Developing the Whole Student

New Horizons for Holistic Education

By: Clifford Mayes

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eText | 31 December 2019 | Edition Number 1

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This book proposes a new way of categorizing curricula in the holistic educational traditional. This is an idea that goes back in the Western tradition at least as far as Plato, and Lao Tzu in the Eastern tradition. It is certainly present in Spinoza and Schopenhauer. It is called a “holarchy”. The idea of a holarchy gives rise to Integrative Curriculum Theory, which, with major modifications, draws on Ken Wilber’s in his evolutionary model of the development of consciousness at personal, cultural and ontological realms.

Integrative Curriculum Theory will: 1) Prove a useful addition to the holistic repertoire of systematic and, above all, humane terminologies and “technologies” for making and evaluating specific curricula as well as for theorizing the curriculum at a time when “scientistic,” “technist” and profit-driven views of education have commandeered the podium, policy, and praxis and 2) address some areas of concern that with certain holistic models of education, and 3) address some problems in Wilber’s integral model of psychological, cultural, and spiritual evolution.

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Mayes is that rare, eccentric genius who has taken a lifetime of painstaking effort to work out in dazzling detail his unique and visionary perspective on curriculum theory. There are so many brilliant insights and ideas here, packed so closely together, this book deserves a careful and patient reading to grasp the structure of his argument and the breadth and depth of his offerings. These ideas form a complex, intricate, elegant, subtle, yet ultimately exhilarating and inspiring system of thought, a cornucopia of reflections and wisdom certain to stimulate the having of wonderful ideas, even for those afraid to venture too far afield for too long. Here is a ‘season of higher-order thinking,’ an exotic voyage of discovery and renewal for the curriculum theorist or the practicing teacher who is suffocating under the dead weight of our current reductionistic, behavioristic and heavily bureaucratized models of curriculum, assessment, and accountability. Here is what an authentic forward-looking commitment to humanism, enlightenment, democracy, intellectual and spiritual culture looks like in curricular form.