What do educational alternatives bring to the arena of public policy? At first glance, taxpayers, legislators, and those who work in public education would seem to have little reason to consider the relevance of homeschooling or independent schools. Let a small minority choose those options and pay for them, they might say; it is the public schools that serve the needs of our communities and most of our young people. 

But how well does public education actually serve these needs? Saddled with political mandates, prescribed curricula, and an obsession with testing, public schools are hampered from addressing the urgent challenges of a rapidly changing world. In important ways, schooling is largely driven by a sociocultural agenda, a worldview, that is stubbornly rooted in industrial-age assumptions about teaching, learning, and the individual’s place in society. Our present system of standardized schooling was devised by the same industrial mindset, the same urge to manage and control nature, that invented standardized agriculture. Schooling strives to produce an educational monoculture—an authorized curriculum, mechanically “delivered” to students through textbooks and scripted lessons, backed up by relentless testing and grading. We accept that this is what “education” means because we are so fully immersed in the modern worldview.   

Since the mid-1800s, schools have been charged with the task of preparing youths for their roles in the industrial economy. As numerous educational historians and informed critics have pointed out, the “hidden curriculum” built into the design of school buildings, the fabric of daily routines, the hierarchical structure of management and discipline, and the demand for constant assessment is oriented toward sorting young people according to class and vocation and training them for their future positions in society. Other facets of their growth that make for a whole and meaningful human life, such as self-understanding, emotional and aesthetic richness, authentic participation in their local community, and a conscious connection to the natural world, are considerably less emphasized and often completely neglected.

However, as the industrial age winds down, as the global corporate economy unravels, young people will require skills and capacities that are not part of the standardized, test-driven curriculum, such as resilience, resourcefulness, and understanding how to live with what nature and culture provide locally and bioregionally. Industrial-age education will need to give way to an ecologically informed education, what many of us call “holistic” education. Here, precisely, is where educational alternatives offer a valuable resource to parents, citizens, and policymakers: They are the seeds for an ecological-age approach to teaching and learning, demonstrating in many ways that holistic education is relevant, effective, and inspiring. Homeschooling families and independent schools can address the critical needs of communities and young people in a dramatically changing world, in ways that a public school system bound to the industrial agenda cannot.

An ecological or holistic worldview is fundamentally different from the mechanistic, technocratic worldview that has dominated the modern world. It appreciates the interconnectedness of everything in the cosmos. Ecology means mutual relationship. Instead of looking for mechanical causes and effects, whether in nature or in the practice of education, we look at processes of co-creation, of self-organization in response to a living, meaningful environment. From an ecological perspective, diversity and individuality contribute to the health of the system as a whole; an open, diverse system is more sustainable than a monoculture. An ecological worldview values the organic process of learning, the cultivation of authentic relationships between person and world, between individual and society. A holistic education cultivates a rich and diverse ecology of learning.

No single way of knowing (or “single vision,” as the poet William Blake put it) can adequately encompass the dynamic complexity of the world. In a holistic worldview, cultural meanings are not fixed; they are contingent and fluid. Consequently, this worldview challenges any educational approach that enshrines a selected body of “facts” into a fixed curriculum. Education needs to respond with dynamic open-endedness; it needs to foster renewal and transformation, not mindless obedience to fixed standards or ideas. Any educator’s or technocrat’s list of “what every third grader should know” represents a partial view of the world, based on one particular, necessarily biased and limited, point of view.

Inquiry, reflection, wonder

Our young people need more from us than a standardized curriculum or institutional environments that manage their learning and behavior; they need opportunities and encouragement to discover their personal gifts and meaningful connections to the world around them. From a holistic perspective, the primary goal of education is not to transmit pre-selected portions of knowledge but to help students experience a sense of wonder and passionate interest in the world, along with habits of open-ended inquiry and critical reflection. Possessing these qualities of being – inquiry, reflection, relationship, and wonder – holistically educated people can engage the world purposefully, creatively, and transformatively; they are not being educated merely to perform assigned tasks or assimilate information.

A holistic perspective views each learner as a complex, multifaceted being. No child is merely a future worker or citizen in training, or a “B student,” or an information-processing machine. Each person is nestled in layers of context: Internally, each of us understands the world through our distinctive temperament and blend of multiple intelligences; each of us experiences emotions and physical sensations that color our learning. Externally, each individual belongs to intimate circles of peers, neighbors, and family members, and beyond that to a social and political order that shapes the meaning of experience – and beyond that, to historical and cultural forces that fashion a collective unconscious. More subtly, every person exists within the contexts of the natural environment – the local topography, climate, and ecological web of living beings – and also within some mysterious realm of archetypal or spiritual energies that only a few can claim to comprehend.

All these contexts go into making up who we are as individuals, and a truly relevant and responsive education takes them into account.

Holism recognizes that it is the essential nature of life, including the human species, to strive for transformation toward greater complexity and integration – toward greater wholeness. Holistic educators assert that every person intrinsically strives to participate in this journey of transformation, and requires a nourishing cultural environment to undertake this quest. Holistic education is not a methodology, a definable series of steps or techniques leading to a specified outcome. Nor is it an ideology, a fixed system of assumptions and beliefs derived from some authoritative text or charismatic founder. Because it follows, rather than dictates to, the organic unfolding of life, a holistic pedagogy must remain open, responsive, flexible, and self-reflective.

A public education policy informed by ecological or holistic principles would support a diverse range of educational alternatives – plural – rather than a mandated curriculum or system imposed by bureaucratic authority. If we could provide public funding for educational diversity, abandoning the technocratic obsession with a narrowly conceived “accountability,” then we could have a truly public system of education, one that serves the authentic needs of growing, striving human beings rather than the managerial agendas of economic and political elites.

Find out about alternative schools and homeschooling programs in your community. If you are a taxpayer or legislator, see for yourself how successful and inspiring these places of learning are for young people and the adults in their lives. People engaged in these educational experiments are building nurturing communities that strengthen our youth for the challenges that lie ahead. They deserve our support.

Ron Miller has written several books on progressive and alternative education, and is currently editor of Education Revolution magazine a member of the Vermont Commons Editorial Board. He has taught at Goddard, St. Michael’s, and Champlain colleges, and established the Bellwether School in Williston.