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Holistic
Education:
An Introduction, Page 1
Purpose of Holistic Education
The
purpose of holistic education is to prepare students to meet
the challenges of living as well as academics. Holistic education
believes it is important for young people to learn:
- About
themselves.
- About
healthy relationships and pro-social behavior.
- Social development.
- Emotional development.
- Resilience.
- To see beauty, have
awe, experience transcendence, and appreciate some sense of
"truths."
Consider
your life's greatest challenges. What did you need to know to
overcome the obstacles you faced? Consider your greatest successes.
What did you need to know in order to achieve those successes?
Then ask yourself, how many of those things that I needed to
know did I learn in school?
For
thousands of years before schools there were social groups which
taught people about the great adventure of being human; its
trials and tribulations, its challenges, and its enormous possibilities
for human goodness and even greatness. These groups were extended
families, communities or tribes or clans, and religions. For
the most part, these groups have disappeared or become compartmentalized
in people's lives.
Now, it is predominantly popular culture (the
media, music) and schools from which young people can learn
about what it means to be human. But culture has it own agenda
(not the welfare of children), and schools were not designed
to replace extended families, communities, and religions. They
were designed to prepare people for the world of work; to give
them the skill sets that would help them up the ladder of material
success.
<Next
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Page
1: Purpose
Page
2: Why
Holistic Education?
Page
3: What Do Children Need to Learn?
Page
4: Helping Children Learn
Page
5: Other
Pressing Issues
Contact Us
The
highest function
of education
is to bring about an integrated individual who is capable
of dealing with life
as a whole.
-J.
Krishnamurti
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