International Handbook of Holistic Education

John P. Miller, Kelli Nigh, Marni J. Binder, Bruce Novak, Sam Crowell, John P. Miller, Kelli Nigh, Marni J. Binder, Bruce Novak, Sam Crowell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138082649
• eBook ISBN: 9781351621892
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Providing a comprehensive overview of holistic education's history, conceptions, practices, and research, this Handbook presents an up-to-date, global picture of the field. Organized in five sections, the Handbook lays out the field's theoretical and historical foundations; offers examples of holistic education in practice with regard to schools, programs, and pedagogies at all levels; presents research methods used in holistic education; outlines the growing effort among holistic educators to connect holistic teaching and learning with research practice; and examines present trends and future areas of interest in program development, inquiry, and research. This volume is a must-have resource for researchers and practitioners and serves as an essential foundational text for courses in the field.

PART I

Foundations

Introduction

Bruce Novak

Almost from the outset of the founding of institutions of democratic public education, various movements of “progressive” education have been countered by those calling for a return to “the basics.”

What perhaps most distinguishes the holistic education movement from other types of progressive education, though, is the effort to ground the education of human beings in what is most truly basic to our humanity.

The fact is that neither the popular construct of “the 3 R’s” nor the idea that education has unspecified “social” foundations—upon which most progressive education has been based—provide adequate beginnings for the understanding of the depth of what can occur when teachers seek to raise learners to the fullest potentials of life that they are capable of attaining. And it is nothing less than the real foundations of that aliveness that holistic education has sought to arrive at.

Those foundations are plural—though irreducible to an alliterative list of mastered skills—because of the complex nature and history of our species. And holistic education can be understood as the attempt both to adequately define and to adequately intuit that complexity in order to bring our species into better harmony both with itself and with the world that we inhabit—and that we must now learn to better integrate ourselves within, to ensure, not just our flourishing, but our very survival.

What, then, are those real, true foundations? How shall we name and integrate them?

It has been one of the deep privileges of my life first to read each of these six uniquely marvelous pieces, and then to think about how they might be thought of together: brought to form a new, complex whole that might actually reflect the real complex wholeness of our humanity.

What I have found is that there are seven integrated dimensions of holistic education: three related to our organic nature; three related to the beginnings, middle, and prospective fulfillment of our being in the world; and a final, single overarching dimension.

The Gateway to Holism

Jack Miller’s opening essay, “Holistic Education: A Brief History,” shows how the intuitions that he and Ron Miller had in the 1980s in founding the holistic education movement¹—I call them the “two bright angelic Millers” that life somehow conjured up to confront the Blakean “dark Satanic mills” of modern industrial schools—provided a new name that opened up whole realms of prior educational thought and practice as being much more than socially “progressive”: actually psychically, socially, and spiritually “integrative.” We are naturally integrative creatures, and can draw culturally and educatively on that nature to grow more integrated, and less disintegrated.

Natural Holism

1. The neurological dimension: Our brains are hardwired for holism. In an age in which our minds are mostly seen as machines in many ways inferior to mechanical computers, it is essential to notice that fully half—and evolutionarily the stronger half—of our brains is devoted to holistic imagination, not mechanical computation. Iain McGilchrist’s revelatory The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (treated more fully in Hart’s Section Five essay) first describes “the primacy of the right hemisphere” of imaginative, intuitive, holistic perception throughout most of the history of our species. Then it describes “the triumph of the left hemisphere” over it, and the active repression of holistic perception in the West, particularly since the “Enlightenment”—a deeply ironic term in this context, since it has actually proliferated a species-wide madness in which left-brained analysis has eclipsed intuitive, connective wisdom. Holistic education serves as nothing less than the healing of this historic neurological rift: a return of the human mind to sanity and health. It is truly “the change we need,” the change that will truly heal our world.

2. The incarnated dimension: We think through our bodies. In all the reading I have done in the field of holistic education over the course of decades, no single essay has touched me more than Vivian Darroch-Lozowski’s “Experiencing Nets of Holism through the Threshold Body.” Describing quite personally, and with the utmost vividness, how the intimate experience of our own bodies brings us in active touch with the world around us, she movingly demonstrates, and holistically exemplifies, the psychic healing, and educative evocation of personal and interpersonal wisdom that McGilchrist points to the urgent need for. She shows us just what it is, just what it means, in Gandhi’s phrase, “to be ‘the change’ we need to see in our world.”²

3. The aesthetic dimension: Our first education comes through the feeling perception of beautiful things in the world. If Darroch-Lozowski’s contribution to the foundations of holistic education is to articulate what it is like to be educated by our own bodies, Tobin Hart’s gorgeous essay “Beauty and Learning” is about what it is like to be educated—literally “drawn out” of ourselves—by our perceptions of harmonious beauty in the world. These harmonious perceptions literally “tune us up,” as Hart felicitously puts it. Darroch-Lozowski and Hart’s contributions thus represent the two sides of the same foundational coin: the beauty we see in the world leads us to cultivate beautiful responses from our inmost selves when we encounter its imperfections. Together, this harmonious perfection and inward perfection constitute the natural, pure gold that can be converted into the holistic currency of general, cultural perfection that, as Hart maintains, literally can “save the world” from the murderous dissections to which we have subjected it. (For a fuller working out of these ideas see my “‘National Standards’ vs the Free Standards of Culture: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Contemporary Educational Philistinism,” Philosophy of Education, 2003.)

Cultural Holism

As is beautifully traced in Miller’s history, there have been three initiating eras, and hence three general cultural forms, of holistic education: the original Indigenous forms; the Axial forms, starting in the mid first millennium BCE; and the contemporary forms, starting in the mid eighteenth century. The actual term “holism” was first coined in the 1920s, first applied to education around the 1980s, and—as noted in Miller’s General Introduction—is just now coming to be understood as the single most salient encompassing idea for the formation of a new ecological and empathic worldview that can take a newly united humanity beyond the materialism, egotism, and nationalism that are now rampantly burning up both the natural world and the human heart. It is becoming increasingly clear that we can escape this burnup only by, in Tobin Hart’s words, educatively tuning ourselves up. And a large part of our capacity to do this lies in our acquiring a common understanding of the deep story of humanity, and how our species has alternately grown in and out of tune both with the world and with the depths of our own nature.

4. The anthropological dimension: Before “civilization” all human education was holistic. In his chapter, “A Much Deeper Place”, Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs, introduces the reader to what he calls “Indigenous Worlding,” and advocates for a return to a “non-anthropocentric worldview.” He soulfully describes and demonstrates the deep connectedness our species lost by becoming “civilized,” and can regain through holistic education’s re-appropriation of that connectedness. From an Indigenous perspective this kind of connection leads to a communal relationship in which the natural world is a co-participant in our being and doing. Accessing its wisdom requires a different set of understandings and skills, a different mindset that lies at the foundation of all holistic education.

5. The historic dimension: Diverse wisdom traditions provide manifold educative resources for the recovery of our natural wholeness within “civilization.” Across Eurasia, starting in the late second millennium B.C.E., new expansionary empires, fueled by the power of new military technologies, began to engulf the humanity of the ancient world. Eventually, though, and again all across Eurasia—in the time the philosopher Karl Jaspers first called “The Axial Age”—cultures of peace and what we can now recognize as holistic consciousness arose to stem the tides of violence, founded by individuals still recognized as among the greatest teachers in all history: the best known being Socrates and Jesus in the West, and Confucius and Buddha in the East. Yoshi Nakagawa’s “Eastern Philosophy and Holistic Education” provides us with a deep and touching exploration of the “perennial philosophy” exemplified by the various branches of Eastern thought. Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation (Knopf, 2006) is a powerful book-length treatment of all the Axial cultures and what they have to teach us.

6. The philosophical dimension: Bringing the left brain to know what the right brain can do. The largest part of Jack Miller’s essay concerns an educational tradition, only recently named “holistic,” stemming from the deeply feeling philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And in a recent conversation with the other “bright angelic Miller,” Ron, who, along with Jack, founded the holistic education movement in the 1980s, I learned that his road to conceiving of the need for such a movement was paved by a deep engagement in the “phenomenological philosophy”—also stemming from Rousseau, as is detailed in my contribution to Section Five in this volume—that reconceives the hierarchical dualism of the modern pseudo-Enlightenment. Rather than being founded on the conquest of what is imagined as passive matter through the power of masterful minds, this tradition of both teaching and thought, which might be called “The Empathic and Ecological Enlightenment,” seeks, at its foundation, to engage feeling and embodied minds in a lively and restorative dance with one another and the world. And it provides new left-brain conceptual support for a general holistic worldview in which the full intuitive power of the right brain is reinstated. Where the mottos of the left-brain pseudo-Enlightenment—“Knowledge is power” and “I think, therefore I am”—were ultimately divisive, the motto of this true, real, holistic Enlightenment might well be: “We empathically feel the world to holistically and soulfully heal both the world and the rifts we have created in and among ourselves through the false limitations of pseudo-enlightened miseducation.”

Holism and the Soul

7. The soulful dimension. Psyche and Eros as the fundamental matter and method of human education. What is it that is incarnated when we extend ourselves in holistic nets toward the world? What is it in us that is drawn to beauty? And what is the shared common core of Indigenous, Axial, and genuinely philosophical education? What else but the human soul? Thomas Moore reminds us in his profound contribution, “Care of the Soul in Education.”³ And when he says, “I would like to use the word ‘erotic’ instead of the word ‘holistic,’” he reminds us of the ancient, intimate relation of Eros and Psyche you will find evident in every one of the essays in this volume: each encompassing the analytic left brain’s attainment of knowledge and power with the erotic right brain’s search for meaning and purpose. Moore quotes his own opening words from his classic Care of the Soul of a quarter century ago: “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all our troubles and affecting us individual and socially, is ‘loss of soul’.” In seeking to place what he calls “intimate relations” between the soul and the world at the core of the nurturance of new generations of humanity, the holistic education movement bears the potential, as this century progresses, to mend that tremendous loss, by awakening each human being to the deep and soulful life that lies within and around us, waiting to be aroused. You will see, as you continue to read.

Notes

1 Ron Miller also notes the following as essential to understanding the historic intellectual origins of the field of holistic education: “A group of thinkers/therapists from the humanistic psychology and nascent New Age movements held two conferences under this banner in 1979 and 1980; among this group were Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jack Canfield, and Theodore Roszak. They formed a ‘Holistic Education Network’ which published two volumes by someone named Anastas Harris in 1980. Canfield co-authored an article in ‘New Age Magazine’ around that time, which is where I first encountered the term ‘holistic education.’ But then it faded out. Curiously, none of the folks involved in the 1979/80 events were still involved when we revitalized the movement around 1988/9.”

2 Readers who would like scientific descriptions of the incarnated dimension of holistic experience that Darroch-Losowski so humanly describes can consult the writings of neurologists Antonio Damasio and Nicholas Humphrey. Readers who would like philosophical descriptions of it can consult the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eugene Gendlin, and Mark Johnson.

3 The classic text on the pedagogy of the soul is Kessler’s The Soul of Education (ASCD, 2000).

1

HOLISTIC EDUCATION

A Brief History

John P. Miller

The term “holistic education” arose during the 1980s. In 1988 the Holistic Education Review began and The Holistic Curriculum was published. Ron Miller (1988), founding editor of the Holistic Education Review defined holistic education in the first issue of the review.

Holistic education, above all else, is an expression of profound respect for the deeper, largely unrealized powers of our human nature. Holistic educators see each child as a precious gift, as an embryo of untapped spiritual potential. This attitude is similar to the Quaker belief that there is “that of God in every one”—or at least an unfathomed depth of personality, contained in the soul of every person.

(p. 2)

In the first edition of The ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• International Handbook of Holistic Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Preface: Educating the Whole Person
• PART I Foundations: Introduction
• PART II Teaching–Learning–Curriculum: Introduction
• PART III Examples of Holistic Education, Practices: Introduction
• PART IV Research: Introduction
• PART V Future Directions: Introduction
• Index