Education for a Postmodern World

Abstract

Ron Miller founded the original Holistic Education Review in 1988. His book What Are Schools For? (1990) traced the intellectual history of holistic pedagogy in the U.S. This paper is a slightly edited version of a chapter added to that book’s third edition, published in 1997. It situates the rise of the current holistic education movement in the particular intellectual and cultural milieu of the period around 1970-1990, when dissidents in various fields explored more “organic” approaches to thinking, living, and teaching. The worldview underpinning modernism was questioned by various “postmodern” understandings that sought a fundamental cultural renewal. One strand of this critique was a “constructive” (as opposed to the more widely known “deconstructive”) postmodernism, which emphasized context, interconnectedness, and the possibility of transcendent (i.e. spiritual) dimensions of reality. Holistic education, in its diverse expressions, is rooted in this cultural critique.