December 2008

December 2008 (vol. 2, issue 5)
"My Vision of Noetic Education"

Noetic education is my critique of higher education consistent with salient points of view and practices presently found in the liberal arts, cognitive and transpersonal psychology, aesthetic education, systems theory, and the learning sciences. The fundamental assumption here is that wholeness of being is healthier than narrow human development presently achieved by the fragmented nature of higher education, based as it too often is on economic rationality, the disconnect between faculty interests and student needs, a shattered curriculum, and uncertain direction. To properly educate a person requires attention be given to mental, physical, social, and spiritual needs. It is essential to human wholeness that higher education nurtures the human spirit and its search for inner sense, leading to intellectual, psychological, and moral well-being. When we learn to think with disciplined feeling, we relate to subject matter in terms of the human spirit, thereby liberating ourselves from the bondage of mindless habit, mechanized thinking, and fragmented talents. True learning awakens one's entire being.

Rooted in an epistemology of cognitive and perceptual wholeness, Noetic education promotes the inclusiveness of objective and subjective ways of learning. "Noetic," from the Greek word nous, means all encompassing ways of knowing. The analytical disciplines of higher education do not by themselves address our full development. Noetic education expands the notion of the intellect beyond instrumental reasoning to include the perceptions of the body, since thinking and perceiving are not mutually exclusive. We need a course of study with a global scope to encourage the cooperation of the analytical skills of the sciences with the heuristic meanings in the humanities and the expressive values of the arts. In such a setting, reason and intellect join together with intuition and the body in the service of liberation, expanding human consciousness.

Higher education suffers from the limits of its rationalistic virtues. Learning that leads to wholeness presupposes going beyond the epistemological orthodoxy that defines intelligence strictly as analytic efficiency and learning only in terms of what can be assessed by tests of strict quantification. Rationalists, logicians, bureaucrats, and technicians have hijacked our understanding of intellect. Understand that I am not discounting the analytical and quantifiable mental functions. I do not propose that we abandon the fundamental human project to grasp the world in rational terms. I do propose that we refine that project of rational inquiry by adding subjective knowledges. The goal is to achieve an intellectual pluralism that makes available to the mind more than logic, not less, and thereby implicating reason in creative expression, personal transformation, and social responsibility. At the moment that we recognize the injurious imbalance at the heart of the academy, we will have to decide whether we will seek out more inclusive forms of learning, or continue to support the maintenance of narrow human development.

An all-sided mind capable of thinking with the heart can avoid the tyranny of narrow cognitive experience. I advocate a "thinking" that includes empathy with people, things, and events of the world; I advocate a "feeling" that includes a conscious and disciplined valuing of experience. At the heart of my idea of Noetic learning is the practice of freedom — freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritative systems, freedom to express creative energies to direct the human spirit and mobilize social action, freedom to become one's own intellectual and artistic authority. A free society needs innovative forms of holistic education that nurture the epistemological pluralism required of an enlightened citizenry capable of effective decision-making and evaluation of competing claims to truth. Our humanity prospers with the continuous exercise of our options to organize experience in a variety of ways. We should strive to develop conceptual, aesthetic, and spiritual frameworks that help us to evaluate experiences, synthesize bodies of knowledge into a whole, and gain insights into our personal and social humanity. Learning is a personal challenge to bring the soul to bear upon those frameworks.

The goal is to direct lifelong learning toward the furthest reaches of our being. This personal evolution requires that we learn from books and from life. Experiential learning from everyday life enhances the endowed faculties of our humanity — perception, reasoning, judgment, moral preference, and intuitive discernment. Instrumental rationality and book learning partially educate a person, artificially dividing one's unity of critical and expressive functions. From experiential learning we see that true human intelligence is not a matter of how much we know from books, as it is how effectively we act when it is unclear what is to be done in a given situation. It involves an integration of bodily perception with reason, leading to types of knowing with which to express a fuller, healthier self.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PHD
Dean, School of Holistic Studies