Peter M. Rojcewicz. PhD

Bainbridge Island, WA

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Too often today what is valued in schools is ‘learning’ understood as the expedient manipulation of information handed down from books or delivered by teachers in order to exploit life for economic, professional, technological, career success, status, or power. As such, knowledge is ready-made and learning an externally driven affair, the mere reception and storage of facts or skills. In that way, schooling does little to enhance discernment and self-agency. Our schools must necessarily experience their own cognitive dissonance by coming to recognize the error in things they currently, or have longed believed, to be true, like the universal superiority of calculative reason over intuition and perspicacious knowing. They must recognize truths in suprarational systems of art, folk, and indigenous knowledge that they’ve rejected as false and superfluous to knowing reality. Deep holistic learning, on the other hand, is an active, arduous process of choice and decision-making, requiring rational and suprarational knowing in specific contexts. Authentic learning is a project of human completion, an existential intimacy of embodied cognition and intrinsic being.

Individuals carry an existential obligation to make apparent in the world their implicate Being whenever and wherever they speak, listen, learn, teach, or act. Manifesting our essential Being through education requires that we link the techno-sciences with a noetic literacy of learning in the arts and humanities, a fluency in ways of perspicacious knowing that are aesthetic, nondiscursive, tacit, implicit, informal, and intuitive, allowing us to ‘read’ and interpret competing claims to truth, discern veiled realities, and show up in novel ways at deep purpose in all that we do. This existential obligation requires we ‘see’ as an artist, ‘listen’ as a mediator, ‘think’ as an intellectual, and ‘touch’ others affectionately as a lover. An artist-self seeks the deep unseen; the mediator-self seeks peace and concord; the intellectual-self seeks truths and meanings; the lover-self humbly seeks the beloved. Acting upon those generative existential responsibilities engenders important healing permutations of self – personal, professional, aesthetic, social, spiritual. We become who we have always been but never realized but for the fragmentation of our implicate identity that results in our living in ‘bad faith.’

An existential turn in our schools away from fragmentation of mind/body, subject/object and toward personal authenticity and ‘good faith’ must, in addition, also be an ontological turn toward disclosure of Being through diverse curricula and pedagogies of meaningfulness and human completeness. As such, learning is valued as a whole-person victory that extends beyond the self to other selves through necessary resources engaged at a distance – human, technological, literary, communal, cultural, etc. However, when students merely receive and accumulate information or imitate skills without broad development of nonscientific aesthetic perception, intersensory reasoning, body-mind discernment, or moral preference through responsible acts in the world, they do not enhance what John Stuart Mill referred to in “On Liberty” as “the distinctive endowment of the human.” That troubled way leads to broken people.

Polarization and splitting reflect a dualistic logic between learning delivered from the outside and learning as an inner achievement and transformation. It is time now to turn to holistic, integral education. What is at stake is nothing less than healthy human development and social concord. When people are fundamentally split body from mind, and feelings from thinking, they suffer impairment of their consubstantial Being that can have lasting effects. A healthy society needs its citizens to be literate beyond language-based and number-based knowledge in order to support vital diversity of objective and subjective thought and expression. To this end, schools must develop curricula and co-curricular offerings that enhance more than instrumental and financial reasoning. Schools must be more than a recruitment agent of career preparation and employment. They must regain their footing as a premier agent of broad learning, capable of guiding people toward all-sided human completion and ethically responsible living with others and the one earth we share.

We stand in a critical place at an auspicious time that requires our appropriate and just measure of response to the epistemic and cognitive harm caused by human and cultural splintering. We must decide immediately whether to continue to support education’s numbers-based model of partial growth over human wholeness. We must critically engage the forces that polarize what should be a healthy bond between inter-sensory, intuitive awareness, and calculative thought. Unfortunately, education’s current cognicentric commitment to abstract, calculative reason as the only legitimate path to knowledge makes human fragmentation acceptable, human impairment permissible, and educational trauma inevitable. Ending the wounding of the integral nature of atypical, noetic, and neurodiverse learners caused by the present educational system is society’s dire responsibility. Failing in that, education presents, causes, and perpetuates its own pathology at the expense of a healthy nation.