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The Integral School (Part 2) |
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By Tyler Hartford
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
It’s hard to dispute the effectiveness of the western intellectual tradition. By dividing phenomena into the smallest observable components and specializing its studies, it has conquered many of the mysteries of the world and marched civilization into an era of awesome technological and scientific progress. The dominance of the West over the world in the arena of ideas and its ways of thinking is undeniable and proves its value to the world. If it is due the praise however, it is also due criticism. The massive challenges the world faces today – environmental, political, economic, and social – are the other side of the same coin.
If there is any common ground for the deficiencies and perils we face as a society, the halls of education, where we spend much of our youth, would be a great place to look. Any deep transformation of society and corresponding solution to our ills will have to focus there as well. Take for instance, issues such as political apathy, environmental degradation, and the ethics of business or scientific research. Taken all together, how much of your education made a lasting impression on you around these issues? Compared to the effect they have on the world, I am guessing that there’s a wide discrepancy. Adding a module on environmental issues to science class, for instance, doesn’t seem to solve the problem either. Dr. James Swan, in his book Nature as Teacher and Healer, points to studies showing there to be no correlation between traditional environmental education, such as increasing awareness of issues like pollution, and the decisions children make regarding these. If we are unable to influence these issues by including them as subjects of study, though, what remains?
Back to the march of progress for a moment: in addition to all the great developments, it has unfortunately left a good deal of calamity in its wake. We failed to foresee, for instance, that pesticides would be dangerous for all living things, that nuclear waste and weapons would haunt us forever, and that messing around with the DNA structure of our food would...., well, we’ll see. What could be the basis of this propensity toward myopia? David Orr, Chair of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, claims that the dominant form of education today “alienates us from life in the name of human domination, fragments instead of unifies, overemphasizes success and careers, separates feeling from intellect and the practical from the theoretical, and unleashes on the world minds ignorant of their ignorance.” Wow. That’s not good.
Sincerely though, the problem may stem from our style of thinking, a methodology that both influences how we learn and then is perpetuated by this learning. We have inherited a tradition which focuses on the separateness of parts at the expense of our awareness of the whole. Nearly all our methods of study stress this perspective. From the earliest years of our education, we divide our attentions over subjects and lessons, ages and aptitudes, and times appropriate for one activity or another, spending scarce contemplation on the interconnectivity of things. Single-minded focus, like a laser, can penetrate the frontier of our knowledge, bringing to light information critical to our process of learning. Without a continual reintegration with the context of our lives (community, environment, values, etc.), however, we risk losing relevance to or, worse, endangering the elements of that context. This is the path we continue to tread. Surely, we must continue to value progress and innovation, but until we begin to place more value in becoming mindful of our relationship to that which is around us, we will find ourselves managing the blow-back.
Studying the relationships between seemingly disparate things, building a more “ecological” perspective, searching the grey area between black and white, and owning the reality that the known is still infinitesimal in comparison to the unknown are all aspects to a more integral learning process and are fertile nutrients to the growth of a more equitable and harmonious world. In reality, there is seldom grounds for absolute certainty, whether on the moralistic scale of good and evil or in the field of knowledge over right and wrong. The creative tension of uncertainty, on the other hand, and the wonder which it yields, is the fuel for a life-long path of learning and intellectual flexibility.
Integral learning is taking root in many institutions of higher learning now, and also among some alternative models for youth. The work we are doing at the Central Coast Village Center is a prime example. Facilitating our student’s relationship with the natural world as a means of producing integral thinking and awareness is at the core of our programs. In combination with direct exposure to nature, developing a capacity for integral thinking will, in addition to a multitude of benefits for the students, create the future stewards of the environment and society.
The need to foster this learning now is greater than ever. A study published in February, 2008, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights for example, the growing alienation of our populace to nature. They find there has been “an ongoing and fundamental shift away from nature-based recreation” over the last three decades. They suggest “the root cause may be videophillia (a preference for indoor media activities).” Further, they conclude, “Declining nature participation has crucial implications for conservation efforts.” As David Adam puts it in his article in The Guardian, “contact with the environment produces more eco-friendly behaviour, … and people must be exposed to nature as children if they are to care about it as adults.” Reversing the trend and offering more integral learning opportunities are both core values at the CCVC, and in our new campaign getting kids “Outside Now!”
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