Holistic education

Holistic education is a relatively new movement, which began taking form as an identifiable area of study and practice in the mid-1980s in North America. It is a philosophy of education based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to humanitarian values such as compassion and peace. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning, gives attention to experiential learning, and places significance on 'relationships and primary human values within the learning environment.' The term holistic education is often used to refer to the more democratic and humanistic types of alternative education. Holistic education is a relatively new movement, which began taking form as an identifiable area of study and practice in the mid-1980s in North America. It is a philosophy of education based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to humanitarian values such as compassion and peace. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning, gives attention to experiential learning, and places significance on 'relationships and primary human values within the learning environment.' The term holistic education is often used to refer to the more democratic and humanistic types of alternative education. It is difficult to map the history of holistic education, as in some respects its core ideas are not new but 'timeless and found in the sense of wholeness in humanity's religious impetus'. The explicit application of holistic ideas to education has a clear tradition, however, whose originating theorists include: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Johann Pestalozzi, andFriedrich Fröbel. More recent theorists are Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, Francis Parker, John Dewey, Francisco FerrerJohn Caldwell Holt, George Dennison Kieran Egan, Howard Gardner, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, and Paulo Freire. Many scholars feel the modern 'look and feel' of holistic education coalesced through two factors: the rise of humanist philosophies after World War II and the cultural paradigm shift beginning in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s, after the holism movement in psychology became much more mainstream, 'an emerging body of literature in science, philosophy and cultural history provided an overarching concept to describe this way of understanding education – a perspective known as holism.' In July 1979, the first National Holistic Education Conference took place at the University of California at San Diego. The conference was presented by The Mandala Society and The National Center for the Exploration of Human Potential and was titled, Mind: Evolution or Revolution? The Emergence of Holistic Education. For six years after, the Holistic Education Conference was combined with the Mandala Holistic Health Conferences at the University of California, San Diego. About three thousand professionals participated each year. Out of these conferences came the annual Journals of Holistic Health . Any approach to education must ask itself, what is the goal of education? Holistic education aims at helping students be the most that they can be. Abraham Maslow referred to this as 'self-actualization'. Education with a holistic perspective is concerned with the development of every person's intellectual, emotional, social, physical, artistic, creative and spiritual potentials. It seeks to engage students in the teaching/learning process and encourages personal and collective responsibility. In describing the general philosophy of holistic education, Robin Ann Martin and Scott Forbes (2004) divided their discussion into two categories: the idea of ultimacy and Basil Bernstein's notion of sagacious competence.