Having been in the educational field for several decades I could not but regret the FAILURE of educational systems and curricula 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 as 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 and organizing concept of Agamic Psychology, as part of Saiva Siddhanta becomes enormously important. Another notion inseparable from this is that of LEARNING as such that 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 to 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 we range over all such seeings and categorize the kinds of learning that take place, we can categorize all into THREE types that I have called alpha-learning, beta-learning and gamma-learning.
1. The alpha type pertains to the reduction of ignorance pertaining to the PHYSICAL dimensions of objects,
2. The beta-type to psychical and social dimensions of existence and
3. The 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 in many books and articles.
Even a 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 the 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 PERSON he is or a friend of his 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 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 making the child WISER and thereby better developed as a person.
While training in some skills, economically useful, is not decried but where the concern with developing the PERSON as wholesome individual is LOST in the skills training than there ceases education as such.
Loganathan @ Ullaganar
Year 2004.
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