Holistic education, expanded perspectives on learning, spiritual foundations of education, contemplative practice. Don't these phrases, all used today by mainstream education organizations, sound familiar? Haven't we heard them before? Didn't the California crowd, egged on by books like George Leonard's Education and Ecstasy (1968), try to bring flower-child wisdom into the curriculum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with little effect?
Yes, but like the media movement and open classrooms of the same neoprogressive years, the proponents of quick change were often naively zealous. They were working from a slim theoretical base, little sense of tradition, and scant research support. Mainstream education associations and rank-and-file teachers saw the innovators as out-landers, energetic but easily dismissed.
Things are different today. First, the work of respected educational theorists and researchers—Jerome Allender, James Moffett, Nel Noddings, Parker Palmer, Sandra Perl, Gabriele Rico, and others—undergirds the current spiritual pedagogies. Educators are looking seriously at the broader implications of ideas like Gardner's intrapersonal intelligence (1983), Goleman's emotional intelligence (1995), and Miller's contemplative practitioner (1994).
Second, the word holistic, as used in academic and popular contexts, has advanced the idea of the interconnectedness of the learner, the teacher, school subject areas, local and global communities, the planet, and indeed the cosmos. Young Rebecca Gibbs expressed this interconnectedness in Thornton Wilder's Our Town: Rebecca: I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. . . . The address was like this. It said: Jane Crofut, The Crofut Farm, Grover's Corners, Second County, New Hampshire, United States of America.George: What's funny about that?Rebecca: But listen, it's not finished: The United States of America, Continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, the Mind of God—that's what it said on the envelope. (Wilder, 1985, p. 45)
Rebecca's sense of wonder has made its way into our institutional consciousness.
Third, the current interest in integrated curriculum runs parallel to recent important interdisciplinary links. Capra's The Web of Life (1996) and Waldrop's Complexity (1992) describe the revolutionary connections among disparate subjects like physics; biology; the performing, graphic, and literary arts; cybernetics; mathematics; economics; transpersonal psychology; Jungian theory; and Eastern, Native American, and Western philosophies.
Illuminating supradisciplinary concepts such as participatory consciousness (Heshusius, 1994) and enactive cognition (Davis & Sumara, 1997) are entering the vocabulary of educational research in mainstream scholarly journals. These connections have contributed to ever-expanding conceptions of the universe and of the brain, mind, and spirit of the learner.
Edging into the Mainstream
Teachers at all levels are exploring inventively. Jane Tompkins and Martha Simmons (1998) of Duke University talk to college colleagues about "becoming contemplative teachers." John Creger (1998) of American High School in Fremont, California, presents course designs and classroom experiences that cultivate "spiritual insight through literature and writing." Cherry Hamrick, a Utah 4th grade teacher, gives a workshop with author Jon Kabat-Zinn on how she incorporates such mindfulness activities as body scans, Hatha yoga, and meditation into her classes (Kabat-Zinn, 1995). The pages of the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning and Holistic Education Review and books like Writing from the Inner Self (Hughes, 1994) give a sense of the range of teaching techniques and disciplines involved in spiritually oriented education.
A growing body of empirical research also supports spiritually oriented teaching and learning by suggesting that methods like imaging and meditation are not inherently connected with organized religions, even though some techniques originated in religious traditions (Suhor, 1994). This distinction holds true in adult education programs. T'ai chi is not taught as an initiation into Taoism. Transcendental meditation and yoga programs are not apologetics for Hinduism.
Many social customs with religious roots have become part of our public, nonreligious liturgy. Halloween activities are an affirmation of neither Wiccan nor Christian beliefs. Mardi Gras is not celebrated by Catholics alone. The commonplace "goodbye" began as "God be with ye," yet no one would call it militant theism. So it is—or should be—in public education. Our pluralism gives us access to many traditions, and there is no good reason to go witch hunting (or Fundamentalist hunting) whenever exotic cultures are studied, Handel's Messiah is performed, or silence is invoked as a relaxation exercise.
But in the current climate, good reasoning is often absent. Both right- and left-wing critics vigorously attack real or imagined instances of spirituality in public education. After years of claiming that godless secular humanism was taking over our schools, in the mid-1980s Fundamentalist Christians began tilting at Satanic windmills. In 1989 they began a series of protests and lawsuits, mainly unsuccessful, against alleged witchcraft, paganism, and other occult influences that they "saw" in an elementary textbook series. In New York, a conservative Catholic lawyers' group is currently challenging the teaching of world mythologies and relaxation techniques, which they see as evidence of indoctrination into "New Age religion"—a term for which they offer tendentious and contradictory definitions.
Left-wing critics correctly see the Fundamentalists' efforts as attempts to impose conservative Christian doctrinal views and practices on public school students. But these critics, like their right-wing counterparts, wrongly perceive experiences centering on spirituality, transcendence, and holism as just another way of introducing sectarian beliefs and prayers into the classroom.
Ideologues on all sides fail to recognize that powerful nondoctrinal definitions of spirituality and transcendence have evolved. Examples abound. Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in psychotherapy, describes transcendent experience clinically as the feeling that one's consciousness has expanded ego boundaries and gone beyond limitations of space and time (1985). Novelist Salman Rushdie, writing as an atheist before his reconversion to the Islamic faith, defined transcendence as "that flight of the human spirit outside the confines of its material, physical existence, which all of us, secular or religious, experience on at least a few occasions" (1990, p. 103).
Abraham Maslow's studies of peak experiences and self-actualizing people led him to conclude that saintliness, transcendence, and creativity can be regarded as religious in the traditional sense or as nonreligious. He also believed that truly inclusive science examines the data of transcendence (1970). Social psychologist Erich Fromm (1963), widely known as an advocate of atheism, acknowledged that experiences of transcendence can be interpreted as theistic or nontheistic.
At workshops and conferences, I have met teachers who balk at applying terms like spirituality and transcendence to public education. But interestingly, virtually all these teachers report significant, life-enhancing experiences that can be accurately described by those words.
The Power of Experience
The test of personal experience is a key. If we have had transporting life experiences that we value above others, surely we should be willing to bring at least some of them into the classroom and the curriculum. We cannot directly transmit such experiences, but we can often set the conditions for their occurrence in classrooms. Education is a sorry enterprise if we teach little of what we ourselves acknowledge to be the central and defining experiences in our lives.
Transcendent experiences fall into squiggly categories. Instead of shoehorning complex states of mind and feeling into some sort of taxonomy, I propose rough categories that appear to advance dialogue about worthwhile human experiences and about whether and how they can be taught.
Aesthetic experience. Most adults have been powerfully elevated by some art form, whether as artist-maker or recipient-perceiver. Some of our most profound aesthetic experiences come when we create works of art, even if what we produce is less than masterful. I am neither a Buddy nor an Adrienne Rich, but some of my finest experiences have come while playing drums or writing. The pleasure of creating and the glow of insight are not reserved for those who produce only the highest art.
Creative artists in one field often take special pleasure in works from another. For novelist Iris Murdoch (Murdoch & Krishnamurti, 1984), viewing paintings has delivered high-level aesthetic experience. For poet, novelist, and essayist Imamu Baraka, blues and jazz were the favored transporting arts (Baraka, 1963); for biologist-writer Lewis Thomas (1975), the music of Bach and Mahler. But almost everyone has known the joy of reaching some aesthetic peak. If we are lucky, we can return to where the joy of art revives the spirit.
Person-to-person contact. The most accessible spiritual experiences are deep love for, and close communication with, other people. Most of us have had ego-transcending experiences connected with our love of parents, spouses, children, siblings, or friends.
Many teachers testify to times of sustained joy in the classroom. Elementary teachers know the enchantment of reading to small children and hearing their delightful responses. Secondary teachers have experienced those magically engrossing class discussions during which shared reflections and feelings form an almost palpable web of connectedness.
Intensive discussions outside the classroom often generate a sense of unified consciousness. Intimate dinner conversations with friends, heady discussions among students in dorms, and a telephone call to share feelings with a far-away loved one can all be suffused with spiritual energy.
Inner experience. This category focuses on blissful states achieved through meditation and prayer and perhaps through cognitive introspection and metacognitive understanding. The practice of meditation and contemplation, whether in religious or secular contexts, is often a transporting spiritual experience. Intellectual self-analysis tends toward self-absorption rather than transcendence, but it can be a vehicle for discovering affect and can yield flashes of self-understanding that move one beyond a closed-in sense of the self. Such self-discovery is often a goal in psychological counseling.
Jacques Maritain (1955) called any powerful subjective insight by the name of poetry. The poetic insight, fundamentally the same as that of Archimedes crying "Eureka" when he discovered the law of hydrostatics, might be that of a stockbroker seeing relationships in market data, of a mathematician perceiving a symmetry that generates a new formula, or of a writer—you or I—discovering the most apt phrasing for an idea. Understood in that way, many of us can report inner experiences in which we have glimpsed a thrilling truth and had a sudden, refreshing sense of spaciousness.
Communing with nature. There is no shortage of testimony about deeply moving experiences of oneness with nature. From William Wordsworth to Dylan Thomas to Annie Dillard to you and me, naturalists and ordinary people have been enthralled with aspects of nature. Western societies, particularly the industrialized nations, are not highly conducive to bonding people with their natural surroundings. Nevertheless, people often speak with deep conviction about moments of communion with nature. Sunsets, mountain paths, seasides, forests, even hurricanes and snowstorms—all have been cited as peak spiritual experiences.
My urban-bound life has included only a few outdoor experiences, many of them downright unpleasant. (I enjoy nature until the mosquitoes show up.) But with spirituality, as with other kinds of human growth and personal enrichment, individual differences must be recognized. These differences can be mutually instructive when we discuss experiences that have been unique and important to each of us.
Sensory experience. Although sensory experience would seem to trap us in attentiveness to the body, sensory joy is by no means synonymous with ego-glut or hedonism. The "high" experienced by athletes brings an unmistakably spiritual release. The disciplines of t'ai chi, aikido, and fencing, when executed with excellence to the point of unselfconsciousness, carry the aesthetic and spiritual energy of ballet.
The sensory and the spiritual are connected in many ways, some of them little explored and difficult to articulate. Many women name childbirth as a miraculously transporting experience, painful as it is. The taste of food, particularly when orchestrated in a brilliant meal, can approach the sense of sacrament. Sexual experience is another sensory realm that often yields a sense of transcendent union, especially in the context of love and commitment. These are wonderful areas for honest personal reflection. Many of these experiences, of course, are clearly out of bounds for direct evocation in precollegiate settings.
Extrasensory experience. To my surprise, educators with whom I have worked are not timid in talking about their extrasensory experiences. Perhaps the fields of parapsychology and transpersonal psychology—which deal with clairvoyance, distance healing, out-of-body experiences, telekinesis—are gaining widespread acceptance. Also, people are simply becoming confident enough about their personal experiences to overcome the fear of being called weird by skeptics. The divided scientific community is tilting toward viewing paranormal phenomena as data, even setting up experiments to test manifestations of extrasensory experiences. (See especially the interviews with Willis Harmon, Beverly Rubick, and Larry Dossey in DiCarlo [1996].)
Ceremony and ritual. In Western culture, we are rightfully cautious of the manipulative power of ritual and ceremony. In the United States, we have perversely contrived to justify our own suspicions by staging "spontaneous" political demonstrations; faking miraculous cures on television; and setting audiences up for coerced poignancy, mandatory hugging, and routine standing ovations.
But we lose sight of the fact that rituals and ceremonies are not always phony or maudlin. Many are highly spiritual, involving multisensory experiences that cut across categories. At a jazz funeral, a fine communal sadness is experienced during the dirge en route to the cemetery and again afterwards in the lively music, dancing, and joyful celebration of life of the recessional jazz parade. The elevation of the Host at a Catholic Mass, especially as embedded in the sensory richness of the old-order High Mass in Latin, can be extraordinarily generative of group consciousness of the Divine, as understood in traditional Christianity.
Other. I include here experiences that are not well described by the categories discussed so far. For example, one teacher said that learning a foreign language gave her a fine sense of "flow." This report is consistent with T. S. Eliot's comment that knowing a second language is like having a second self. The second language gives us access to different sonic, kinesthetic, and cultural realities. And so it goes.
The Classroom as Spiritual Garden
Given the high value we place on experiences that profoundly connect us with our inner selves, other individuals, communities, nature, and all the others on Thornton Wilder's all-embracing address list, which experiences can we translate into the curriculum and classroom? How can we best go about it?
Certain experiences are inaccessible or wholly inappropriate in K–12 education. Life experiences of parental love, the heights of contemplative bliss, and sexual ecstasy are not ours to give. Even so, all teachers, regardless of their subject areas, can identify appropriate spiritual experiences and consider components of the curriculum and conditions of classroom instruction that are likely to evoke spiritual or transcendent experiences.
A few principles and practices have already been suggested. Inducing insight, in Jacques Maritain's broad sense of the term, isn't a new idea (1995). The trick is to bend the instructional environment toward insight without becoming formulaic. Step-by-step approaches to discovery, forced or routine brainstorming and hypothesis making, and relentlessly linear Socratic questioning are unlikely to generate the spark of new understanding. Only a genuine atmosphere of inquiry will allow students to relax sufficiently to think adventurously and to take the risks that lead to an authentic "Aha!" experience.
The same lack of strain must underlie specific techniques, such as those mislabeled "New Age" by anxious conservatives. Inviting students to participate in a guided imagery exercise or asking them to open their minds and feelings to the invigorating emptiness of meditation must take place in an atmosphere of peaceful trust. Not all students will be comfortable with such techniques, any more than all are comfortable with spelling bees, small-group work, or computer keyboarding. A sensitive teacher will know when a particular technique is usable and whether the students' responses are crisp, ambivalent, or mechanical.
The signs that insight-glimpsing experiences are happening in a classroom might be a spontaneous laugh, grunt, or grin; a student's well-turned, often metaphorical phrase; a thoughtful statement that surprises even the speaker; a pleased or troubled glance; an excitedly raised hand; or even an inarticulate attempt at orally formulating an insight. Witnessing these moments of enlightened growth is one of the great pleasures of teaching.
Extraordinarily intense class discussions resemble what Maslow (1970) called "plateau experiences." Such discussion presupposes both rapport and engaging subject matter and builds from those bases in unpredictable ways.
Teachers of performing arts, of course, have a special advantage in bringing heightened awareness into the classroom. They have on hand the very stuff from which high levels of aesthetic experience are made. In teaching the performing arts, we often traffic in the direct evocation of joy. Even a technical breakthrough, like executing a difficult musical passage effectively, can be an epiphany to a struggling student.
Teachers of literature also have a special role. Beyond helping students become directly enthralled with the ideas, feelings, and language of literature itself, they show students how literature can give them vicarious entry into worlds outside their direct experience. Through literary study, students can achieve a tender readiness for response to experiences—in nature, various art forms, rich ceremony, parent-child love, and contemplative bliss.
Too often, language arts teachers teach about wonderful things without invoking the sense of wonder that makes them worth teaching. A desire to "cover" the Romantic Period or the metaphysical poets takes primacy over being swept into the romantic sensibility or dwelling within the refined ecstasy of a metaphysical conceit.
The same is true of overly technical or cognitive approaches to any subject. When the eye is fixed solely on future results, whether advanced placement tests, spring band or choral concerts, or championship basketball games, we lose sight of helping students be present to the here-and-now joys of literature, music, athletics, and other areas of study.
Spirituality grows in classrooms when teachers see themselves as agents of joy and conduits for transcendence, rather than merely as licensed trainers or promoters of measurable growth. Surely the latter roles are important, but they are not why we educate. Many of the most worthwhile things in our lives are already implicit in the curriculum, waiting for us to bring their real presence to our students.
