Ecological Civilization and Whole Person Education

1. Ecological Civilization and Whole Person Education Dr. Jay McDaniel Hendrix College Conway, Arkansas

2. Abstract: A Role for Government in Ecological Civilizations An ecological civilization is a nurturing society. Its citizens live with respect and care for one another and the larger community of life. A society of this kind requires for four kinds of education in addition to more technical forms of education: family life education, compassion education, education in spiritual literacy, and education for environmental appreciation. Ministries of Education in ecological civilizations will support and sponsor these four kinds. This support will be one way that they exercise good government. It will be by education, not force. However, whole person education must be creative not deadening; enjoyable not pedantic. In every instance it must involve active learning on the part of students and creative pedagogy on the part of teachers. It must partake of what Whitehead calls “romance” in education: that is, the joy of learning.

3. What is an Ecological Civilization? • An ecological civilization is easy to imagine and hard to realize. It consists of communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, culturally diverse, humane to animals, ecologically wise, and spiritually satisfying – with no one left behind. • Their citizens live with respect and care for the community of life and one another. They listen to one another and feel listened to, knowing that every voice counts. They belong to, and help create, what we might call a nurturing society. • Even as they nurture one another, they also realize their own individual potential. They feel unique and worthy of respect as individuals and they feel connected to a larger whole that is part of their very existence. They are, in the words of John Cobb, persons-in-community.

4. The Desire for Harmony • Such societies involve much more than environmental protection. Their “ecology” includes the ecology of nature and the social ecology of human life. • Human life is not simply an objective process. It is a process of feeling and responding to the world, from a first-person perspective, and of seeking some kind of harmony amid this process. • In process thinking we speak of seeking harmony as the “subjective aim” of each and every human life. It has many dimensions. As Zhang Zai puts it in his classic neo-Confucian text, the Western Inscription, it is a process of seeking harmony with yourself, other people, the natural world, and heaven. • (In his paper for this conference, Dr. Paul Bube speaks of the need to move from a preoccupation with retributive justice and proportionate justice to restorative justice: to healing justice. If and as people seek such healing or restorative justice, they seek “reconciliation” when they have differences.) • This seeking emerges out of a desire for harmony.

5. Moving Toward an Ecological Civilization: Worldviews are helpful but not Enough • How might we grow toward this kind of society? Many of us in the constructive postmodern tradition emphasize the importance of worldviews in approximating this kind of society. • We see the world as a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, and we believe that seeing the world this way can help us live more lightly on the earth and gently with one another. • We talk about a universe which is filled with mutual becoming and intrinsic value, and about the priority of persuasive power over coercive power. • We propose that the universe carries within it a normative dimension: a lure toward truth and goodness and beauty, toward wisdom and compassion and creativity. • We recognize that many worldviews can point in this direction, but we are especially impressed with that of Alfred North Whitehead, because he helps us understand how such an organic worldview can be both scientific and spiritual, neither to the exclusion of the other. • We recognize and celebrate that this kind of worldview resembles and can be enriched by many worldviews from classical China. • Nevertheless, a shift in worldviews is not enough

6. Whole Person Education How might a society grow into this kind of society? Education is critical. A society of this kind requires for four kinds of education that surpass merely technical education. Together they form what we can call “whole person” education. • Family Life Education: Education that helps people become nurturing parents • Compassion Education: Education that helps people grow in their capacities for empathy • Spiritual Literacy Education:Education that helps people recognize their own capacity for positive emotions. • Earth-Appreciation Education: Education that helps people appreciate the beauty of the natural world.

7. Reclaiming Classical Education in a New Way • These kinds of character or whole person education were fostered in traditional China under the rubric of classical education. Many traditional Chinese texts helped an elite cultivate healthy family life, a sense of compassion, a recognition of the positive emotions associated with spirituality, and a respect for the hills and rivers, trees and stars. • But that kind of education no longer exists in China. Rather a compulsory system of public education exists. It is similar in other nations. “Modernity” emphasizes technical competence, not whole person education. • Ideally, whole person education can and should occur naturally in family life. But that is not the way things work today in China or in most other nations. Parents are absorbed in making money and students, beyond an early age, are overwhelmed with pressures to pass national exams. • Thus, whole person education must occur in public schools.

8. A Role for Ministries of Education • How might this happen in China? I do not know, but I can imagine that the Ministry of Education might play a constructive role. • According to Wikipedia, the MOE “certifies teachers, standardizes curriculum and textbooks, establishes standards, and monitors the entire education system in an effort to "modernize China through education.” The primary emphasis has been on technical education. • According to the Ministry of Education’s website, its aim is: • Its aim is: • “to provide guidance for the supervision over education nationwide, organize and direct the inspection and evaluation of the implementation of the nine-year compulsory education and the literacy campaign among the young and the middle-aged, and to monitor the quality and level of the development of elementary education. • “To take charge of the overall planning, coordination and management of all forms of education at various levels; to formulate, in collaboration with relevant departments, the standards for the setting-up of schools of all types at various levels; to guide the reform of education and teaching methods; and to take charge of the statistics, analysis, and release of basic educational information.” • Suggestion: The Four Kinds of Education named earlier form four kinds of pro-social literacy.

9. Family Life Education • Today, a vast range of research literature from psychology, cognitive linguistics, and political science shows that the emergence of a nurturing society is closely connected with parenting styles in early childhood. • Nurturing parenting styles are neither overly permissive nor overly authoritarian. They combine loving support with discipline, affection with authority. The children of such parents typically feel listened to and respected as they are willing to receive instructions and constructive criticism. In a word, they feel loved. Children with nurturing parents grow up combining pro-social traits such as friendliness, a capacity for listening, and an ability to cooperate with others with individualized traits such as a capacity to think for themselves, take initiative, and act independently. They are the kinds of people who can build and help sustain ecological civilizations.

10. Compassion Education • Compassion Education (CE): educating people in practical ways to expand their capacities for respect and care. In the United States three research centers especially promising in this regard: Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, the Center for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto, Canada; and the Claremont Center for Engaged Compassion. As the Stanford center makes clear, organizations ground their work in leading-edge scientific research: brain-mind and behavior studies, clinical psychology studies, and biomedical studies. The Claremont Center trains facilitators and does “compassion work” all over the world through what it calls the Pulse Method. I offer an excerpt in Appendix A. • http://ccare.stanford.edu/ • https://www.mindfulnessstudies.com/about/ • http://www.centerforengagedcompassion.com/

11. Education for Spiritual Literacy • Education for Spiritual Literacy (ESL): that is, educating people to recognize the spiritual side of their lives and the spiritual side of other people’s lives, so that they can treat themselves and other people as whole persons: that is, persons with inner capacities for curiosity and wonder, for imagination and listening, as well as for kindness and compassion. Here spirituality does not refer to religious affiliation. It refers instead to the moods and modalities found in the circle below, developed by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in Claremont, CA. In their wheel of spirituality they offer a vocabulary, a spiritual alphabet, for appreciating the positive emotions that people seek and feel in daily life, and which are part of what it means to be a whole person.

12. A Spiritual Alphabet for Whole Person Education

13. Education for Environmental Appreciation Education for Environmental Appreciation (EA): educating people about the more-than-human world (the hills and rivers, plants and animals) and providing them with opportunities to appreciate that world, in its beauty and intrinsic value (value independent of its usefulness to human beings.) There are many examples of such education around the world and often they rely two models: a cognitive model and an aesthetic model. In the words of Chung-Ping Yang: “The former stresses the necessity of scientific knowledge, including ecology, biology, and geography, while the latter focuses more on imagination, intuition, mystery, and folktales.” See Yang’s Education for Appreciating the Environment – An Example of Curriculum Design of Natural Aesthetic Education in Taiwan. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1061087.pdf

14. Thank you very much. Jay McDaniel