Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Lucca, Italy

…blatant problems of American democracy are directly related to, if not rooted in…epistemological and spiritual problems…where aesthetic, expressive, and spiritual dimensions are chronically undernourished, if not actively suppressed by schooling. – J Miller

Since the ultimate authority of life lies within the individual, there is nothing more important in life than to develop the innate tendency of the psyche to realize its wholeness. The psyche demands to be developed and to be made whole; obedience to this command is the highest good and the ultimate concern of life. – C.G. Jung

At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity. – Rachel Naomi Remensee

For those who give primacy to Ultimacy, full human development is seen as not only needed for an individual, but for society as a whole. Societies need fully developed humans, because it is the heroes of virtue…who are seen as the well-spring of cultural and social renewal. – Scott H. Forbes

According to A. Maslow… metapathology [means] ‘Impairment of self-development due to the failure to satisfy basic needs’. In contrast to Maslow’s metapathology, I refer to all disturbances, both existing in general and specific to humans, as metapathologia. My definition: Metapathology is a philosophical and religious consideration that deals with the question of disturbances of being that go beyond, but also include, all individual phenomena. Short: Metapathologia is the study of all possible disturbances. – Torsten Oettinger

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To stop education’s ongoing violent impairment of learning and disturbance of students’ sense of self, schools need a guiding story of pluralistic intelligence that joins analytical reason with hands-on, intersensory engagements. Schools need to orient learners not only to their important career-related mental capacities and professional skills but also to the strength of moral virtue, imaginative cognition, and individuation honed by the arts and humanities, that when wedded to the sciences, leads to wholeness. For this to occur, an imaginative exchange must exist at the core of education whose justification must be that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest for life by uniting what is traditional and what is emerging in an imaginative consideration of learning (Whitehead, The Aims of Education). Schools impart information, but fail to do so creatively. The proper center for any school is an abiding concern with valuing and developing the nature and diverse function of the cognitive imagination, the intuitive intelligence that is the core of all knowing, typical and noetic.

 A democratic society benefits when its schools embrace more than the intellect’s reduction to instrumental reasoning and economic rationality by increasing the diversity of intellectual perspectives, products, and performances, while raising the mean of all (Eisner 1998:50). American democracy is currently moribund in questionable epistemological and ideological presuppositions that have made society an agent of political, economic, and epistemic injustice. Truth is politicized; fiction is reality; morality is an expedient matter of self-interest; might makes right, God is on our side, and anyone not-me is suspect, villainized, or otherwise Othered. Ron Miller (2000:2) observes, “conventional education… strives to defend and fortify the imperfect social and economic structures…” and represents “…a massive, deliberate, and efficient mechanism for placing human energies at the disposal of the corporate state.” The story of healing education is my social critique and re-imagining of learning as a holistic, integral counter to disembodied, hyper-rational education that, by itself, undermines self-integrity, cognitive freedom, and ultimately weakens democratic social order. The democratic spirit of my project seeks to nurture and celebrate a diversity of people capable of “…never succumbing to a feeling of futility, or the belief that they have come to an end of what is worth having” (Mary Warnock 1978)

As a matter of mission, schools must necessarily prepare students with knowledge of how the world presently works. Because the world displays ongoing, turbulent, and discontinuous change triggered by international migrations, geo-political strife, volatile financial markets, systemic racism, planetary deterioration, globalization, and incursions into sovereign states, the ability to grasp the inner workings of the world is extremely rare. It is essential that graduates understand the chaotic, unpredictable processes at work, so as to perceive the sense of it all. Deane Nuebauer states, “Education at all levels needs to become in novel ways a theorizing activity and pervasive inquiry about the nature, order, and the way of things” (Globalization and Education, p.56). The fragmented world calls for different educational models to radically interrogate the ways knowledge is generated, disseminated, and retained. Neubauer points out that the historical standards that have generated taxonomies of our academic disciplines and professions must be replaced by “imperatives to understand the world in terms of processes and relations extant within it (Neubauer, p.57). Protracted problems of today and tomorrow will be systemic problems that defy solutions by any one specialty. Graduates will have to be comfortable working in cross-disciplinary teams that encourage multiple ways of knowing.Noetic literacy has been portrayed here as the ability to ‘read’ the warp and woof of our unique times, characterized by chance, emergence, synchronicity, liminality, emergence, patterns, and self-organizing systems across all domains of meaning.

With their legacy of noetic ways of understanding, the arts and humanities traffic in experience of ongoing change, the uncanny, the disenfranchised, and the ‘wild’. They satisfy the objective requirements of life and the subjective needs of spirit. They offer us a depth-poetics of meaning. However, because the arts and humanities have been for at least two decades in decline in America in favor of education as job preparation, things have taken a dark and dangerous turn. The role of the artist traditionally was to make its citizens believe not primarily in physical reality – i.e., the role of science and technology – but to believe in noetic and numinous things that could happen, that is, what is possible as being probable, or necessary. The irony is that the creative invitation of artists to indwell in visions of as-if has been hijacked by the ‘art’ of the con, lying in public, gas lighting, deflection, ghosting, media channels of ‘alternative facts’, and AI deep fake. It is a dark, distressing time.

Citizens across all meaning oriented professions need to support holistic and integral curricula and pedagogy that feature acquisition of adaptive psychosocial skills that include frustration tolerance, cognitive flexibility, resilience, ‘response-ableness’, transdisciplinarity, interdependence, ‘copeless-ness’, negative capability, noetic discernment of the difference between one possessing personal agency as a doer and the state of one being done to, and overcoming conviction confirmation bias. While obtaining an absolute and definitive knowledge of the world is unlikely, noetic based learning and inquiry through the arts and sciences, is the healing education for our directionless, soulless times. Healing education project must necessarily have strong roots in depth psychology, since self-understanding is pre-requisite for understanding the world and how it works.

Studying the depths of the psyche in its interior and exterior aspects, means schools need to make inquiries into the unconscious mind that is itself, like the present times, characterized by uncertainty, oppositions, supra-rationality, compensation, shadow, synchronicity, and self-organization, as expressed in dreams, revelations, active imagination, altered states, synchronicities, visions, and uncanny psychic phenomena. The re-storying of education of student and faculty healing via noetic literacy with its antimonial both/and logic closes subject-object splits offers the best approach to grasping the complexity of processes, relations, problems, dilemmas, and networks of global operations.

Schools in a democratic society must enhance the epistemological and cognitive pluralism required for effective decision making, problem solving, and evaluation of competing claims to truth. The reconstructive imagination, following Vico, is the tool to ‘enter into’ other cultures and enlarge ones’ fundamental Being, as a result. Imaginative cognition is necessary for our ethical decision making and comprehension of the subtleties of life. Cognitive diversity as expressed through the arts and humanities means we add more not less than logic to the mind of learners. At the heart of the healing education project is “the practice of freedom – freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritarian systems, freedom to structure creative energies to propel and direct the human spirit, freedom to become one’s own intellectual authority” (Rojcewicz, Current Musicology 2001:111). The learner, “develops the capacity to move among worldviews, transcending particular identities while simultaneously honoring each of them” (Zajonc, Kosmos Journal, Vol. V, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2006 www.kosmosjournal.org).

Cognitive freedom means ‘thinking’ with critical disciplined feeling and ‘feeling’ with conscious evaluation of experience that leads to knowledge prized not exclusively for its effective utility, but also for its essential truth, and potential for transformation. My healing education project travels a middle way between subjectivism and cognitivism. For example, Gerhard Grössing notes that one is often “confronted with Albert Einstein’s statement that the setting of principles (axioms), which are intended to link up the elements of experience in a meaningful way, will not be accomplished through a logical method but only through an  ‘intuitive (psychological) connection’, whereby he meant that the ‘free creation of the human  mind´ is an indispensable part of theory construction.” Similarly, Noam Chomsky held, “It is quite possible … that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” On the other end of the continuum of either/or worldviews are those who believe in the incontestable authority of scientific empiricism. Francis Bacon asserted that scientific “knowledge is power.” Freud referenced “Our God, Logos.” Maturana asserted that “to live is to know” ontic apodictic knowledge. By themselves alone, neither non-cognitivism nor cognitivism leads to development of a balanced, all-sided humanity and the fullness of life (Quotes in this paragraph are found in Torsten Oettinger, “The Absolute and Pseudo-absolute – Basics of Different Realities”).

Today’s intractable problems are systemic challenges that defy solutions via single worldviews and individual disciplinary approaches. Noetic learners are well suited to work in transdisciplinary teams that require a broad portfolio of ways of perceiving, knowing, acting, and making. We understand the accompanying growing pains from opening to new perspectives when old institutional policies, structures, and configurations no longer serve students’ greatest needs. We should ‘play’ innovatively with the structures dividing typical from atypical learners to the mutual benefit of students and society. We should overcome the brittle territorialism school overseers hold regarding rational, objective, and techno-scientific disciplines and practices. Knowledge found in broad based arts and humanities “expose the contingency of present arrangements” and “unearths a priori[s] buried in present assumptions…” (Sameer Pandya, Miller-McCune, Online Smart Journalism. Real Solution, July 29, 2010, 11:47 am). Atypical learning modalities that implicate emotions, interpersonal engagement, intuition, and extended sentience are adaptable to effectively address racism, nationalism, global warming, neoliberalism, and planetary degradation that require more than rational or technological approaches. Noetic modalities flexibly serve personal and socio-political needs by honoring human idiosyncratic wisdom across knowledge of arts and humanities, multicultural, folk, and indigenous carriers of wisdom.

Healing education project is my ‘constructive postmodern’ (David Ray Griffin 1992), holistic critique of today’s dominant worldview that is excessively material, exterior, objective, and dualistic. It places integral importance upon the interior and exterior dimensions of individual and collective life composing a whole. Healing education theory augments the notions of intelligence and human excellence when perceived strictly through lenses of techno-science, specialization, hyper-rationality, and neoliberal standards that serve corporate needs over broad-based educational outcomes. Part of education ‘healing’ its own illness will come from dethroning its underlying fantasy of intelligence as residing within a single factor ‘G’ (Mesa Foundation). This fantasy promotes the idea that real meaning, research, teaching, and truth depend on a single, unified vision of cognition. My educational project is a working meditation on authentic broad-based learning from a perspective of pragmatic idealism. As an educator and a poet, I am an idealist seeking to practically realize holistic values and integral outcomes through the arts and humanities, looking to poetry, folklore, mythology, depth psychology, and indigenous wisdom systems. The task requires a rethinking not only of education at all levels, but also of the teaching roles of faculty, family, community, and cultural institutions that influence learning, knowledge, and human development. This enormous undertaking must be accepted without cynicism or despair, for deep, transformative learning may take place informally where it is noticed least, as a “learning beyond any teaching” (Hillman (Re-Visioning Psychology).

We currently witness a contagion of fragmentation throughout education. Reflecting the “worldwide pandemic of polarization” (Kirk Schneider, The Polarized Mind), 2013, p1, 5), schools have fixated on limited sets of reductive, exclusionary values to the omission of arts, ‘spirituality’ (Laurel H. Campbell and P. London), and greater epistemological and cognitive diversity that would augment normative standards that perpetuate human alienation, disjunction, decay, and conflict. My point is that school curricula based primarily on either quantitative science, or the qualitative arts are by themselves inadequate and have contributed to the polarization of society. The healing education initiative highlights the intersection of multiple academic and tacit forms of cognition and envisions a noetic humanity open to all images of selfhood, subordinate to none (Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man)). To heal the fragmented nature of education itself and thereby offer citizens learning experiences that mend their mental, emotional, and spiritual splits, we must avoid the romanticizing of atypical non-discursive knowing as superior epistemic events and the senseless discrediting of scientific knowledge and practice. Both forms of knowledge are essential to a salubrious self, vibrant life, and concordant society. And yet, education typically ignores atypical knowledge.

We stand at a crossroads and must decide whether to continue to support an educational model that cripples diverse learners or begin to pursue human and environmental wholeness. We must not avoid this ethical challenge, no matter how strongly we may believe that normative, numbers-based quantification methods guarantee the correctness of the techno-sciences. Education at all levels suffers from the limits of its rationalistic and techno-scientific virtues.   Education privileges and then separates the hard sciences from the human sciences is a “disguised moral discourse,” producing widespread human, socio-political, and ecological calamities (Jennifer M. Gidley, Evolving Education: A Postformal-integral-planetary Gaze at the Evolution of Consciousness and the Educational Imperatives – Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Education, Southern Cross University, May 2008). As we make human splitting and the marginalization of groups acceptable by disconnecting learning from the larger ethical questions of humanity and everyday life, we make the sickness unto education allowable and student trauma inevitable. We must leverage upward personal and social fragmentation like scattered seed for noetic flowering. Education itself is the problem; and education is the solution. Let us ‘re-story’ schooling, learning, and learners in ways that restore an all-sided formation to human development. Let us cease imposing upon nonconventional learners arbitrary, academic identities that reflect not the splendor of their implicate uniqueness but the stupor of mass identity and culture.