Why holistic Education ...

Fundamental insights made in the 21^st century into the nature of physical reality, the genesis and evolution of the cosmos, the needs and capacities of the human being, and how people learn have yet to be incorporated into education.

Much of today's education is built on implicit 19^th century mechanistic reductionistic assumptions about resources, processes and people. For most of the 20^th century education was largely about a mechanistic process of 'schooling' that moulded the resource of raw students to fit the workplace and meet economic imperatives. It was rarely about learner centred education.

Building an education system for the 21^st century capable of helping to bring about the kind of preferred futures being described by many communities will require a shift in perceptions to current understandings about the world in which we live. In particular:

·        Many of the local and global challenges facing us today are embedded in interconnected systems. Addressing these challenges means moving beyond the limitations of the perspectives, methods and tools of traditional reductionistic thinking. Systems thinking involves a shift from the parts to the whole, from objects to relationships, from structures to processes, from hierarchies to networks, from the rational to the intuitive, from analysis to synthesis, and from linear to non-linear thinking.

·        Our understanding of physical reality and the cosmos has undergone revolutionary change over the last century through developments in quantum physics and astronomy. 'Quantum thinking' and new cosmologies have changed the way we view the origin and destiny of humanity and the nature of reality.

·        Our understanding of what it means to be human and how people learn have changed dramatically over the last few decades but 'schooling' remains largely as it was early last century. 

"You can't solve problems from the consciousness that created them."

(Albert Einstein)

We need a shift in perception that leads to a more holistic view of education in keeping with up-to-date world-views.

• Learning should be organised around relationships within and between learners and their environment while empowering learners to understand the past, live fully in the present and co-create preferred futures.
• Curriculum should be inquiry driven, interdisciplinary and integrated, and is based on explicit assumptions of interconnectedness, wholeness and multiple ways of being.
• Education should be a rich experiential journey of discovery, expression and mastery where students, teachers and the wider community learn and grow together.

"Many students see themselves as accidents of random processes and separate from nature, the cosmos and universal evolutionary processes."

"But isolation and alienation are profoundly false states of mind. We were born out of the Earth Community…and our natural genetic inheritance presents us with the possibility of forming deeply bonded relationships [with]… all life… and the universe."     

 (Swimme)