4 Key
elements in any model of Holistic Education – what
does any model of holistic education have to provide an account of?
What
are key elements in any model of Holistic Education – and here for a moment
more we’re back to fragmentation ?
Perhaps
you will agree with me if I say that anything that purports to be a model of
Holistic Education has to provide answers to these 7 questions.
How do we account for or use;
1 mystery &
ultimate reality in a/our model of HE?
2 story, stories & the wisdom/spiritual traditions of humankind in
a/our
model of HE?
3 consciousness &
consciousness raising, in a/our model of HE?
4 learning & teaching - in
a/our model of HE?
5 being human, positively and fully, in a/our model of HE?
6 meaning and meaning-making in
a/our model of HE?
7 knowledge and knowing in
a/our model of HE?
Any model of holistic education I suggest has to provide a
convincing account of these 7 questions, and the realities to which they
point. It also has to decide
on how these elements fit together theoretically and in practice.
But there is one more question, even harder perhaps than these seven.
Imagine yourself stuck between any two of your most challengingly
different country-men or women at a dinner.
One asks, “Tell me Maria, or Juan,” or whatever name you have,
“what exactly is this whole of which you speak?
And what is it that makes of the parts a whole?”
Ahh so we have an eight question.
8
How do we account for and use that
which makes of the parts a whole in our model of HE?
Now
this is a good question to have an answer for!
What answers should we give to this?
God
willing, and Ramon’s Foundation willing, by the end of this conference we will
all have better answers to that question! This
presentation is my pennyworth to being better prepared should I meet another
keeper of a castle who asks such a question.
We
are starting to see that at the heart of holistic education there is the
ineffable, the transcendent spirit, the mystical reality, in which the whole is
always something greater than the sum of the parts.
Here I want to put another of my cards on the table we are also speaking
about aesthetical as the same reality of experience.
All of these types of experience, the ineffable, the mystical, the
aesthetic and so on, are, from the point of view of the basic dynamic in
holistic education, the same - although they may not be of the same worth. They all are in the first case experiences.
They are generally thought of as very rare, though studies have shown
that they are not. Secondly
they are more or less transformative.
But
are they not there, more or less every day in classrooms, like specks of gold in
a pan-handler’s sieve waiting to be recognized – if we teach in a right way?
One of their unifying characteristics is that they take us out of
ourselves, to use common parlance, or, to use a slightly more archaic phrase, we
are ‘transported’.