Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Our postindustrial information age is acutely aware of the role of method in the critical questioning of assertions of knowledge. “How do we, and how can we know this or that?” “What are the criteria, credentials, and standards that serve as foundations for truthful claims to know something?” While at first blush such questions may seem overly philosophical, our failure to adequately address them can and often does have injurious effects on learners.

Students frequently enter school with a hidden implicate identity, that is to say, a sense of selfhood existing before and beyond educational categorical identification. Their unique identity is largely shaped by unconventional ways of knowing and sense-making of the world. Students, whose core being stems from anomalous epistemologies, are often ridiculed as non-academic, shamed as ‘slow’ learners, or marginalized in tracks for learning-disabilities or transgressive students. Their multi-perspectival consciousness, fashioned from unconscious, instinctual, intuitive, or tacit everyday awareness, is not valued within the narrow cognitive portfolio of acceptable learning, labeled instead as a kind of katabasis, to be understood here as a fall from academic grace.

Consequently, noetic learners are often held back from grade-level progression not because they are not smart, but because their school suffers from a naive reductionism regarding the notion of intelligence. Education today lacks of a pluralistic view of knowing and knowledge and is therefore unable to recognize the value of alternative knowing within a vision of excellence and human wholeness. Neurodiverse learners, who if they lived in other cultural and learning contexts would be considered ‘gifted,’ suffer concussive outcomes in our schools from which many never recover. This is but one aspect of the current ‘sickness unto earning’ that plagues American education.

My noetic education project is a call to members of the Academy to do all they can to instigate shifts toward more integral ways of conceptualizing learning, knowledge, intelligence, and a more fully formed human being, as part of its generative mission. We must do what we can to end educational trauma.