PART I
Foundations
Introduction
Bruce Novak
Almost from the outset of the founding of institutions of democratic public education, various movements of âprogressiveâ education have been countered by those calling for a return to âthe basics.â
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 âthe 3 Râsâ nor the idea that education has unspecified âsocialâ foundationsâupon which most progressive education has been basedâprovide 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 pluralâthough irreducible to an alliterative list of mastered skillsâbecause 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 inhabitâand 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 Millerâs opening essay, âHolistic Education: A Brief History,â shows how the intuitions that he and Ron Miller had in the 1980s in founding the holistic education movement1âI call them the âtwo bright angelic Millersâ that life somehow conjured up to confront the Blakean âdark Satanic millsâ of modern industrial schoolsâprovided a new name that opened up whole realms of prior educational thought and practice as being much more than socially âprogressiveâ: actually psychically, socially, and spiritually âintegrative.â 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 halfâand evolutionarily the stronger halfâof our brains is devoted to holistic imagination, not mechanical computation. Iain McGilchristâs revelatory The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (treated more fully in Hartâs Section Five essay) first describes âthe primacy of the right hemisphereâ of imaginative, intuitive, holistic perception throughout most of the history of our species. Then it describes âthe triumph of the left hemisphereâ over it, and the active repression of holistic perception in the West, particularly since the âEnlightenmentââa 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 âthe change we need,â 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-Lozowskiâs âExperiencing Nets of Holism through the Threshold Body.â 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 Gandhiâs phrase, âto be âthe changeâ we need to see in our world.â2
3. The aesthetic dimension: Our first education comes through the feeling perception of beautiful things in the world. If Darroch-Lozowskiâs contribution to the foundations of holistic education is to articulate what it is like to be educated by our own bodies, Tobin Hartâs gorgeous essay âBeauty and Learningâ is about what it is like to be educatedâliterally âdrawn outâ of ourselvesâby our perceptions of harmonious beauty in the world. These harmonious perceptions literally âtune us up,â as Hart felicitously puts it. Darroch-Lozowski and Hartâs 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 âsave the worldâ from the murderous dissections to which we have subjected it. (For a fuller working out of these ideas see my ââNational Standardsâ vs the Free Standards of Culture: Matthew Arnoldâs Culture and Anarchy and Contemporary Educational Philistinism,â Philosophy of Education, 2003.)
Cultural Holism
As is beautifully traced in Millerâs 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 âholismâ was first coined in the 1920s, first applied to education around the 1980s, andâas noted in Millerâs General Introductionâis 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 Hartâs 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 âcivilizationâ all human education was holistic. In his chapter, âA Much Deeper Placeâ, Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs, introduces the reader to what he calls âIndigenous Worlding,â and advocates for a return to a ânon-anthropocentric worldview.â He soulfully describes and demonstrates the deep connectedness our species lost by becoming âcivilized,â and can regain through holistic educationâs 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 âcivilization.â 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 Eurasiaâin the time the philosopher Karl Jaspers first called âThe Axial Ageââcultures 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 Nakagawaâs âEastern Philosophy and Holistic Educationâ provides us with a deep and touching exploration of the âperennial philosophyâ exemplified by the various branches of Eastern thought. Karen Armstrongâs 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 Millerâs essay concerns an educational tradition, only recently named âholistic,â stemming from the deeply feeling philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And in a recent conversation with the other âbright angelic Miller,â 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 âphenomenological philosophyââalso stemming from Rousseau, as is detailed in my contribution to Section Five in this volumeâthat 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 âThe Empathic and Ecological Enlightenment,â 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-EnlightenmentââKnowledge is powerâ and âI think, therefore I amââwere ultimately divisive, the motto of this true, real, holistic Enlightenment might well be: âWe 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.â
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, âCare of the Soul in Education.â3 And when he says, âI would like to use the word âeroticâ instead of the word âholistic,ââ 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 brainâs attainment of knowledge and power with the erotic right brainâs search for meaning and purpose. Moore quotes his own opening words from his classic Care of the Soul of a quarter century ago: âThe great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all our troubles and affecting us individual and socially, is âloss of soulâ.â In seeking to place what he calls âintimate relationsâ 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: âA 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 âHolistic Education Networkâ which published two volumes by someone named Anastas Harris in 1980. Canfield co-authored an article in âNew Age Magazineâ around that time, which is where I first encountered the term âholistic education.â 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.â
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 Kesslerâs The Soul of Education (ASCD, 2000).
1
HOLISTIC EDUCATION
A Brief History
John P. Miller
The term âholistic educationâ 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.
(p. 2)
In the first edition of The ...