Studying
holistic education, as well as defining it, leads to practical problems. I
can’t be the only one who has problems with the ironical difficulty of
having to study and talk about holistic education in linear and fragmented
ways. I have this problem
right now. My heart is full
of stuff I long to convey to you but it has to be communicated mainly left-brain
to left-brain – its fragmented and linear when the reality is whole and
complex. To what should I turn for
help? What doorway might I open?
If I could paint I would try to paint you some pictures, something a bit
more subtle than an odd overhead transparencies or two.
If I could dance perhaps I would try to dance some of my personal truth
– but that would not be a pretty sight, and
I fully intend to spare us both that embarrassment.
So I’ll read you three short poems by different poets, very simple
poems, but ones that help define one of the doorways to the ineffable heart of
Holistic Education.
I’ve thought of a poem.
I carry it carefully,
nervously, in my head,
like a saucer of milk;
in case I should spill some lines
before I put them down.
Gerda Mayer
Here
is another equally short, equally brilliant poem this time by Stephen Spender;
Word
The word bites like a fish
Shall I throw it back free
Arrowing to the sea
Where thoughts lash tail and fin?
Or shall I pull it in
To rhyme upon a dish?
And
thirdly by Charles Causley;
Kelly
Wood
by Charles Causley
Walking in Kelly Wood, gathering Words
Frail as spilt leaves, fine sticks of sentences,
Spirals of bracken from the fallen ground,
I listen for the silences of stone,
The stream’s white voice, the indifference of
birds.
Safe in my quiet house I lay them out
- Leaf,
stick and bracken - in the hearth’s cold frame,
Strike steel on flint against the page of dark,
Wait patiently for the first spark.
A flame.
Don’t
these three poems say more about the nature of creativity than dozens of books
of psychology. Don’t they
also combine what is said about creativity with what it is to be human – to
care and be critical as well as to create?
Metaphor
is a means for creating the space in which public and personal knowledge can
come together, happily, in peace without competition, without making the other
wrong, and inflicting defeat. Metaphor
is a prime doorway to enable depth of engagement in learning, as well as to the
deeper experience of life generally.
Story is another such doorway. This Zen story also enables us to get a glimpse of one facet of the ineffable centre of holistic education;
The Strawberry
A Zen Tale from Japan
There was once a man who was being chased by a
ferocious tiger across a field. At the edge of the field there was a cliff. In
order to escape the jaws of the tiger, the man caught hold of a vine and swung
himself over the edge of the cliff. Dangling down, he saw, to his dismay, there
were more tigers on the ground below him! And, furthermore, two little mice were
gnawing on the vine to which he clung. He knew that at any moment he would fall
to certain death. That's when he noticed a wild strawberry growing on the cliff
wall. Clutching the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other
and put it in his mouth.
He never before realized how sweet a strawberry could
taste.
MacIntyre
(p.201) takes the view that we, humanity that is, are in the midst
of
a story & that is through the story and stories that we understand each
other
and
ourselves.
"...man
is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, is essentially a
storytelling animal"
he says.
Storytelling
according to Chinua Achebe, the Ibo novelist is
"the basis of our existence - who we are,
what we think we are, what people say we are, what other people think we
are." John
Windsor The Inde 20.8.94
According
to Cox, in the Cox Report on the teaching of English
Narrative has been described as a
primary act of mind; children construct their world through story....
This process should be an active experience, involving questioning,
problem solving, hypothesising and imagining.'
Cox
Report English 5-11, Nov. 1988
All
stories are supposed to consist of Exposition:Conflict:Resolution
but what about the Strawberry story what and where is the resolution there?
I
am not a dancer, I’m not a painter; if anything I am a wordsmith and from time
to time during my presentation, I am turning to the poetic, to images in words
to balance the linear. In
turning to poetry we find one doorway for the ineffable since we find that the
meaning can ,almost infinitely, exceed the meaning that is in the sum of the
words used. Such
meaning-making possibilities that the greatest poets and writers create, seem to
reverberate through all time and all space.
Such meaning transcends the you and me and our struggle to communicate
lineally, left-brain to left-brain.
In visiting such worlds that the poets create we seem to be freed
temporarily of the limitations of this world.
We seem to pass beyond the demands that come from this world of opposites
as is described in this short piece from Herman Hesse;
Our mind is capable
of passing beyond
the dividing line
we have drawn for it.
Beyond
the pairs of opposites
of which
the world consists,
other,
new insights begin.
-Herman Hesse