Holistic Education

By Mary M. Leue

 

 

I recently spent a day with Ron Miller, who has been very much in the lead in holistic educational thinking. We agreed that holistic education is not really a systematic viewpoint for a school, as is, for example, Steiner's Waldorf program. It is a perspective on teaching and learning which involves a number of conceptual elements &endash; one of which might be, for example, Dewey's notion of a student as a "whole child," not just an entity to be trained for results in skills learning.

 

It is a philosophy of thinking and feeling that is based on respect for the child and his developmental, spiritual, behavioral, social, emotional and physical needs. The implications are that each child must be understood on an individual basis and his particular needs addressed, such that he becomes increasingly open to enhancing his own life offerings as a total human being.

 

That's a huge task, and I cannot imagine any actual school of which I am aware being able to fulfill all of the needs of all children in this holistic manner. Nor do I know any that do so. I need to add that I personally would be highly suspicious of any school that labeled itself "holistic." I would worry that such a label for a new school would tend to attract teachers and parents who would be least able to fulfill the role or understand the real needs of a schoolful of children through implementing a "holistic curriculum" or program.

 

In my opinion, such needs can only be understood fully through having lived in a school which was clearly open to allowing children to explore their own territory and discover what they needed and wanted from their environment. Otherwise idealism on the part of a teacher who took her task seriously might tend to cloud her vision to the actual impact she might be having on some one child - or she might consider it her role to direct him toward a pattern of learning that went against his own inner instincts or the source of his creativity. John Gatto's book, A Different Kind of Teacher, describes this concept of teaching very eloquently.

 

You can read several incisive commentaries about John's book on my website at www.spinninglobe.net/diffteach.htm/ The beauty of John Gatto's understandings is that he has worked with some of the most vulnerable children (as have we in The Free School) one could have chosen - the kind one finds in inner city schools - for whom ineffective teaching is epidemic - not because the teachers aren't qualified, but because their qualifications simply do not apply to these children.

 

I would suggest that the most important ingredient in a teacher's offerings would be the willingness and capacity to withhold the temptation to take over and direct the child into one activity or another, one learning or another, and thereby foreclose the child's own creative élan and instinct. There is a wonderful article by Hanna Greenberg on this subject, which you might do well to look at, called "The Art of Doing Nothing," by Hanna Greenberg. You can see Hanna's article on my website at www.spinninglobe.net/nothing.htm

 

Another article that spells out very movingly the kind of therapeutic interventions that may occasionally be needed when "the art of doing nothing" is not an appropriate or effective response to the need of a specific child is an article, "Fixing a Desk, Mending a Mind," by Chris Mercogliano, director of The Free School, from his book, Making It Up As We Go Along, which describes one kind of response to such vulnerabilities. It's on my website at www.spinninglobe.net/fixart.html

 

Another one of Chris' articles that describes the gamut of doing/non-doing which constitutes a good teacher's repertory is "The Therapeutic School" - also on my website at www.spinninglobe.net/healschool.htm/ Knowing when it is appropriate to inspire a child by presenting her/him with certain interventions, skills learnings or curricular offerings and when it might disastrous to do so - this kind of discrimination can only be acquired by having been a part of a school which understands such differences, some of which may involve therapeutic understandings, not just pedagogical concepts, depending on the needs of all the children enrolled in the school. Most non-public schools screen out "special children" (e.g., emotionally disturbed) by category, and so teachers in such schools are not trained to function therapeutically when it may actually be appropriate.

 

If you haven't heard of any holistic schools, it may be because "holism" encompasses all of these considerations, and founding a school on all of them would be an oxymoron, in that a new school would be as yet totally untried by experience, and so could not possibly BE holistic. Ron himself started a school for the younger grades called Bellwether School, near Burlington, VT, which is still going strong, and getting bigger every year. When I asked him if he considers it "holistic," he said no. It was to be a school which would be based on humanistic principles and enjoyment of the experience, and it works well using such criteria - but he told me he specifically does not believe in labeling a school as holistic.

 

I do not believe that Scott Forbes, whose book on holistic education comes out of the doctorate he completed at Oxford University a few years ago, who believes fully in holistic principles, and who founded and headed a school for many years dedicated to the teachings of Krishnamurti - Brockwood Park, in Hampshire, UK &endash; would call his school holistic. Although the school may run according to the holistic principles he has written about, it has never been labeled a holistic school. Nor should it be.

 

I visited Brockwood Park some years ago and I found it a good, humanistic school with student participation and excellent teachers, but I would never call it holistic. For one thing, it is closely tied into the English national examinations system - as it has to be. Every one of the classes I visited was working solely on the exam elements the students needed to know in order to pass those examinations. The same thing could be said of most American schools, public or private. Calling such schools holistic would make for such logical incompatibility with holistic principles as to reduce the concept to an empty generalization.

 

Holism can be a guiding principle, and should be - and it may even be a result of years of a school's existence - but it's like a recipe in a cookbook. Calling it holistic does not guarantee that it actually is holistic. The proof of the pudding principle is ALWAYS in the eating - that's the telling ingredient here.