Holistic education is a movement in education that seeks to engage all aspects of the learner, including mind, body, and spirit. Its philosophy, which is also identified as holistic learning theory, is based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to their local community, to the natural world, and to humanitarian values such as compassion and peace.
Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning, gives attention to experiential learning, and places significance on "relationships and primary human values within the learning environment". The term "holistic education" is most often used to refer to the more democratic and humanistic types of alternative education.
Background
Holistic education's origins has been associated with the emergence of the concept of instruction in ancient Greece and other indigenous cultures. This involved the method that focused on the whole person instead of one or some segments of an individual's experience. It formed part of the view that the world is a single whole and that learning cannot be separated from all of man's experiences.
The term holistic education has been attributed to the South African military leader, statesman, scholar and philosopher, Field Marshal General Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), who is noted for his role in the foundation of the League of Nations, and the formation of the international peace organization, the United Nations. He drew from the ancient Greek conceptualization of holistic education to propose a modern philosophy of learning.
Smuts is considered the founder of "Holism", which he derived from the Greek word ολος, which means "whole". In his 1926 book Holism and Evolution, Smuts describes "holism" as the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution. Today, this work is recognized as the foundation theory for systems thinking, complexity theory, neural networks, semantic holism, holistic education, and the general systems theory in ecology. Smuts' "holism" was also the inspiration for Emile Durkheim's concept of the "holistic society", as well as Alfred Adler's psychological approach, which views the individual as an "integrated whole".
There are also sources that credit Rudolph Steiner, John Dewey, and Maria Montessori as the originator of the modern model of holistic education. Steiner, particularly, developed a holistic education framework based on the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and H.P. Blavatsky. It introduced the concept of "imaginative teaching" and its role in the learner's self-actualization.
Development
It is difficult to map the history of holistic education, as in some respects its core ideas are not new but "timeless and found in the sense of wholeness in humanity's religious impetus".
The explicit application of holistic ideas to education has a clear tradition, however, whose originating theorists include: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Johann Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Fröbel.
More recent theorists are Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, Francis Parker, John Dewey, Francisco Ferrer John Caldwell Holt, George Dennison Kieran Egan, Howard Gardner, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, and Paulo Freire.
Many scholars feel the modern "look and feel" of holistic education coalesced through two factors: the rise of humanist philosophies after World War II and the cultural paradigm shift beginning in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s, after the holism movement in psychology became much more mainstream, "an emerging body of literature in science, philosophy and cultural history provided an overarching concept to describe this way of understanding education – a perspective known as holism."