"To
teach as if the whole world were in the balance." (Part II)
It
is my contention, based on twenty-five years of practice, that a teacher,
modeling congruence of mind and body and spirit in their own selves, and
employing a curriculum and pedagogy that honors, thus nurtures the mind, body,
and spirit of each of their students, can transform graceless, weak, and
fractious social behaviors and artistic expression to one of grace, depth,
power, even wisdom. In the schools we have. Right now.
Mind
A most significant observation that Gregory Bateson made
in Mind in Nature, and that is the basic observation of the psychology
of learning; is that when there is agreement
amongst what is derived from reasoning with what we intuit, and what we hope,
and what we dream, and what we imagine, and what we remember; we are prone to act accordingly. But
when there is dissonance amongst the several intelligences, we are reluctant
to act. Any one, even more so, any group of intelligence's that are not in
accord with the persuasion of the others, tends to veto the whole shebang and
constrain consequential behavior. The mind has many ways to know the world,
each way bringing distinctive and necessary news. Only when all the news is in and there is substantial agreement amongst
the reporting agencies of the mind, does the corpus of the self give itself
permission to act, to behave differently. The actual features of mind to
perceive, feel, intuit, imagine, hope, dream, are more vast and interdependent
as they combine to steer us through life in the here and now and towards a
future we desire, than schooling now admits to and employs. Therefore, the
practice of the schools we have are barely sufficient to enculture the new
generation into the ways of the old, no less elevate behavior to a higher
level.
The Artful Mind
Art
Education may not employ and cultivate a holistic mind, but the artful mind is
a holistic mind. Wonder, awe, intuition, dreams, fantasy, the
subconscious, are all states of mind that are familiar to artists and the
literature concerning how artists think. These states of mind of the artist,
and in fact of all creative people, ought to find their way into the literature
of art education, but they rarely if ever do so. In recent years the literature
of art education has all but expunged these terms from its literature and from
its state mandated frameworks and standards of expectations for both students
and teachers, minimizing their cultivation and importance. One can, of course,
teach art without wonder, awe, fantasy, intuition, but then you will end up, of
course, with teaching, teachers, students, and their art without wonder, awe,
fantasy and intuition. The art like objects so produced will look like
art looks, but it won't do the work that art informed by awe, wonder,
fantasy and the subconscious does.
It should then come as no surprise at all that schools,
cultivating only one of the many agencies of the mind, fail to
elevate behavior, when they hardly elevate the mind. In contrast, holistic
education calls upon and cultivates reason, but it also calls upon and thus
cultivates wonder, memory, awe, intuition, dreaming, fantasy and the like. Not
peripherally and incidentally, but centrally, consistently and importantly.
How to nurture this enlarged domain of mind? You don't
have to teach a person how to dream, or imagine, or intuit, or to have a
subconscious; these states of mind come with being born human. But as teachers
we can allow these qualities of mind to atrophy by our neglect of them in our classrooms.
How then to nurture this broad and native array? No differently than how anything else is
nurtured. Call upon dreaming and wonder and intuition and fantasy and all the
rest as seriously, as often, as rewardingly, as instrumentally, as you now call
upon reason. And just as reason flourishes or languishes based upon the degree
and kind of attention it receives, so will wonder and dreaming and the rest of
the array of mindfulness. As will the art so created.
Body
The second element of being human that holistic education
deliberately addresses is the body. A sound mind in a sound body was even the
credo of the architects of reason, rationality and the academy itself, the
Sophists. Here however, we are not only addressing the need to mindfully cultivate
the body for healthful and graceful rewards, we call attention to the fact that
the entire body has intelligence. Every organ every system, every cell has
intelligence. That is, every cell, every organelle, every amino acid! knows
what's happening inside it and outside it, and knows what to do when things are
OK, and when they are not OK, and of course knows what is OK and what is not
OK. Its pattern recognition is uncanny, its awareness is constant, its
manufacturing agility without peer, its ability to surmise from the scantiest
of evidence unrivaled, it can improvise, heal itself, make new parts, and so
on.
Our body is constantly critically, truthfully signaling
how it is functioning. But we are rarely if ever taught how to interpret its
forms of "speech". And so the critical information that this billion
year old system of refined awareness constantly provide, remains all but opaque
to us. We must learn the language our medulla and our cerebellum and our spinal
cord, our musculature, skin, and the entire network of our central and
peripheral nervous is speaking. The news is vital. If the intelligences
saturated throughout the body conclude something at variance with the
intelligence arrived at throughout the mind, then just as dissonance within the
mind inhibits behavior, dissonance between the body and the mind also inhibits
behavior. Holistic education carefully explicitly, constantly cultivates the
multiple intelligences embedded throughout the entire body.
How? The visual
arts can learn a great deal here about what an informed, aware, practiced and
attuned body requires from what the community of dancers, athletes, musicians,
and theater people know and practice. Many cultures have developed
sophisticated systems of educating the aware, alert, intelligent body. Any one
of the several forms of Yoga, or Tai Chi, Chi Gung, Reikki work, the Alexander
Technique, or the leading edge of our own western medical traditions, might
serve as examples. Whatever the tradition, all body work begins with quieting the
noisy rational mind, and the twitchy, impulsive body to such a degree that the
more subtle utterances of the whole Self and the whole world may be heard and
attended to. Here again, there are many systems of quieting the mind from the
many meditative practices to just sitting quietly doing nothing, or as Thoreau
did, taking a little solitary stroll along some preferred byway.
 |
| By Peter London |
The Artful Body
The intelligent, harmonious body is no stranger to the
arts. It may well be said that the creative process is a process of embodiment. The accounts of artists; visual,
theatrical, musical, are replete with evidence of how much inspiration and
guidance originates in their kinesthetic selves. The community of artists is
constantly referring to feelings, literal feelings that often appear to them to
be automatic, physically demanding of expression in their artistic forms. These
physical inclinations need not be the sometimes, vague, and untutored phenomena
as they are now treated if they are treated at all. There is a non-rational
intelligence that is characteristic of our selves that is located all
throughout our many cells, organs and systems. An education in and through the
arts that fails to cultivate this body-intelligence reduces and distorts the
full and proper education in general, certainly in and through the arts.
A novel idea? Not at all.
The Bauhaus School in the 1920-s and 30's incorporated these same
principles throughout the curriculum and as a result created the new languages
of the arts that still dominate our current vocabulary of all the art forms.
Kandinsky, Itten and Klee, three significant Bauhaus faculty and progenitors of
Modern art, based their art and their pedagogy directly on these same holistic
principles. Beyond the European tradition, we can turn to any, no every
tradition from Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas and find this same
basic appreciation of a tuned body being the prime instrument for the artistic
enterprise.
The Spirit
We come now to the dimension of holistic education that at
first glance might seem contentious, or at least obscure: Spirit, the third
dimension of Being, and thus the third dimension of holistic education. But it
need not be either contentious or obscure if we simply define- for our
purposes- Spirit is any quality we hold to be of ultimate value. The spiritual
dimension provides an essential quality to our being and the overriding
complexion to our general behavior. Our spiritual center may be composed of a
deity or deities, pantheism, philanthropy, geography, or a cherished history.
Whatever resides enduringly at the core of our belief and value system, or
again, whatever is of ultimate and irreducible concern, can be said to create
our spiritual dimension.
How to evince and nurture matters of the spirit in the
teaching of art? Here again, the response is straightforward; raise the great
existential/ philosophical /anthropological/theological/ and scientific issues
with your students as a bases for reflection and expression in their work. The
very same category of questions that lie at the core of everyone's arena of
ultimate concerns;
Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Who are you, really? Who am I, really? What is of ultimate value to me? About me?
What price glory, Where are we going? How shall we get there? How will we know when we have arrived? What are the meanings of the world to
me? In what ways do I matter to the
world? Is this all there is? And so on.
When one cultivates this level of introspection in
students, and brings them together with a teacher seriously interested in
attending to those reflections, then the urgency and the freedom to express
those reflections full and clear, crafts those expressions to the level of art.
We should not be surprised to observe that just as
dissonance within the mindfulness of the brain leads to inaction or weak
action, and dissonance between the intelligence's of the body and those of
mind, lead to similar constrained behavior, dissonance amongst our spiritual
convictions and those of our body, and of our mind also confound and constrain
behavior. The matter is actually worse than this; for dissonance amongst mind,
body and spirit does not simply dampen or inhibit behavior (learning), more
perniciously, dissonance distorts, warps behavior, more often than not with
violent consequences for the practitioner and their surround. One might well wonder to what degree our own
violence prone society is symptomatic of the unbalanced manner in which we school
our children.
When there is harmony amongst the mind, body and spirit,
however, people experience what Abraham Maslow termed a "peak"
experience, or what James would call a "religious" experience, or an
ecstatic experience, or Jamake Highwater would call a "spiritual"
experience, or just being "in the groove", as Mickey Harte, or Louis
Armstrong might say. Whatever the name
and from whatever the cause, when there
is congruence across mind, body and spirit, people in such states of alignment
all report remarkably similar states of being: Effort becomes light, ideas
flow easily and rapidly, endurance is extended, so is patience, focus becomes
more concentrated, time becomes extended, boundaries soften, definition becomes
clearer, crisper, the ego retracts, all the senses become more acute, images
appear entire, the world seems at very worst pleasant if not joyous, everything
seems interesting, everything seems to matter, everything seems to be a portion
of everything else, a feeling of affection attends to all, emotions are full
but without strong eddies and turbulence, there is a sense of being both
replete and full of appetite, it seems easy to be the subject and object of
love, there is a sense that one has been privileged to glimpse the features of
some divine plan. That somehow, everything will be all right.
In other words,
elevated, artistic behavior is the natural human behavior whenever there is a
congruence of mind, body and spirit. It is what artists and creative people and lovers report
all the time. And there is no reason why the exchange between teacher and
student could not achieve similar results. Especially in the arts. Any
education that seeks to elevate behavior, seeks to address in fullness the task
of healing the world, requires an education of the mind, the body, the spirit.
Especially in the arts.
- Peter London
www.peterlondon.us
www.peterlondon.us
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