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"From information to
Transformation is about remembering what matters in education and in life.
In many ways, it concerns who we are and how we know. Drawing largely from
the wisdom traditions, transpersonal psychology, and pedagogy, a map of
the depths of knowing and learning is constructed that unfolds through six
interrelated layers: information, knowledge, intelligence, understanding,
wisdom, and transformation."
The
Transpersonal
A transpersonal
orientation presupposes that ego and rationality are not the highest
attainment of human possibility, while it still acknowledges their
essentiality. In other words,
there is more to us than our small self-separate identity, and our knowing
operates in complex dialectics that go beyond basic logic and reasoning.
Entering into
these depths offers an education that is both practical and remarkable,
one that replaces radical disconnection with radical amazement.
It includes the education of the mind and heart, balances intuition
with intellect, and mastery with
mystery, and cultivates wisdom over the mere accumulation of facts.
Too often schools
skim the surface of information at the expense of knowledge,
intelligence, understanding, and wisdom.
Information
Information
involves discrete facts and the most basic skills.
Most educational debate orbits around which and how much
information should be passed along, and how and how well we are doing
it. What has happened is that the essential currency for learning,
information, has become mistakenly identified as the goal.
Knowledge
Knowledge
involves the development of systems of information instead of discrete
pieces.
Perhaps
the most universal way of moving information into the patterned wholes
of knowledge is by offering material in the ways that we live and
understand our lives, through stories and metaphors.
Understanding
Understanding
moves beyond the rational and the sensory.
Paradox and possibility open up.
The
heart of understanding is cultivated through empathy, appreciation,
openness, accommodation, service, listening, and loving presence.
Wisdom
Acting
wisely involves a capacity to listen and translate the power of the
intellect and the sensitivity of the heart into an appropriate form (its
action, attitude, etc.). Wisdom
dynamically expands and integrates perspectives, seeing beyond what is
visible from a stance of fear and self-interest.
Wisdom involves a degree of awareness that enables
discrimination.
While
the heart of understanding is universal and indiscriminate, wisdom
brings this broad unconditionality to the particularities of a
situation. For example, the
wise response is not always "just love"; it may be strategic,
disruptive, confrontational. In
this way, wisdom does not simply serve individual growth but the
evolution of growth in general.
Whereas
intelligence will cut, dismantle, and reconstruct [a] question in order
to work towards certainty, wisdom rides the question to see where it
goes and what it turns into. Wisdom
asks questions about questions, not so much to close in and trap the
answer than to see what the question has to tell us about ourselves and
our world.
Education
for wisdom and transformation is not about being taught but about waking
up.
We come
to wonder, and in turn to awe and wisdom, through our vulnerability and
openness. As we open up
questions, a space is created, the wisdom space.
The wisdom space opens to reveal a clearer view that is
experienced not as a solution to a limited problem, as when the
intelligence solves a problem (although this is important), but involves
being in rapport with the mystery.
Transformation
Education can provide
opportunity not only to gather and manage data, but to decompress it, to
break its code, moving through layers of knowledge, intelligence,
understanding, wisdom; ultimately this is the process of transformation.
Education
for transformation does not try to impose, force, or even teach
liberation but provides liberating (transformative) habits and tools
that include strength of well, clarity of mind, compassion of heart, and
power of critical dialogue. Through
their appropriate use, one may gain the personal power, depth of vision,
and understanding to achieve transparency of the world and the self.
Transformative education enables us to avoid getting caught in
our own little whirlpool of existence, so that we may live in the whole
river of life.
When
education taps the current of transformation it takes us beyond the
"facts" and categories of our lives, the limits of social
structure, people of cultural conditioning, and the box of
self-definition. In this
way, we gain the capacity not only to gather the facts of our life but
also to transcend and transform them; this is where the deepest moments
in education lead.
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