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The Universal Schoolhouse:

av James Moffett

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Can schooling transform society? This visionary book argues that it can if we look beyond the traditional view of education as a means to finding jobs or getting ahead, and we attend to the personal development and enrichment of the whole child.
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I was a teacher and teacher educator for forty-five years. It was my vocation, in the most genuine sense of that word. I wish that I were more optimistic now, in what are said to be my “golden years,” about the future of teaching and learning in our culture.

If I were asked to list ten books from the twentieth century that all educators and educational leaders should read (including legislators, school boards, government officials, and Congress itself), I would probably not frighten them with Ivan Illich, Neil Postman, or Paulo Freire—maybe not even John Dewey. I would include such practical voices as Deborah Meiers, Linda Darling-Hammond, Howard Gardner, and Robert Bellah (q.v.). But I would have to let myself include one visionary, James Moffett, and from among several of his books I would choose The Universal Schoolhouse (Jossey-Bass, 1994).

I had known Moffett’s work for many years. I had followed and admired his writing, recommending titles to students, colleagues, and professional leaders. I had publicly expressed to him the gratitude of teachers for ideas we had borrowed, especially from his own teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy. But when The Universal Schoolhouse first came out, I must admit I thought it was too idealistic, too other-worldly. I had to grow into it. In the meantime, the profession has proceeded in an opposite direction. The culture has not grown with Moffett. Schools have, in many ways, reverted to the fifties (when I first entered the profession). Somehow we need to ponder his vision and to consider introducing his strategies for reform among teachers and learners who are clinging to the edge in desperation.

The subtitle of his book is Spiritual Awakening Through Education. Since that terminology is likely to turn lots of folks off, especially in an age when our traditional separation of church and state is being threatened, I’ll limit myself in this review to some comments on his first chapter, “Spirituality and Education,” and then to a brief list of some of his recommended reforms.

He begins by mentioning two classic works on human consciousness (Richard Bucke’s and Julian Jaynes’), which developed ideas of “cosmic consciousness” and the “breakdown of the bicameral mind.” As our population grows, as technology mushrooms, and diversity becomes more apparent and problematical, Moffett identifies the “trick of our era”: “creating social coherence while fostering personal self realization.” Now that’s tricky indeed. Social coherence (serving our community, our society) and self-realization (asserting self-awareness and independence) sound almost like polar opposites. Moffett is quick to explore their complementarity, and also to distinguish between spirituality and religion. These statements indicate what he means by spirituality:

“It validates the inner life of thought and feeling and the sense of personal being in the face of depersonalization and a preoccupation with physical things. It calls us back from surfaces to essences, to whatever may be at the bottom of things or beyond our immediate kin and ken. It invites us to seek commonalities beneath commonplaces, for the sake of mind as well as morality.” (p. 19)

“. . . people who extend the range of their identity and sympathy naturally do what is good for others as well as for themselves, because they dissolve the boundaries of the ego and feel always the connectedness. If [social] evolution reverses involution, then its direction is spiritual in that, as Bucke believed, more and more people will see life whole and act accordingly.” (p. 22)

That, at its heart, is Moffett’s vision. Serving ourselves through serving our communities and redefining community in a global sense are first steps in realizing a “cosmic consciousness.” This is spirituality, not religion, but it coincides with world views espoused by many of the world’s religions, including but not limited to Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, even some forms of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Developing inner as well as outer consciousness is one pathway to spiritual growth, developing intuitive as well as rational thinking, creative as well as critical, collaborative as well as individual, in other words, exercising both sides of the bicameral mind.

“The Hindu notion of the manifest world as maya or illusion has always assumed the ‘constructionist’ view of knowledge that reigns today in cognitive psychology circles, that is, that humans make knowledge or meaning, collectively and individually, by putting together their perceptions of the world . . . .” (p. 28)

Himself a student and instructor of yoga, Moffett would have education balance physical, emotional or devotional, intellectual, altruistic or activist, and meditational approaches to learning. “These multiple pathways,” he maintains, “develop body, heart, mind and spirit for the realization of the individual at all levels of being. Were they offered as means to an ideal secular education one might never suspect that they issued from a spiritual discipline aimed at enlightenment or awakening. As a program, these paths would fulfill the traditional [US] American goals of citizenship, employment, and personal development.” (p. 29)

It’s as simple—and as profound—as that. “The old polarity between spirit and matter,” he says, “may turn out, like the one between matter and energy, to be a costly habit of mind more than a representation of reality.” He concludes, “Even if you understand spirituality only as metaphor or myth, it can help you to think big and see deep when contemplating educational and societal transformation.” (p. 32)

Moffett then proceeds with some of the practical issues of “flag and-dollar” schooling, with school reform, with education to transform culture and to transform consciousness. Part Three of his book brings him to actual strategies for teaching and learning that characterize his “universal schoolhouse.” Let me just list a few of them without taking time to define or expand upon them. Consider this list:

concentric learning centers
“rippling”
tutoring and coaching
apprenticing and interning
visiting
community service
playing games
practicing the arts
home-schooling
self-teaching
individual, modular courses
projects
global thinking

Finally, his vision sweeps outward toward cultural reform, replacing welfare, rechartering corporations, reallocating governmental functions, “banding together.”

For practical, if not ideological, reasons, citizens in the twenty-first century should talk about Moffett’s ideas, try out some of his strategies for teaching and learning, maybe even read some of the books on “universal spiritual traditions” that he recommends. It couldn’t hurt. ( )
  bfrank | Jul 29, 2007 |
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