The history of educational criticism may be generally seen as a legacy of appeals for education to move from a largely third-person, objective/
exterior orientation—where knowledge and education are construed pri-marily as the ingestion of facts and information—to a broader vision of human development. This is not to deny that conservative arguments, particularly in reaction to attempts at expansion of learning models in the 1960s and 1970s, have not been advanced that are leery of such reform, but that the most prominent critical voices have been those seeking an expanded vision. As Ron Miller points out, these voices can be traced back much further than the educational thrusts driven by the “human potential movement” of the mid-twentieth century, and indeed extend back over two centuries through the work of a group of “innovative, dissident edu-cators” that included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Froebel in Europe and a number of Transcendentalists in the United States.51 “[T]he end of education is not reason per se,” asserted Froebel, “but rather the happy, unified man [sic] who need not keep his instincts and impulses chained down, for they are functionally a part of
the integrated man at peace with himself, his universe, and his God.”52 An important common thread in this early work is the unfolding of the mor-al, creative, and spiritual faculties latent in students—hence, properties of Left-Hand quadrants—and liberation from constraining third-person objective focus. Few were more scathing than Emerson about educational tendencies that prevailed in nineteenth-century American schools that countered this aim. “We are shut in schools and college recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing.” It is only the student “who holds the key to his own secret.”53 Similar sentiments were expressed by Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, and A. Bronson Alcott, who defined the province of the instructor as the “awakening, invigorating, directing rather than the forcing of the child’s faculties upon prescribed and exclu-sive courses of thought.”54
Here it is important to dispel any possible confusion over why conventional education is considered third-person, which we have also associated with physical reality: Key is the objective/exterior orientation and the exclusion in the educational process of the innermost, spiritual dimensions of the subject: consciousness. Therefore, even though it could be argued that rote memorization constitutes subjective activity, the locus of engagement is not the interior foundations of subjectivity but simply the ingestion of objects of perception. Opening up of the educational landscape to include problem solving, grappling with abstract ideas, discussion, and reflection represents the beginnings of second-person engagement. First-person education is grounded in direct experience of the transcendent Self, exquisitely silent and devoid of mental activity other than the radiantly wakeful self-referral awareness of awareness itself.
As I will argue in the next chapter, which will consider jazz educa-tion’s repression of creativity and individuality, solutions necessary for first-second-third-person synthesis will require not only robust creative exploration, but also rigorous emulative grounding—the interplay of both comprising a cornerstone to an integral model that distinguishes it from what, as noted earlier, integral educators have categorized as holis-tic, alternative, and transformational approaches. While these unconven-tional approaches counter the third-person overemphasis on “acquisition of knowledge and cognitive development,”55 they sometimes tend to err in the opposite direction, resulting in unbalanced first-person and/or second-person engagement. All are regarded as essential in the integral paradigm, a principle that is uniquely illuminated in the first-second-third-person process scope of jazz.
Twentieth-century educational criticism saw the beginnings of movement in this direction early on in the work of Alfred North White-head, whose The Aims of Education, despite its brevity, set the stage for much subsequent thinking. Among the insights Whitehead contributes include a three-pronged sequential trajectory he called the “Rhythm of Education” that proceeds from Romance, an initial exploratory-intuitive phase, to a phase of Precision, involving more detailed, analytical engage-ment, both of which culminate in a stage of Generalization, where they are integrated. In declaring that “[a] stage of precision is barren without a previous stage of romance,”56 Whitehead in a single sentence issues a central critique of tendencies in education that prevail to this day. He also delineates a powerful principle through which third-person objective mastery and second- and (albeit to a lesser degree) first-person interior and creative engagement can enhance each other in a synergistic fash-ion. Chapter 10 will consider an approach to musicianship training that I have designed and utilized for many years that follows this sequential thrust. Whitehead presages the emphasis that would later come to the fore in much educational thinking when he places front and center the inherent limitations of formal schooling to provide all the knowledge needed, a point that however relevant in regard to the 1929 knowledge base is exponentially more so today. “If Methuselah did not become an educated man,” he quipped, in comparing what could be learned in that alleged 800-year life span compared to the 80 or so most of us get, “it was his own fault.”57 Self-sufficiency must therefore be considered a para-mount educational aim. In at once recognizing the value of classics, yet also acknowledging that they must be made relevant and approached and applied through the lens of the present, Whitehead demonstrated the kind of reasoned approach to the notion of canonical knowledge that has much to offer current debates. As does another of his patent mottos that directly pertains to this question of currency: “Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.”58
John Dewey’s famous “experiential continuum” can be seen as a further articulation of Whitehead’s nonlinear, sequential premise, where again the heavily analytical approaches that prevail require broader, more unified interior-exterior engagement.59 Although less explicit than White-head, who ascribed as important to education a religious goal—which he construed broadly it must be emphasized—interior development is implicit in Dewey’s otherwise pragmatic vision. While less so in the work of Jerome Bruner, Dewey’s emphasis on “process,” particularly given his focus as a psychologist on science education, further pushed thinking away from an exclusively third-person focus in an area that is particularly
prone—and understandably so given the integral correlation with science and third-person reality—to such. Seeking to counteract the emphasis in much of school learning and assessment upon “explicit formulations, upon the ability of the student to reproduce numerical or verbal formu-lae,” he stressed the development of faculties such as intuitive thinking that are highly valued among mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and others in scientific areas.60 His articulation of the importance, moreover, of cultivating capacities “to learn how to learn” presaged an important theme in later educational thought that is of particular relevance in today’s world.61
Important contributions were made by other psychologists around the mid-twentieth century, even if these, perhaps reflective of the gen-eral revolutionary spirit that took hold in society at large around that time, stressed more the importance of providing students latitude for creative exploration than a balance with the analytical evident in other literature. Carl Rogers has joined other humanist psychologists as part of an important educational voice, perhaps exemplified in his characteriza-tion of prevailing tendencies in schools as the “mug and jug” approach.
Viewing the teacher as the jug, which pours information into the passive receptacle, the student who is the mug, education leaves little “place for their [students’] feelings [or opportunities] to choose or initiate their own learning. It is only by chance that students learn anything that that has meaning for their lives.”62
Maxine Greene is among the prominent advocates for the impor-tance of the arts as vehicle for cultivating imagination and creativity in education and society, a position that appears even more under assault as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century. “What happens to that imaginative creation,” she asks in 1985, “in the face of pressures”
to shift our educational gaze toward ensuring “our nation’s technical and military primacy?”63 We will see that an integral framework helps recon-cile the apparent tensions between pragmatic and economically driven educational incentives and the broader ideals Greene and other visionar-ies endorse. The same holds for the all-important area of diversity, for which Greene has also argued forcefully and insightfully. Foreshadowing another theme to emerge in greater prominence in more recent years, she advocates diversity as not only an ethical imperative, but as a part and parcel of educational growth for all through the establishment of
“spaces of excellence where diverse persons are moved to reach for the possible.”64 Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences laid the groundwork for the notion of diversity to move from largely demographic considerations to an embrace of the different ways in which different
people, according to their individual propensities, learn. Consisting of musical, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrap-ersonal, and bodily kinesthetic intelligences, the basic idea is that each individual possesses strengths and weaknesses in one or more of these areas. By diversifying the educational landscape from its long-standing focus on logical-mathematical knowing, again what integralists consider third-person approaches, the prospects are heightened that more indi-viduals would be empowered by having their strengths honored, at which point they could develop their weaknesses from a standpoint of greater integrity and confidence.65
Later Gardner would reflect on the possibility of spirituality qualify-ing as an eighth intelligence, hintqualify-ing at an integral turn in his work.66 As Helen and Alexander Astin confirm in their landmark survey of spiritual dispositions among college students and faculty, this is clearly an area of intense interest in the educational population. One would think, then, that it would assume equal prominence in the curricular and other delib-erations that comprise academic discourse.67 While ways that this might manifest would begin to take shape with the Contemplative Studies move-ment that was launched in the late 1990s,68 that these experiences have not been foreign to educators so attuned is suggested in bell hooks’ account of her classroom experiences that exemplify her notion of “engaged peda-gogy.” Conveying that “[a]fter twenty years of teaching, I can confess that I am the most joyous in the classroom, brought closer to the ecstatic than by most of life’s experiences,”69 she points to the transformational potential inherent in teaching for not only students but instructors themselves, a theme echoed in the work of Parker Palmer.
John Miller’s “education for the soul,” Diana Denton’s “phenomenol-ogy of the heart” combined with her strong meditative pedag“phenomenol-ogy, and Robert London and Sam Crowell’s contemplative approaches to engage-ment with the natural world are further examples of the growing body of attempts to bring a more systematic and explicit first-person dimension to the educational endeavor. While some examples of this work more closely embodies the full scope of the integral vision than others, as a whole it reflects important movement in this direction by traversing what I call the
“exterior-interior” divide that has long separated conventional education from what education can, and arguably ought to, be. Accordingly, the first comprehensive volume on integral education, published in 2008, may be seen as arriving at the crest of an ever-growing wave of movement toward first-second-third-person synthesis.70
As inspiring and informative as this latter work is, a sobering fact must be kept front and center in our awareness. That is, despite these educational visions and corresponding innovations, they represent notably
small and isolated compartments within an academic world that remains deeply entrenched in third-person, objectivist-materialist approaches.
The Matrix of Materialism continues to constrain education to a small portion of what it can, and must, be. Integral education in its ulti-mate manifestation will ground rigorous intellectual inquiry, and robust creative, physical, emotional, interpersonal engagement, in penetration to the innermost dimensions of consciousness through systematic medita-tion practice. While a shift to this approach represents one of enormous proportions, clear delineation of the scope, nuance, and coherence of the integral vision, combined with adept diagnostic activities that shed light on underlying patterns that preclude growth will make it possible.