Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD January 30, 2015
Noetic education is my holistic critique of higher education and borrows salient points of view and practices from the arts and humanities, cognitive psychology, aesthetic education, systems theory, and the learning sciences. The fundamental point is that wholeness of being is healthier and more optimal than the narrow human development presently achieved by the fragmented nature of the academy, based too often on economic rationality, a disconnect between faculty interests and student needs, a shattered curriculum, and uncertain social purpose.
To properly educate a person requires attention be given to mental, physical, social, professional, and spiritual needs. It is essential to human wholeness that higher education nurtures the human spirit and its search for inner sense, leading to intellectual, psychological, and moral well being. When we learn to think with disciplined feeling, we relate to subject matters in terms of the human spirit, liberating ourselves from bondage of mindless habit, mechanized thinking, and fragmented talents. Noetic learning awakens a spirit of one’s entire being.
“Noetic,” from the Greek word nous, suggests multiple ways of knowing. Rooted in an epistemology of cognitive wholeness, Noetic education links objective and subjective learning. The analytical disciplines of higher education do not by themselves derive our full development. Noetic educational theory and practice enlarge the notion of intellect beyond instrumental reasoning to include perceptions of the body, since thinking and perceiving are not mutually exclusive. We need holistic systems that wed analytical skills of science, heuristic skills of the humanities, and expressive values of the arts. In that setting, abstract reason joins embodied intuition in service of mind-body-spirit liberation, expanding human consciousness.
Higher education suffers from limits of its rationalistic virtues. Learning unto wholeness means moving beyond seeing intelligence strictly as analytical efficiency and learning only in terms of what can be assed by tests of strict quantification. I do not propose, however, that we abandon the fundamental human project to grasp the world in rational terms. I do propose that we augment that project by adding tacit subjective knowledge, including self-reflection and contemplative practice. The goal is to achieve an intellectual pluralism that makes available to the mind more than objective logic, not less, and thereby implicating reason in creative expression, personal transformation, and ethical responsibility. Shall we finally implement programs of expansive knowing or continue to support impaired development?
An all-sided mind capable of thinking with the heart can escape the shackles of limited cognition. I advocate thinking that includes empathy with people, things, and events; I advocate feeling that includes a conscious and disciplined valuing of experience. At the heart of Noetic educational theory is practice of freedom – freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritative systems, freedom to creatively direct the human spirit and mobilize social action, freedom to become one’s own intellectual and artistic authority. Imaginative thought constitutes a poetic intelligence that is not a matter of right answers or correct use of language; it probes the essence of things, freely moving awareness through states of being.
A society that values cognitive freedom needs necessarily to support innovative forms of holistic education required of an informed citizenry capable of effective decision making and evaluation of competing claims to truth. Our humanity flourishes by creatively organizing experience in multiple ways. Noetic literacy integrates conceptual, aesthetic, and spiritual/transpersonal frameworks to help us assess events, synthesize knowledge, and gain insight into our personal and social humanity.
Noetic education advocates for continuous learning that touches the furthest reaches of being. Our personal evolution requires we learn from books and from one another as part of lived experience. Experiential learning enhances the endowed faculties of our humanity – reasoning, perception, judgment, moral preference, and intuitive discernment. Instrumental rationality and book learning by themselves partially educate a person, dividing the unity of critical and expressive knowing. From experiential knowing we learn that human intelligence is not simply a matter of how much can be grasped from books but how deeply we think and how responsibly we act when it is unclear what is to be done. It involves the integration of types of knowing with which to fashion a healthier self, capable of addressing intractable personal, social, spiritual, and ecological issues. As such, we may come to learn how to love, untying knots in the human heart.