I will be posting a few blogs on an invaluable resource: Ron Miller’s Caring for New Life: Essays on Holistic Education (2000) which forwards a “powerful critical theory” that meets the challenges of today’s ailing U.S. school system (p. 19).
Miller (2000) makes a compelling argument for holistic education, advocating for education that is spiritually-based and life-affirming, and against a “technologically efficient, rationally standardized” (p. 9) form of education that endeavors to fulfill materialist needs. His stance clearly challenges the positivistic theoretical framework, and human capital economics ideology that dominates conventional schooling in America today.
Miller’s holism is informed by a theoretical base of constructive postmodernism, which he forwards as an attempt to infiltrate America’s school at a time when standardized testing and a push for 21st Century skills by policymakers and corporate culture is intense. Holism, in my view, is an alternative schooling methodology as well as a form of critical pedagogy which has the potential to redirect the perpetual education reform in America, and focus it on social change.
Reference:
Miller, Ron. (2000). Caring for new life: Essays on holistic education. Brandon, VT: Foundation for Educational Renewal.
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