In spite of all the difficulties and dangers in the world today, and perhaps in response to them, a movement is underway towards transformation in nations and institutions. This movement will lead to an enhanced capacity for integrating different perspectives and ideas, in contrast to the extreme fragmentation and competition currently dominating much of our thinking. Although the times we live in are often referred to as the Information Age or the Knowledge Age, I believe that a better description will be --and must be -- the Integrative Age. Key to our future will be the development of more complete human beings with a greater sense of wholeness and connectedness, with a more developed spiritual intelligence.
Just as the University of
Faith evolved to the
University of Reason,
the next phase will be the
Integrative University for an
Integrative Age, recognizing
the evolving human
capacity for integrative
and spiritual
consciousness.
Experts in many fields, ranging from education to economics, are stressing the importance of this capacity in all of us. For example, Alexander Astin at the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA questions whether any of our domestic and world problems can ever be resolved without a substantial increase in our individual and collective self-awareness, which are essential elements of a spiritual intelligence and which are necessary prerequisites to our ability to understand others and to resolve conflicts. He writes, “this basic truth -- which lies at the heart of our difficulty in dealing effectively with problems of violence, poverty, crime, divorce, substance abuse and religious conflict that continue to plague our country and world -- was also dramatically and tragically illustrated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Building.”
Duane Elgin in Awakening Earth observes that we are rapidly approaching one of the great pivotal points of human history. The Earth is being severely wounded by humanity while, simultaneously, the world is awakening as a conscious, global organism. These two facts seemingly pose a paradox, but in fact are intimately related. Pushed by a harsh reality, the human family is being challenged to realize a new level of identity, responsibility and purpose. And Robert Fogel notes in The Fourth Awakening, that critical spiritual assets such as a sense of purpose, self-esteem, a sense of discipline, a vision of opportunity, a thirst for knowledge and the struggle for self-realization must all be transferred at a young age through education. Yet our current models of education do not address these challenges adequately due to the extraordinary degree of differentiation, fragmentation and isolation. To understand this predicament as well as the path out, we must examine the evolution of Universities since their founding in the western world almost a millennium ago.
Our approach to knowledge evolved as society changed from an agrarian to an industrial to an information age, and now to the Integral Age. For the first five hundred years, Universities were embedded in medieval culture where knowledge was largely based on faith and religion. Scholars pursued knowledge from a mixture of motives, combining rational and irrational, scholarly and superstitious, using methods of empiricism and speculation. However there was an emphasis on the integration of knowledge across diverse fields that was lost to some extent with the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and with the rise of modernism and the enlightenment. During the 20th century, the fragmentation of knowledge reached its pinnacle in the relativism of postmodern philosophy. Over the same time span, the nature of Universities changed from the University of Faith to the University of Reason, the dominating paradigm in the modern University.
This fragmented approach to knowledge derives from our interpretation of the relationship of human beings to the universe, originating with modern science and the enlightenment. Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind identifies the prime cause as "the Copernican shift of perspective in the mid-sixteenth century which displaced the human being to a peripheral position in a vast, impersonal universe with the ensuing disenchantment from the natural world. The Copernican revolution constituted the epochal shift to the modern age. Almost a century later, Descartes woke up in the Copernican universe and fully articulated the experience of the emerging, autonomous self as separate from the external world it tries to master. With the human mind distinct from the world, then the apprehended universe was ultimately the mind's interpretation."
Another century passed, bringing us to the mid-eighteenth century, when Kant drew out the epistemological consequences. He deduced that all human knowledge is interpretive, and that the mind can draw no mirror-like knowledge of the objective world. Here the roots of postmodernism become visible; the world is essentially a construct and knowledge is radically interpretive. Every act of perception and cognition is congruent, mediated, situated, contextual, and theory-soaked. Over a period of 200 years the cosmological estrangement of Copernicus and the ontological estrangement of Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement of Kant, a threefold, mutually reinforcing prison of modern alienation that has resulted in the fragmentation and relativism of knowledge prevalent today, and a concomitant weakening of a spiritual connection to the universe and to each other.
But the lesson of Kant is that the locus of the communication problem -- the problem of human knowledge in the world -- must be viewed as centered in the human mind. Therefore, as Tarnas goes on to say, it is theoretically possible that the human mind has more cards than it has been playing. The pivot of the modern predicament is epistemological, and it is here that we should look for an opening. The opening lies in the realization that postmodernism is a transitory phase; education must move towards a transmodern philosophy which will overcome the postmodern worldview, not by eliminating it, but by constructing a new worldview through a revision of modern premises and traditional concepts.
In Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World, David Orr suggests that this constructive postmodernism, or transmodernism, demands a new integration of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions. It rejects not science as such but scientism in which the data of the modern natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the construction of our worldview. In spite of its fragmented approach, the postmodern movement has nevertheless created the necessary ingredients for a new intellectual vision, which I call transmodernism.
Just as the University of Faith evolved to the University of Reason, the next phase will be the Integrative University for an Integrative Age, recognizing the evolving human capacity for integrative and spiritual consciousness. The philosopher Ken Wilber sees this emerging capacity as the next stage in human development from the archaic and mythic eras of primal cultures to the "truth-force" and "strive-drive" levels of scientific rationalism and materialism, and now to the greater integral- holonic consciousness of the future. Of course there is no simple linear progression from one level to the next; the different levels are all necessary if we are to survive well in the complexity of the modern world. In earlier times a survival sense based on sharpened instinct and innate senses was crucial -- and sometimes still is. More important for the future will be the holistic mind.
A significant 20th century step along this evolution is the consciousness associated with the “human bond” reflecting greater awareness of ecological issues, explorations of the self and the capacity for integrating and aligning systems. The enhancement of this capacity in human consciousness must increasingly become the focus of educational systems -- not by a return to the simpler unitive cosmologies of the past, but through the ability to integrate at a different level from the insights we have gained in the differentiation of areas of knowledge since the birth of modern science and the enlightenment.
Although it was modern science, from the seventeenth century onwards, that led to our dominant, rational, analytical worldview, the science of the twentieth century has now shown the way to a different model of the universe as a web of connections, even as a holographic universe in which information about the whole is contained in each and every component. Let us hope that this interpretation of reality will find its way into our epistemology and approach to learning. There does seem to be a pattern for increasingly rapid transformation in human history. While the earlier hunter-gatherer and agrarian phases spanned thousands of years, only a few hundred years separated the industrial age and the information age. We might anticipate a more rapid transition to integral, holonic thinking, particularly if our educational institutions make it a priority.
Perhaps humanity is gathering on-stage for the next enlightenment. We have experienced the Enlightenment of the East and the Enlightenment of the West. The next enlightenment should combine the best of these forerunners. On a grand scale we might think of the future as the integration of the great insights of the world's spiritual traditions with the discoveries of modern science. Some of the ideas in modern science have been implicit in the world's religions for thousands of years.
As we design education for the future we need a world philosophy. An attempt at developing this global blueprint for the future of education can be found in the Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the 21st Century, titled Learning: The Treasure Within. It defines four pillars for education: Learning to Know; Learning to Do; Learning to Live Together; Learning to Be. This structure can now be understood as the natural consequence of the evolution of knowledge and education outlined in this essay. Traditional educational models focus on Knowing and Doing in the University of Reason, with little attention to Living and Being. Knowing and Doing represent the exterior and material aspects of our lives, while Living and Being are more connected to the interior aspects, to our self-awareness and spirituality. They constitute aspects of the Integrative University.
Quoting from the UNESCO Report: "The problem will then no longer be so much to prepare children for a given society as to continuously provide everyone with the power and intellectual reference they need for understanding the world around them and behaving responsibly and fairly. More than ever education's essential role seems to be to give people the freedom of thought, judgment, feeling and imagination they need in order to develop their talents and remain as much as possible in control of their lives.". Our aim must be the complete fulfillment of the human being in all the richness of personality and the complexity of its forms of expression as producer, inventor and creative dreamer and with all their various commitments as individual members of a family, of a community, and of the world.
This goal for education is no less than a spiritual quest for the times we live in.
