5  Nurturing the human spirit - the heart of the SunWALK model of holistic education

In my own model the domain where I really want simplicity is in the understanding the teacher has of what he or she is doing in teaching pupils.  What is in her, or his, heart, clear as a bell, as s/he faces the class and manages the lesson.   Teachers need such clarity and certainty and secure foundation.   Primary school teachers in the UK were supposed, under the hideous National Curriculum, to face classes with 210 Attainment Targets in mind.  Multiply these210 Attainment Targets with I don’t know how many other factors.  Multiply the product of that with the number of children, since all were supposed to have individual learning paths.  Hell enshrined in policy.  “Truth is a single point; the ignorant hath multiplied it.”  

My answer here is very simple.  All education is about one task, and one task only; and that is nurturing the human spirit, within the community of humankind.   

Perhaps you will go with me if I suggest, as a metaphor, that we could consider that that human spirit is, in a person, white light.    Then imagine that, as in the world of colour there are three primary colours.  Then imagine that all human expression is a mixture of those three primary colours.  Then imagine that those three primary colours are caring, creativity and criticality.  

This light in the first form is chi or ki or id or in Rollo May’s wonderful book Love and Will it is the daimon.  All such names refer to the life-force, that drives us on.    It is spirit that then manifests as mind and body and soul.  This is the inner world of being human, which, as we evolve through early childhood, becomes consciousness.   Teachers like parents are both in the business of nurturing the human spirit in children, of raising consciousness, but in somewhat different contexts.

In practice caring, creativity and criticality are three modes of engagement, engagement that we have firstly with the world-at-large and secondly with the self.   From the interaction between caring creativity and criticality, from within the person, and interaction with the world-at-large, or with the self, capabilities grow.

The fourth ‘c’ is community  since the human spirit is only ever developed in community, starting with family and local community and school classroom.   

These four then are the teacher’s task, that is nurturing of the human spirit;

caring,

creativity,

criticality,

in community, including in the spirit of service to others.

Nurturing the 3Cs, and facilitating the class as community that’s it – the rest is mere information.   In the absense of true undersatnding politicians especially always fall back on the transmission of information.  Apart from a notion that even idiots can understand it also has the advantage, as Freire taught us in his banking metaphor of education, of wielding power.

But information is the fuel not the fire.   The fire is the human spirit; caring, being creative or exercising criticality.    Concerning the secondary position of information you will recall the wonderful rhetorical questions of T.S. Eliot

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Someone apparently added, “And where is the information we have lost in data?”  Each of these steps is progressively de-humanizing as we move downwards from wisdom toward data.   As we move downward we move further from the human image, being custodian of which Huston Smith says, is the central concern of the humanities.    The downward staircase: wisdom – knowledge – information – data.   Data is where it is hardest to see the image of being human, data is smart bombs from 30,000 feet.   Even information informs, and therefore that brings the possibility of transformations and therefore of moving up to toward wisdom, but data without a secure, inclusive, context of being human is the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire. 

            Here we are saying that the task of education is to develop heart and mind and creativity and social capabilities such as teamwork.   These are permanent in their importance.  Information isn’t – do you think that information, and the particular ordering of information that is current will be the same in ten year’s time?

The 4 Cs that’ it, that’s all you do, but, and here is the nub of the matter, you must always do all four, have all four running.    This is not to say they should all be fully present in a single lesson, though they can well be.   So long as there is balance over a number of days or weeks, balance that is between intense engagement in all four Cs.   When all four are present that is when the chance of magic is greatest.

What happens when all four aren’t together?   The answer is you get the kind of problem that exists in respect of moral education.  Moral education is the four Cs – in the light of higher-order values.  Moral education is not a thing, a programme to be added, as a bolt-on extra.  It is a dimension of being, of caring and creating and exercising criticality – in community with others, and in the light of sources of higher-order values.  So the teacher knows what she or he has to teach – human beings, being positively and fully human as judged by the great spiritual and wisdom traditions.

Similarly where does meaning come from – it comes from the four C’s plus values.  Similarly my answer to the supreme question, “What is it to be human, fully and positively?”  My answer is that it lies in being caring, creative and in criticality  - in community - in the light of higher-order values.

This view of the human spirit and the 4Cs is the heart of the model I have been developing, which I have named SunWALK.   The human spirit is at the centre of a set of seven sub-models.  There is no time to even touch upon them.  

SunWALK refers to Willing Action through Loving and Knowing in the light of the Sun of higher-order values.   Everyone’s set of higher-order values comes from a different variety of sources, but they are nevertheless the means by which the path of life is illumined.    The comedian Dave Allen always ends his programmes, “May your God go with you.”   We all walk the path of our lives in the light of the best we can construe of what God, or Truth, Beauty and Goodness, is.   We need to help children explore the fact that the Sun that  illumines the paths of their lives stems from two sources.   Firstly it stems from that which we internalise unthinkingly.   BUT increasingly, as they get older, it is a matter of what, or with whom, they choose to identify - insofar as they can resist media manipulation.  The 4 Cs approach makes possible self-transformation.  It provides deep engagement and enables children to develop early in social and moral capabilities as well as intellectual virtues – several or many years ahead of their peers in my experience.