What is Holistic Education?

From Kathleen Kessen’s 2023 article
Contemplative Inquiry, Indwelling, and the Art of Understanding the Child

Holistic education, with its ancient roots, developed as a contemporary field of practice focused on cultivating dimensions of human experience largely ignored by modern schooling with its priorities of learning facts, mastering the basics (reading, writing, and math) and doing well on exams. Influenced by various academic movements including humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, systems theory, holism, ecology, and the “new sciences” of complexity and quantum theory, holistic education aimed to cultivate the subtle human faculties of aesthetics, intuition, imagination, emotional intelligence, and spirituality, as well as a progressive social and ecological sense of responsibility. While small impacts on conventional schooling can be seen in such pedagogical innovations as social-emotional learning, restorative justice, environmental education, and various measures to make schooling more equitable, schooling remains stuck in a conventional mold that dates back to the beginning of the 20th century.

Despite decades of educational research, hundreds of “models of best practices,” and an industry of “research-based programs” and “data-driven instruction,” genuinely effective teaching and learning remain a mystery,
frustrating all efforts to identify the “one best method” or the most successful recipe for instruction. While much effort has gone into trying to articulate a science of teaching and reduce it to a list of prescribed behaviors, teaching is more an art than a science. It is a complex human activity with innumerable variables. Every context is different. Every child is unique. And every society holds different values about what is important and what should be taught. Educators concerned with the holistic development of the child needs to be aware of all these differences and nuances and approach their work with the same creative and contemplative purposes and intentions as a painter approaches a canvas or a poet considers the rhythm and imagery of her words.