokam. https://shlokam.org/gita/gita-4-39.htm
- Bhagavad Gītā 17.3, Sanskrit text and English translation, Holy Bhagavad Gita (Swami Mukundananda). https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/17/verse/3/
- “Credo”, Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/credo
- Kaṭha Upaniṣad 1.1.1–3, in The Upanishads, translated by Swami Paramananda. https://www.hinduwebsite.com/sacredscripts/hinduism/parama/katha.asp
- Caṅkī Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 95), translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, dhammatalks.org. https://dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN95.html
- Kidd, C., Palmeri, H., & Aslin, R. N. (2013). Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition, 126(1), 109–114. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3730121/
- Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x
- Roorda, D. L., Koomen, H. M. Y., Spilt, J. L., & Oort, F. J. (2011). The influence of affective teacher-student relationships on students’ school engagement and achievement: A meta-analytic approach. Review of Educational Research, 81, 493–529. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654311421793
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