Having been in the educational field for several decades I could not but regret the FAILURE of current educational systems and curricula globally to develop the person as a whole. The educational institutions have become commercial centers for training the necessary skills for industries and education itself has become an industry of a sort! And as such the PERSON and the DEVELOPMENT of the person have become either unimportant or something that is attended to only incidentally, a by-product of some kind. The development of the person is seen as IRRELEVANT for the needs of the industry.
Education has become equated with SKILLS TRAINING and the educated person is seen someone skilled in some field or other.
This is where I think the notion of Holistic Education, as I see it, sounds like an attempt to recapture the original meaning of education, that which DEVELOPS THE PERSON as a whole and which certainly involves training in some basic skills but now those which would help the development of the person.
It is here where the notion of LEARNING as that in which REDUCTION IN PRE-EXISTENT IGNORANCE takes place, a central concept of Agamic Psychology, becomes enormously important. Another notion inseparable from this is that LEARNING as such takes place only when there is SEEING. When a person is LED to SEE a certain thing in a certain way so that the object seen is UNDERSTOOD in a way TRUE of the object, then we can say the person reduces ignorance about the object and hence effects learning of some kind.
Thus teaching is literally and metaphorically OPENING UP THE EYES so that the person thus helped begins to SEE things he has not seen before or sees the already familiar in ways now quite different and novel.
And when we range over all such seeings and categorize the kinds of learnings that take place, we can categorize all into THREE types that I have called alpha-learning, beta-learning and gamma-learning. The alpha type pertains to the reduction of ignorance pertaining to the PHYSICAL dimensions of objects.; the beta-type to psychical and social
dimensions of existence and gamma-type to the metaphysical .
These notions are derived from the Saiva Siddhanta notions of pasanjanam, pasunjanam and pathinjanam that I have worked out in great detail in many of my books books and articles.
Even the young child is capable of all these different types of learning and education becomes holistic only when all these three different types of learning are catered for and the child is initiated appropriately into all these.
Here the most basic is alpha-learning where the physical properties of objects are learned. However at the appropriate moments, learning about the SELF can be interjected so that the child begins to see what kind of a PERSON he is or friend is and so forth. For young children gamma-learning, that about the unconscious constitution of oneself, how
one's psychical nature is constituted by the archetypes and so forth, may be very challenging but not impossible. The gamma-learning in early childhood takes the form of FANTASIES and allowing them to fantasize as much as they can then slowly drawing them into reality and make them SEE the presence of archetypes in the world and in the person
actually constituting whatever one is and whatever that transpires as events in the world.
Pedagogy along these lines will be concerned with DEEPENING the visages of the child so that not only he sees more but also deeper and deeper. In this notion of education we become concerned with the will to make the child WISER and thereby better developed as a person.
While training in some skills, while economically useful, is not decried but where the concern with developing the PERSON as a wholesome individual is LOST in the skills training than there ceases education as such.
ULLAGANAR
( editing and re-paragraphing by his student )
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