Antiholics Anonymous

I think it is amusing that one great source of hits upon this blog is the question, "What is the opposite of holistic education?" I don't think I quite intended that. The problem is that I did intend to point out the flaws in the concept, and perhaps I have done too well in that regard.

So here I must set the record somewhat straighter: I think that holistic education is a wonderful ideal; but, like the idea of the 'reasonable person' or the 'economically rational person', it is an impossibility which is to be hoped for but never realised. Nobody will ever receive an holistic education; nobody should (if they want to be honest) claim to deliver such a thing.

Furthermore, I will lay down a challenge: define 'holistic' and then prove that you have delivered an holistic education to any particular person using specifically described means and methods. If you can do so, I will recant and become a crusader for your brand of holistic education.

Please note that you should give a complete description of the process, including modules like 'standing in the rain to build character' if you have such advanced ideas in your armamentarium. I will gladly disabuse you of such fantasies if I can.

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Note: This seems to be the first use of 'antiholic' in the sense of 'opposed to the idea or acceptance of holism or things said to be holistic' anywhere on the web. It's a true neologism, and one that works. The word has been used before as a sort of contraction of 'anti-alcoholic', either as a substitute for 'teetotal'/'teetotaller' or for 'anti-alcohol crusader' — but that's not an obvious usage nor one that makes sense etymologically.

Analysing Development Fail (Negative Perspective)

So what should you do if you really wanted a proper integrated system of education, without the 'development fail' that afflicts so many? Clearly, you should begin with a vision (what you hope to achieve in the long run), a mission (what it is you're supposed to be doing), and a philosophy (the principles which decide how you do it and why — and how you won't do it).

But that also reveals what the three main errors are in the world of education planning: myopia, mission creep and missing principles. There are ways to reduce these errors or attempt to eliminate them, but in order to do so you first have to identify them.

Myopia strikes first. You can tell myopia is present when you ask this question: "How does what we are doing actually help to make our vision come about in the long run?"

For example, if the vision is 'all our students will be global citizens' then you should ask two versions of the question: i) 'What is the causal link between activities such as overseas awareness/service programmes and becoming a global citizen?' and ii) 'Would the students we have become global citizens without our intervention?'

The former, if it can be shown, would show a true positive or negative in terms of having a functional theory of achieving the vision; the latter would show the danger of false positives or false negatives — i.e. students achieving or failing to achieve but not as the result of the education delivered.

Mission creep, the distortion of a pre-existing mission, is more insidious. For a start, it is very likely that if the students can't say what the mission is, mission creep has already occurred. It's also easy to detect mission creep by linguistic analysis — if the mission statement contains complex arguments or long sentences then it's quite likely not a good mission statement, or mission creep has seeped in.

Missing principles, which render a philosophy of education hollow in the sense that key axioms are lacking, are harder to detect. For religious mission schools, this is easy — if core principles are taken by quoting scriptural verses, it's quite likely that principles are missing. Why? Because Christians, for example, believe in something much more complex than running an entire endeavour based on one or two verses from their Bible. For secular schools, this is not so easy, since it requires line by line analysis to determine if there are missing ideas or not.

There is however a much easier way to detect 'development fail'. After reading about 3500 papers on the subject, I can with some assurance say that if the word 'holistic' crops up anywhere in the documentation, 'development fail' is 100% likely to occur. This is because 'holistic' is a nice ideal, but nobody can define it, and because they can't, they can't work towards it or have a philosophy based on it — not without being terribly dishonest.

Some argue that their holism is limited to things like 'developing multiple intelligences' and they proceed to list them. But if something is really 'holistic' then it surely cannot mean 'limited' or 'listable in a finite list'. Some say that they mean 'developing the whole person'. This is a cute evasion, but if it doesn't mean things like 'teaching people how to groom their fingernails' or 'teaching them how to cook a decent meal' — which are obviously good things — then obviously the system doesn't mean the WHOLE person, but really 'all the parts of the person that we think are good parts, and forget the rest.'

The most rational way to limit holism that I've seen is the 'honest admission' trick: "We would like to provide a truly holistic education but we are limited by material, funds and time." Well, yes, that's true — but then you shouldn't tout 'holistic' should you? Naughty, naughty.

The sad part is that most people are easily taken in. It is like Hitler's big lie — if you say holistic, and genuinely provide a lot more opportunities (the educational equivalent of Lebensraum) than most people would otherwise be exposed to, people will believe that it is holistic, as if you could have 'relatively more holistic' as a meaningful phrase.

But this is what analysis means: we break things apart to see what really is there, and not just have a quick look and give some award for Quality or Class or Something Bigger Than We Thought We'd See.

Subcompetence and Splinter Cultures

The last few days have been days in which I've managed to catch up with old friends as well as young friends. I've also managed to make ends meet by sitting around at the local Starbucks and dispensing advice for a fee. This has not been easy, since I am normally pretty serious about the advice I dispense, and I try my best to give useful material.

But in between sessions of advice-dispensing and consequent fee-taking, I found myself musing on two tangentially related themes. Subcompetence is one; the Dicksonian idea of 'splinter cultures' is the other.

Subcompetence is an interesting word; it is related to both 'competition' and 'competence' through the common Latin origin competere, which means 'to strive together (towards a common goal)'. When one says a person is 'competent', we mean that his faculties are coherently focussed when he undertakes a specific task. Nowadays, it also implies that he is able to carry out that task, whatever it is. The odd thing of course is that modern competition is far from a common striving; perhaps it is antagonistic striving towards the same prize, which only one competitor can win.

But what is subcompetence? It is the state of being just about unable to complete or excel in one's chosen task, or the task one has been given. I was thinking about it because there are a whole bunch of people out there who have seemingly been dragooned into teaching a subject that none of them is fit to teach (as far as the evidence seems to show). They all come from one discipline, in which it is possible to believe they are competent, and inflict themselves (or are inflicted) upon innocent students who find that they have not learnt very much from the experience.

How do I know this? I know this because whenever I ask the students why they don't seem to have learnt the right stuff, they keep referring to the same people. And these people all have at least one thing in common.

It put me in mind of the Splinter Cultures first described by Gordon Dickson in his Childe Cycle, beginning with 'The Tactics of Mistake'. In that sequence, humanity forms highly specialised cultures which farm out their skills with varying degrees of success. Since specialists are paid so much more than general 'baseline' humans, the market drives ever more specialised culturalisation. Eventually, the cycle shows that this results in peculiar dysfunctions, as the specialists prove incapable of holistic synthesis (or anything remotely similar).

When faced with a subject like 'Theory of Knowledge', which by its nature requires the ability to roam back and forth comfortably across the world of all the disciplines and areas of knowledge, people with a highly specialised training tend to fail. They can only see things from their specialist perspective, which makes their ability to educate others somewhat lacking.

The whole thing leads to one thought. If you claim you are going to try to provide (or worse, that you DO provide) an holistic education, you cannot afford to dispense with a) skilled generalists, b) structures that bring specialists together in common endeavours of cross-disciplinary learning. If you make such an error, you might possibly still claim multidisciplinarity, but you certainly will not be able to provide an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. And once you go there, there is no way you can even claim an holistic perspective or pretensions to providing an holistic education.

Quantum Mechanics

The problem, when all's said and done, is the concept of the quantum. In life, as in physics, the quantum is the smallest unit of anything that makes sense in a given context. Once you have this idea of quantity, the idea that all things can be reduced to discrete and finite elements, then it becomes tempting to launch a barrage of mathematical rules in an attempt to reduce the target known as life to its quivering naked essentials.

And that is why holistic education is doomed.

Once people get their hands on numbers and the limited intelligence required to manipulate them, the idea of a whole becomes fragmentable. If a whole can be reduced to numbers, then each numbered item can be dealt with as a single part. If the whole can be reduced to single parts, then it's not holism we're talking about, but the idea of engineering, the idea that you can have specialists and specific things and not have all-round development.

Actually, I don't think that all-round development is desirable as an end unto itself. I believe in the multiplicity of gifts. I believe in the difference of individuals. I believe in the irreducibility of the mystery of life. I mock the idea of the quantum as applied to the reality of the human. And I will stop at nothing to educate without the illusion of holism to lure people to their doom.

I do not want quantum mechanics, people who tinker around with numbers and reduce things to units. I do not want the zeitgeists, people who seek to kill time by diminishing its power against the backdrop of eternity. I want to know that our universe is immune from the spirit of reductionism and the spirit of trivialism and the spirit of fluffiness without cuteness (oops, well, stuff like that). I want a cosmos (not just a world, a secularity that terminates) that goes on forever and ever in the light of God, worlds without end, amen.

The One-Bookie Leader (Part II): Timing the Tables

It is a fascinating thing to be watching the Monobibliarch (or 'One-Bookie Leader) in action. This is because most of us seldom see a reasonably bright person enslaved totally by dedication to slogans and quick-fix pseudointellectual writings. In my previous post, I mentioned some signs by which you can tell if you are watching an OBL in action.

Here is one obvious corollary sign: the Monobibliarch cannot see when his thoughts contradict other thoughts in his head, since he has by nature a one-track mind. Quite often, when presented with a multifaceted situation, he can only grasp it when it is reduced to a single idea (e.g. 'make more money', or 'assign more periods', or 'holistic education'). I present to you a couple of tableaux from my extensive past experience with such a person.

Situation 1: OBL says, "I want you to make sure that there is a gap of at least two days between PE lessons for each class. Should be no problem, since we have five days to work with, right?" Of course there was no problem, so a beautiful timetable was created. Then I get summoned downstairs. "Why are all PE teachers free on Wednesday?" Well, I must admit I was totally flabbergasted by that question. So flabbergasted that I actually replied (probably a mistake), "Errm, if you have PE lessons on Wednesday, then you can't have any more PE lessons for those classes except on Sunday and/or Saturday." Dead silence. You could see the gears whirring and getting stuck.

Situation 2: OBL says, "Make sure that every department gets as many lessons as they want. Every student should have one break a day, normally recess is at 10 am." Some computational exertion later, every student group has a break. The problem is that some groups have days that start at 7.30 am and go on to 4.40 pm. And they only have ONE break around 10 am... OBL's solution is, "Make the day longer so we can squeeze in another break somewhere." Haha, I remember increasing the length of the day several times. I still have the statistics and data to prove it. I am pretty sure nobody needed so many hours of lessons (and sometimes, non-lessons).

The problem of course is that things like integrated programmes (and real attempts at holistic education) cannot be simplified to a single line without looking rather threadbare and awkward. It's like those people who say, "God is love," and stop there without anything else. The worst part is that things like OBLs can't see it and get rather upset if you imply they are not seeing something. That does lead to the idea that you can detect an OBL by his aversion to chess (or his inability to play it). He will stick to one line regardless of consequences, then switch to another and forget the first altogether.

Holistic Delusion

All I can say about those holistic-education evangelists out there is that you must all be wrong in the head. There is no such thing. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There is an ideal called 'holistic education', but the thing itself, in an actual and realised way, does not exist.

You have only to look at simpler constructs like Howard Gardner's 'Multiple Intelligences' scam. First he says there are five. Then seven. Then eight and a half. And so on. Meanwhile, he sells millions of books, and people run around designing curriculum and games and toys based on 'multiple intelligences'. Well, it's not a position he found tenable, and anyone worth his salt should have seen it.

Each brain is unique. You can reify and classify, analyse and debate all the possible outcomes of what the brain does (whether it's cognition, ideation, imagination, whatever). All you get is convenient categories. Some are too broad to be of use; some are too narrow to be useful. And any kind of categorisation militates against the ideal of holism, since such things argue that the brain can be splintered into orthogonal fragments of function and behaviour.

Sooner or later, the marketization of education will result in all kinds of educational con-men running rampant while they consume the diminishing supply of taxpayers' money. It has happened before and will happen again. No one person will be able to say, "Après moi, le déluge," because le déluge has already descended.

Why is the Garden Full of Footballs?

Yes, that's an interesting question, isn't it? I first asked this question back in 2001, as part of a project about developing inter- and multi-disciplinary education modules. A few years later, I received an award from the Education Ministry for this and other projects; it was in the same year that I was asked to stop being Dean of Sciences. But that's not important really; the key question is: "What has happened to inter- and multi-disciplinary education?"

The thing is that the rot began with C P Snow's infamous disquisition on 'The Two Cultures' in which he wrote about a divide between the sciences and the humanities. Later hands dug deep to widen the crevice into a crevasse, and then into a grand canyon.

It is of course all rubbish. Whereas in retrospective cynicism one may describe two different sets of paradigms and assign one kind to 'sciences' and another to 'humanities', the fact is that science stems from 'natural philosophy' and 'natural history' before it becomes 'natural sciences' and then 'applied sciences' or 'technology'. The sciences are a small and over-specialised area of the humanities; this is their proper relationship, and not one of opposed equals.

To give an obvious example: consider medicine as a 'science'. As a physician (haha, yes, that is the right term), you establish a personal confidential relationship with the patient. You then proceed to act as an historian, interviewing either the patient (if lucid and conscious) or his neighbours, relatives etc (if patient is not lucid or conscious) and perhaps resorting to eyewitness accounts or physical evidence. Then you make an hypothesis, adjusting it in the light of geographical, biological, racial, and perhaps economic evidence. Then you act on the hypothesis and seek to effect a corrective regime.

You might as well be a politician, or a judge, or a restorer of paintings. You would follow similar steps. This is because human knowledge and human inclinations drive all human inquiries. Science is as much a product of the fertile human cerebral engine as any other area of knowledge. We define these areas and the paradigms by which we research and examine them. We decide what evidence is valid and what is rational or not.

There is no external validator that we trust; we place much more trust in our own experience based on the results of our actions or how closely things match our predictions. We tend to trust in our own understanding without question as to the basis of that understanding, its origins, or its relevance to the universe as a whole. And here is where the educated man collapses as a being of straw and light and mirrors, of smoke without fire and fact without context. It is all very sad.

But what can be done?

I refer you back to the original question. "Why is the garden full of footballs?" When this question was posed, the first reaction from the educators was, "What a stupid question!" The reaction from the students was slightly more encouraging, "What a strange question! Let's give you some answers."

To date, I have actually received more than a hundred different answers. But the point, as the students eventually discovered and the educators struggled to realise, was that each answer (whether intended to be trivial, serious, comic, or sarcastic) was capable of generating an entire universe. For example, one bright spark said, "Because there are none elsewhere." Can you imagine what kind of universe would place footballs in the garden outside but nowhere else in all infinity? It boggles the mind.

Similarly, and on a different scale, the response, "The boys were playing an April Fool's joke on the gardener." The questions here are even more interesting: "Why boys?" "Why assume that there is something called an 'April Fool's joke' ?" "Must a garden have a gardener?" and so on.

Every response we make towards every source of response-provocation generates worlds. This is why the narrow-minded should have their brains forcibly expanded. Cognitive dissonance is a key tool of this enterprise, and any educational leader (de jure, de facto, or de profundis) to be worth his salt must engage in exercises which unsettle his own lofty perch so that he can learn. The educator who will not learn is like the teacher of literature who cannot write, yet another joker who cannot practice what he preaches. But I've spoken of the cure elsewhere.

Sometimes, I have felt like changing the question to "Why is the School Full of Idiots?" because that would be more provocative as the title of a presentation made to educators. The main problem is that this is never completely true (with respect to 'full') and it is always partly true of any institution (with respect to 'idiots'). We are always plagued by the narrow and tiny-minded. But it is our Sisyphean work to make sure we are not like that ourselves, and to help others toil towards the same end alongside.

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Note: Oh yes, I must say that the comments to this memetic post were all very amusing too. I note that many of them make reference to me as a teacher. And many of them are delighted to mention that I was not a very 'good' teacher either, although apparently able to teach half a dozen different things. Haha, I'm sorry!

Departmentalism

It is a sad but enduring truth that sometimes some people think of a concept and then espouse it without considering the concomitant problems. One of those concepts is holism, or an holistic education (which is one of the many kinds of holism on sale these days).

In several of my previous posts, I have pointed out the shortcomings and difficulties of current 'holistic' thinking in education. Now, I am going to take a different tack. Let's consider things which are manifestly not holistic.

The first candidate is obvious. It is compartmentalism. If you can segregate or ring-fence anything within an educational system or programme, then by definition, the resultant structure is no longer holistic. For example, if you say that student discipline will be run independent of student academic achievement (whether explicitly or implicitly), then you are denying the holistic. Of course it is possible to claim till your face is purple that by putting discipline and achievement together – in the same forum, boat or igloo – that you are conducting holistic education. You would be wrong, since having two peas in a pod does not make a single bean out of them.

The second (and often more insidious, stubborn and recalcitrant) is not so obvious. It is departmentalism, that modern bureaucratic descendant of feudalism. In departmentalism, it is often assumed that a school needs to be separated into independent fiefdoms (oops, I mean departments) in order to function like a school. It is also assumed that if you get the department chairs in the same room for a few hours (in what is called a school steering committee meeting, or the equivalent), you will get a miraculously holistic transdisciplinary outcome.

Well, you won't. This would be like putting different flavours of jelly beans in one bag, shaking the lot up, wagging your finger at them and saying, "Play nice, now!" and then expecting them to become a single large lump of jelly which evokes all the possible separate flavours while not being completely indigestible.

But the skeptical administrator will argue (and rightly so, in a sense) that there is no alternative to departmentalism. Fine. Then you can have two possible types of responses. The first response to this is, "Since there's no alternative to departmentalism, there is no possibility of holism." The second response to this is, "There are a few alternatives. Here are some."

Alternatives to departmentalism? Really? Well, yes. They might not be very good, but they are decent alternatives.

There's the concept of holistic units. In some large schools, small consortia are formed, comprising teachers who together offer all the necessary subjects for an all-round education. Each consortium holds to its own philosophy while seeking to fulfill the overall mission of the school. The idea is akin to that of combined-arms assault teams. A team that combines counselling, discipline, academic, service, sports and dietary elements (among others) in a single seamless programme would be delivering one variety of holistic education. In a small enough school, this approach would include all members of the school.

There's the concept of interdisciplinary units. Immediately, you might say that this is obviously not an holistic approach. Hmmm, maybe not. But it can be brought quite close. For example, consider a team of teachers, each offering a discrete area of interest, subject, approach or course. Then think of them working together flexibly to deliver a combined programme in which they actively worked to reinforce and support each other while retaining their own perspectives and biases. In a sports analogy, this would be a lot like basketball rather than American football – you don't have special teams, but you do have players with specific functions and you can rotate elements around for different team purposes.

There's the concept of knowledge webs. A clever 'spider' can spin connections between all the separate nodes in such a system. You could still have discrete areas, but the 'strand coordinator' is an agent who has enough of an holistic perspective that she (women tend to see more holistically) or he can tweak them until they appear to flow freely across the old functional boundaries.

Now here's a last point. 'Departmentalism' doesn't mean 'departments'. In reality, you might still need departments of some sort, just to reassure the masses and to handle some admin functions. The point is that you cannot make department chairs the cornerstones of the admin system. You need deputy principals or strand coordinators or programme coordinators with the genuine ability to think across disciplines and help weave them together into a functional whole.

Life is messy, sometimes miasmic. Nothing in reality can be easily shoved into a departmental box or a box labelled 'Discipline H'. At the very least we owe it to learners to give them an educational experience that, even if it does consist of discrete elements, includes pointers towards ways of combining them into holistic approaches for handling all their later life.

The Hedgehog And The Fox

In one of those weird bursts of synchronicity, I was thinking about hedgehogs, foxes and education; moments later, I read Ariana Huffington's recent post on microtrends vs macrotrends, and why Barack Obama seems to be winning the Democratic nomination in the US Presidential Campaign.

Isaiah Berlin died more than a decade ago, just as I was completing my first year as an educational administrator in the black arts. He was famous, in particular, for an essay entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox. It was based on a poem by Archilochos – a Greek poet who wrote, πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα.

Poll' oid' alópéx, all' echinos hen mega is a complex little idea. It means, "The fox knows many things; but the hedgehog knows one great thing." Berlin used this as the basis for a division of human thinkers into two categories, those who look at the world as an irreducible mass of conflicting and ambiguous ideas, and those who think in terms of grand unified theories – the so-called Big Ideas.

In the end, of course, you need both. The hedgehog's single great idea might only bear fruit if coupled with the duplicity and guile of the fox and his many little cunning ways. But the cycle seems to work this way: a hedgehog-style big idea launches a revolution that picks up speed but may have little concrete application or systematic development; the foxes come in to pursue their own agenda and to make sure that small ideas hiding in the shadow of the big idea find their proper place. Eventually, a new big idea will come along, and the cycle repeats.

A problem arises when one of these two is in the ascendant for too long. An institution intent on leading a foxy, duplicitous, mendacious and misleading life will sometimes lose sight completely of any big idea at all. Instead, its 'big idea replacement programme' is to adopt the motto mundus vult decipi. The world wants to be deceived, and since we can do it, why not?

It all ties in with my musings on holism. The modern holism seems to be a foxlike one: if we think in many directions all at once, it is holism. But that is not holism; rather, it is pluralism wrapped in a neat blanket and masquerading as an integrated whole. The true holism is that of the hedgehog; there is one idea, and everything else serves it. The practice of education, for example, must lie somewhere between the two: we have classes, but individuals who must be respected as such; we have departments, but they exist to carry out the mission of the school. We are multicultural and multidisciplinary, but sometimes we forget the intercultural and the interdisciplinary, and we have never really known the transcultural and transdisciplinary.

Finally, we need to examine the fox and the hedgehog a little more closely. The former is a predator; its problem-solving is geared towards rapine and murder. The latter is prey, but well-defended with barbs in every direction except at the soft underbelly. Eventually, what we know of nature tells us that the fox will win, given enough time. The hedgehog's main salvation lies in the fact that the fox is impatient and choleric; it has a short attention span.

Now imagine what we could do to enhance the two. Give the hedgehog the ability to poison its spines, or even grow specialist spines with unusual abilities: narcotic effects, psychotropic effects, projectile capability. Give the fox the ability to make long-term plans and stay focussed for more than one period of time. I still suspect the hedgehog will win in the long run. If it were faster, there would be no foxes left. For the hedgehog is not only a unified agent, it is also a disruptive force par excellence just by being what it is. Then again, if the fox tried its hand at honest work, or evolved an opposable thumb, thus leading to the invention of tools, it would be the end of the hedgehog.

The last possibility is to combine the two. But nature has already done that, although the combination is not obvious. The answer to the hedgehog/fox dilemma is a simple one. Man is the animal that combines the two, and that is where we return, at last, to Berlin.

Duplicity

If anything can be anything, and everything is an educational experience, then an holistic education is life, no matter how badly lived. That is what I heard a great wise one say today. I have to say I am disappointed.

Project Work

Let me propose to you a new project.

Suppose you had to do something abstract like 'nurture an holistic education'. Where would you start?

I find myself grasping at straw(s).

Can Holistic Education Exist? (Part 2)

I'm not a very theological person, or a very philosophical one. But I do believe in the relative sanctity of language - the idea that words are meant to describe and detail things to some degree of precision and accuracy. This means that while common usage can shift meaning over time, the time period is normally a fairly long one. Words in general keep their meanings within a time-scale sufficient for one generation to (just about) communicate with the previous or the next.

For technical language, this span has to be a little longer, so that the discourse can extend back and forth through time in such a way that the foundations of a discipline can still be seen (or at least, alluded to reasonably). In this context, 'span' refers not only to a range within time, but also to connectivity (as in a bridge or a tapestry).

And here is Exhibit One: the word 'holistic'. Holism is a property possessed by things which are complete in themselves, and which if decomposed to their elements, would be of less value than the sum of those elements. The kind of value is not the point, although it helps to know what it is. The point is that the whole before decomposition was more valuable to the person doing the evaluation.

Take, for example, a marble bust and the bucket of tiny marble pieces resulting from demolition of that marble bust. To an evaluator who uses an aesthetic baseline, the whole bust has incalculably more value than the marble gravel. To a chemist looking for a source of granular crystalline calcium carbonate, the marble pieces may have more value in a catalytic or kinetic sense (although the mass of substance is the same). The hologram version (i.e., the bust), however, can be thought of as having less entropy. It took effort to get the marble to look exactly like the man whose head it represented. That effort gave the bust a value which is now lost. The chemist can use any other marble source; he need not use the bust.

The same thing applies to a cake, a book, a car – any whole that is made from smaller components which do not spontaneously combine, and which requires an ordering anti-entropic process to produce. The problem lies in the reverse process, from the information-deficient raw materials (materials which do not themselves contain a plan for further development) to the information-rich product (a product which was made through a process that required information). The problem is that when we have unformed substance (or uninformed substance), we do not definitely know what the final form should be, can be, or ought to be.

This is true of people who are being educated. Educaré is Latin for 'drawing-out', as wire is drawn out (whence 'ductility') from raw metal. But what do we want to draw out? The raw material itself offers no clue, and wire without form is merely wire. Of course, wire can have uses in itself, but it can also be made into much more valuable products through progressively more complex processing sequences. An holistic education would be one which could take into account the end-product. And that is something the wire does not define.

So is it all lost? Is an holistic education genuinely beyond us? It all depends. As a Christian, I'd defer to something along these lines. If there is a divine purpose, then that must inform us as to what we must be 'drawn out' to be. An holistic education in a Christian mission school must therefore be based solidly on at least this much.

Can Holistic Education Exist? (Part 1)

I don't believe in holistic education. It's a sham. Nobody can be educated as a whole while the model of education is still divided into individual processes and disciplines. And I'm not sure you can be said to be educated if the model of education were to be made so transdisciplinary that no individual processes and disciplines existed (except of course the one process called holistic education).

This is probably an unpopular stance. But it is probably a necessary one, given the odd climate of this age. Go to Google. Type define: holistic in the search box. You will quickly begin to grasp why I say an holistic education is not possible.

How can it be that we tout such a thing? To do so would require that our education take into account the whole system that is a human being; we would have to consider the academic, spiritual, social, mental, and emotional aspects of the hologram entity – as one being. And since we cannot even fully understand ONE of these aspects, how can we do this?

The answer: we cannot. We can only pretend to it.

That said, can we aspire to it? We can certainly try. Now that I have brought us all down to earth in this endeavour, let us try to think about what an holistic education could possibly be like.

Firstly, it isn't about mens sana in corpore sano, that old Latin mantra of the dualistic mind/body idea. If it is genuinely holistic, we have to treat the mind and body and spirit as one. Each student should have a special diet of food and drink and exercise that caters to the needs of intellectual and spiritual activity. Prayer and fasting, alternating and interwoven spiritual and mental exercises, these should be the framework of activity. Example: you eat chocolate, you should taste it and consider the spiritual consequences of the act, and how it raises your game and your understanding of economics – and then you dance, you sing, you exude the act which is chocolate-eating. And it is both worship and study, at once.

Secondly, it cannot be a school in which the disciplines are ring-fenced from each other. The subjects must be allowed to percolate, to merge, submerge, and re-emerge. And through it all, for each student, fluctuat nec mergitur – the changing tides do not drown the consciousness, but enhance it. Perception sharpens and zooms out to dimness; the universe is one, and yet the eye sees a particular detail. Learning meanders through the broad lands of the dominion of mind, and as the starter's gun fires, the athlete's spirit burns. This sprint could be metaphor, could be act, could be valour of mind and body and spirit all in one. And as the tape is breasted at the 100m mark, the physics tutorial is over.

Thirdly, the process must constantly seek to offer physical, social, spiritual, mental, and emotional growth to the student. This five-fold model was one the religious taught me fifteen years ago, when I was learning from them how to use my gifts. You cannot develop the mental without considering its impact on the spiritual, the light is casts on emotion and society and the habits of the body; and that is but one interpretation of how all five might work together.

And lastly, the teacher must constantly work at all five aspects too. The teacher mirrors the student, offers an ideal; the student shows the teacher that the teacher has more to learn. Two mirrors opposing each other into infinity, leading to greater and deeper reflections. At the end and at the beginning is God, who knows how much we do not see.

Can we try to make this happen? I fear it. I fear that the wisdom of man is not sufficient and that it leads to despair. And yet, I do not fear at all. We will never achieve holistic education in the world of men. But the Spirit enfolds us in bright wings, leading us to take on more of the image of Christ, to the glory of God the Father. And then, we shall be whole.

Dramatis Personae

This morning I woke up as usual, and everything had changed. It was a hot day, just as many before it, and so it was not the heat that raised my hackles. Rather, it was the sudden crushing awareness that though much is taken, not so much abides. Though we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven, we are not any useful strength anymore. We are caught up in toil, labour, the inadequate apprehension of an inadequate world.

Greet the criteria. Meet the criteria. Act as if the criteria are everything. And die by the criteria, proud in your triumph. What a sad lot we are, what a violated mission we pursue. In some sense, we are the guardians of Hermetic mysteries, for Hermes was the great father of Autolycus 'Lone Wolf', and Autolycus of Anticlea 'Withstanding Glory', and Anticlea was mother to Odysseus 'Much Hated'. But that is just mythologizing.

In reality, I was born into the family of the Registrar. And he said, the Mission is that all should be good, all should be God-fearing, all should be grown into manhood and womanhood. Not for my ancestor the tinkly chimes of buzzwords, shifted and redefined at will. No. He was blunt and violent with it. A ruthless man, he, who scorned both the Presbyter and Method of his youth and love, naming himself but one of many Brethren.

He would have spat upon the feet of heathen images, he would have asked, "What fills the spaces? What place is this which claims to value what its values no longer know to name?" But sadly, I am not him, I am not him at all. I come from an effete and paltry generation. We no longer stand up for what is bright and hot and deep and of the Spirit. We fall to the wayside, attracting candidates because we no longer have faith that the Spirit will send them to us.

We make our own mission. We no longer value manhood and womanhood, but we value some imaginary holism. For who among us is whole? What is whole? It is folly and rampaging humanistic pride to seek a whole which only God can provide. We are whole despite our flaws because we are defined as whole, because the Logos writes us whole, not because we can dance a minuet over two crossed swords while declaiming the merits of a maritime climate when making economic gains.

Here we are. We should ask, is our God a Gardner, a Goleman, a Golem, a Csíkszentmihályi? Or is He God, ineffable, incorruptible, all-wise and terrible in His wrath? We should ask many things. But one thing is not in doubt: the mission that we have is not the mission that we began with.