‘On December 17, 1968, Krishnamurti received a telegram to say that Brockwood Park had been bought. The Simmons, Doris Pratt, a young architect and two male students moved into the house in the middle of January 1969. Their first task was to scrape the accumulated meat grease of years off the kitchen stove, a particularly unpleasant task for vegetarians!

 

‘On March 6, Krishnamurti, Mary Zimbalist and Alain Naudé flew to England and went to stay at Brockwood for the first time. There were then four pupils at the school, all boys. The west wing of the house, which was in future to be Krishnamurti’s home whenever he came to England, had been only minimally furnished.’

—Mary Lutyens

The intention behind this new school was stated in the KFT Bulletin:

‘Altogether the whole property is admirably suited to the purposes of the Foundation, which are to make a home for Krishnamurti (where it is believed he will stay for longer and longer periods), an educational centre for boys and girls of school-leaving age and over, and a meeting place where responsible, free, dedicated and serious human beings can come to discover for themselves what it is to live intelligently, and then go out into the world and transform themselves and others.’

—KFT Bulletin 2, Spring 1969

Brockwood Park School had been in operation four years when Krishnamurti made it clear that the vision behind this school is a radical one:

‘You can have a first-class school on the traditional lines. I mean by traditional, top people who are deeply good—in the large sense of that word, not just a bourgeois word—that they will never kill, and all that. That is still very small; it has not got the spark of the eternal, divine, or whatever you like to call it. Now, can the spark of that something burst in us?’

—Krishnamurti, Discussion in Switzerland, July 1974

 

‘Is it possible to create or bring about such intelligence that the mind is never conditioned? Brockwood is not a progressive school. Do you know what I mean by a progressive school?—better and all the rest of it. And since it is not, can we all who are involved in it and have the responsibility for the students, in the very process of unconditioning the student, uncondition ourselves? Not say, ‘I must be unconditioned first and later I will uncondition the student,’ but in the very discussion of it, in the very investigation of it, both the educator and the educated begin to see the importance and necessity of freedom from conditioning. Now, how is this to be done? Not as a system or a modus operandi.’

—Krishnamurti, Discussion in Switzerland, August 1974

Today, after more than 50 years of existence, Brockwood Park School is still based on the original intentions, Krishnamurti’s teachings. These teachings question and negate systems, methods, blueprints and formulas. Therefore, the education offered at the School, the classes taught, the discussions amongst the staff and students, and any other approaches adopted are primarily to facilitate the intentions of Brockwood, and Krishnamurti’s radical teachings are central to this.