The Heart of Higher Education

A Call to Renewal

Parker J. Palmer, Arthur Zajonc, Megan Scribner

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470638477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

A call to advance integrative teaching and learning in higher education.

From Parker Palmer, best-selling author of The Courage to Teach, and Arthur Zajonc, professor of physics at Amherst College and director of the academic program of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, comes this call to revisit the roots and reclaim the vision of higher education. The Heart of Higher Education proposes an approach to teaching and learning that honors the whole human being—mind, heart, and spirit—an essential integration if we hope to address the complex issues of our time. The book offers a rich interplay of analysis, theory, and proposals for action from two educators and writers who have contributed to developing the field of integrative education over the past few decades.

• Presents Parker Palmer's powerful response to critics of holistic learning and Arthur Zajonc's elucidation of the relationship between science, the humanities, and the contemplative traditions

• Explores ways to take steps toward making colleges and universities places that awaken the deepest potential in students, faculty, and staff

• Offers a practical approach to fostering renewal in higher education through collegiality and conversation

The Heart of Higher Education is for all who are new to the field of holistic education, all who want to deepen their understanding of its challenges, and all who want to practice and promote this vital approach to teaching and learning on their campuses.

Chapter 1
Toward a Philosophy of Integrative Education

Parker J. Palmer

Those of us who advocate for integrative higher education in the opening years of the twenty-first century stand in a long line of would-be reformers. An on-again, off-again movement to make America’s approach to higher education more multidimensional has been at work since before there was a United States.

In 1774, representatives from Maryland and Virginia negotiated a treaty with the Indians of the Six Nations, who were then invited to send their boys to the college of William and Mary, founded in 1693. The tribal elders declined that offer with the following words:

We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those Colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces: they were instructed in all your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods … neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counsellors, they were totally good for nothing.

We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind offer, tho’ we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.¹

Here we are, two and a half centuries later, wanting the same thing these tribal elders wanted, in principle if not in detail: an education that embraces every dimension of what it means to be human, that honors the varieties of human experience, looks at us and our world through a variety of cultural lenses, and educates our young people in ways that enable them to face the challenges of our time.

The institution of higher education is notoriously slow to change. But many individuals within the institution have kept the vision of an integrative practice alive in their hearts—using heart in its original sense, not just as the seat of the emotions but as that core place in the human self where all our capacities converge: intellect, senses, emotions, imagination, intuition, will, spirit, and soul.

There are good and bad reasons for the slow pace of institutional change. One of an institution’s key functions is to conserve the best of the past over time, serving as a collective memory bank to protect us against historical amnesia, cultural erosion, and the seductions of the merely new. For this we can be grateful. But institutions sometimes cling to their routines out of fear of change and under the cover of the arrogance of power: when you are the only game in town, you do not need to listen to your critics.

If higher education is to keep evolving toward its full potential, it needs people who are so devoted to the educational enterprise that they have a lover’s quarrel with the institution whenever they see it fall short of that potential—and are willing to translate that quarrel into positive action. We need to uncover and empower the heart of higher education in those faculty, administrators, students, alumni, and trustees who have a vision for reclaiming the unrealized potentials in the human and historical DNA that gave rise to academic life.

MODES OF KNOWING

At the heart of any serious approach to educational reform is a set of questions about the core functions of the university: knowing, teaching, and learning. Advocates for integrative education take facts and rationality seriously; the failure to do so would betray our DNA. But we also seek forms of knowing, teaching, and learning that offer more nourishment than the thin soup served up when data and logic are the only ingredients. In our complex and demanding worlds—inner and outer worlds—the human species cannot survive, let alone thrive, on a diet like that.

I have long been impressed by the fact that science itself—great science, original science, the science on which so much of modern culture is built—depends on our subtle faculties as much as it does on objective data and logical analysis. It depends on bodily knowledge, intuition, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility, as you can learn from any mathematician who has been led to a proof by its “elegance.” The hard sciences are full-body sports, enterprises that depend on experiential immersion in the phenomena and the process. To quote that classic of children’s literature The Wind in the Willows, the greatest of scientists have always thrived on “messing about in boats.”²

I find it helpful from time to time to reread Michael Polanyi’s fifty-year-old classic, Personal Knowledge.³ Polanyi, a physical chemist and philosopher of science, argues that our scientific knowledge is dependent on us being in the world as whole persons, that if we did not have bodies and selves that “indwell” the physical phenomena of the world in an altogether inarticulate way, we could not know any of what we know at an articulate conceptual, logical, empirical level. Our explicit knowing depends, argues Polanyi, on a vast subterranean layer of tacit human knowing, and we will be arrogant about the hegemony of science until we learn to honor its wordless underground foundations. Reading Polanyi made me realize that a student who says, “I know what I mean but I don’t know how to say it,” is not necessarily blowing smoke!

When we honor the hidden aquifer that feeds human knowing, we are more likely to develop a capacity for awe, wonder, and humility that deepens rather than diminishes our knowledge. And we are less likely to develop the kind of hubris about our knowledge that haunts the world today. So much of the violence our culture practices at home and exports abroad is rooted in an arrogance that says, “We know best, and we are ready to enforce what we know politically, culturally, economically, militarily.” In contrast, a mode of knowing steeped in awe, wonder, and humility is a mode of knowing that can serve the human cause, which is the whole point of integrative education.

Human knowing, rightly understood, has paradoxical roots—mind and heart, hard data and soft intuition, individual insight and communal sifting and winnowing—the roots novelist Vladimir Nabokov pointed to when he told his Cornell University students that they must do their work “with the passion of the scientist and precision of the poet.”⁴ Integrative education aims to “think the world together” rather than “think it apart,” to know the world in a way that empowers educated people to act on behalf of wholeness rather than fragmentation.

The philosophical infrastructure of integrative education is a very large topic. I will try to bring it down to scale by framing these two opening chapters as “a dialogue with the critics,” an encounter with five archetypal criticisms of integrative education that I have heard or intuited over the years. As I look back on my own work in higher education, I am clear that I have learned more from my critics than from my fans. Criticism awakens me at three o’clock in the morning, compelling me to chew on things in a way I never do when people tell me that I got something right.

There is another reason I want to bring the critics into this conversation up front. In my judgment, one of the saddest and most self-contradictory features of academic culture is the way it tends to run away from criticism. Academic culture celebrates “critical thinking,” of ten elevating that capacity to its number-one goal for students. But academic culture is sometimes dominated by orthodoxy as profoundly as any church I know. If a mode of knowing, a pedagogy, a life experience, or social perspective is not regarded as kosher in the academy, it too often does not get a fair hearing. So if we are serious about integrative education, we must give a fair hearing to those who disagree with us. As we do so, we have a chance to model and help restore one of the academy’s highest norms when it comes to good inquiry: engaging contradictory ideas in creative conflict.

CRITIQUE 1: WEAK PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS

In this chapter and the next, I want to explore five critiques of integrative education. Some of them have been made explicitly, while others I regard as the unspoken and underlying reasons why the academy has often resisted an integrative approach to its mission. The first critique—which has four subsections and will occupy the rest of this chapter—is that integrative education is a grab bag of techniques that have no philosophical underpinnings, coherence, or power, that it is merely an assortment of pedagogies like service learning, action research, and small-group process, behind which there is no deep-rooted or defensible educational philosophy.

Up to a point, the critics are right—if they weren’t, there would be little need for this book! The integrative education movement has been obsessed with questions of technique. But the weakness of the philosophical case for integrative education is not because none can be mounted. It is because many of us have not done our homework on these issues in a way that allows us to engage our critics in a constructive dialogue—hampered, perhaps, by a sense of having a “country cousin” relationship to our city cousins in the academy who embrace and are emboldened by the power of academic orthodoxy.

We cannot advance this movement by remaining on the margins and tinkering with methodology. We need to draw on the deep and rich philosophical resources that are readily available to us, that are found at the heart of the classic traditions that gave rise to higher education. The subtle faculties on which great science depends—including nonrational forms of intelligence such as bodily knowing, relationality, intuition, and emotion—deserve the most rational defense we can give them. Our challenge is to become more conversant with these things and more articulate about them, in dialogue with the critics.

As we move in that direction, two interesting ironies are worth noting. One is that in the university—where issues in the philosophy of education ought to be regular topics of discussion—the discussion, as everyone knows, is much more likely to be about who gets on-campus parking or the bigger slice of the credit-hour pie. Advocates of integrative education can serve the general renewal of academic culture well by putting subjects of more fundamental importance into play.

The second irony is this: the philosophical foundations of conventional pedagogy are so weak that no one even tries to mount a philosophical defense of them. For example, it is widely understood that the division of intellectual labor represented by discipline-bound academic departments is not the most illuminating way to gain knowledge of a complex world, which is why interdisciplinary studies are at the growing edge of the evolution of learning. But most teaching continues to occur within disciplinary silos, not because it is philosophically defensible but simply because that is how things have always been done. So if the critics who represent academic orthodoxy want a conversation about philosophical foundations, they face challenges of their own. We need a genuine dialogue in which the partners help each other move past their own limitations for the sake of the larger enterprise.

I want to offer a few notes toward that possibility under the four philosophical rubrics of ontology, epistemology, pedagogy, and ethics, which I regard as foundational to the educational enterprise at large, including integrative education. These four as I understand them are woven together by the concept of “community,” not merely as a sociological phenomenon but as an ontological reality, an epistemological necessity, a pedagogical asset, and an ethical corrective. Of course, in the brief span of a chapter, I cannot begin to do justice to questions that philosophers have grappled with for centuries. I hope simply to help make these questions part of the conversation, knowing that Arthur Zajonc will address them in more depth later in this book.

An Ontological Reality

Ian Barbour, the distinguished philosopher of science, offers a quick and helpful three-stage summary of the complex history of ontology, the nature of being and how we perceive it, at least in Western civilization. In the medieval era, says Barbour, we viewed reality as mental and material “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Gratitudes
• The Authors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Toward a Philosophy of Integrative Education
• Chapter 2: When Philosophy Is Put into Practice
• Chapter 3: Beyond the Divided Academic Life
• Chapter 4: Attending to Interconnection, Living the Lesson
• Chapter 5: Experience, Contemplation, and Transformation
• Chapter 6: Transformative Conversations on Campus
• Afterword
• About the Appendices
• Appendix A: In the Classroom
• Appendix B: Beyond the Classroom
• Appendix C: Administrative Initiatives
• Notes
• Index
• End User License Agreement