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The Spirit Of Education by jeff white
Non-Fiction
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What is education?
It’s a term we use every day to describe the process of putting 25 or 30 young souls into a cinder block room and filling their heads with what-all over the course of the first quarter of their lives. But is that education? If it’s not, what is it? And what are its consequences?
The word “education” comes to us from the Latin educere, which means “to lead out” or “to draw out.” What we do in schools, when we attempt to add cumulative layers to children’s bank of knowledge, has little to do with this drawing out; one might go so far as to think that it is its antithesis. Education—true education—is not a process of pouring in from without, but of calling forth what is within. It’s not a process of memorization or socialization or instillation, it’s a process of nurturing, of allowing, of evoking. It’s a process of bringing forth the person one is meant to be.
This, of course, is a lifelong project.
"The Spirit of Education" attempts to begin anew our conversations about this thing called education. It suggests that we start not with what students ought to know, but what humans are. It suggests that learning isn’t something that happens to children in specialized buildings at the hands of experts, but something that is hardwired into the human animal, an essential goad to our personal and collective evolution.
"The Spirit of Education" isn’t just about schools. Rather, it’s about learning. Deep learning. Real learning. It suggests that our primary job on the planet is learning: learning the depths of who we are, and learning how to realize (learning how to make real) the best that is within us.
Jeff White has written a provocative and solidly-argued analysis of the educational system in the United States. His thinking is based on his own experience as an educator, but he seeks to transcend the narrow bounds of much of the current talk of the 'crisis in education.' We should have a wide-ranging discussion of the premises and future of education in America, and Jeff White's should be a voice in that conversation.
--Glenn Perusek, author, Shifting Terrain: Essays on Politics, History and Society (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).
Bravo Jeff! Bravo! I truly admire your accomplishment and respect your work, just as I would any fine craftsman, artist, scholar and teacher. I want you to know that I really value my personal experience reading this book. I doubt that you would have predicted that your book would be used for personal and professional development of a capitalist, CEO type, but it was in my case...[A] good book at my house is when my wife or I say to other, "Listen to this;" your book passed that test.
--Myron Marsh, President and CEO, Thomson-Shore Inc.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works- 3.0 United States License.
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Chapters
| Title | Description | Date Created |
| Education: A Revision (14.49 MB) | The word education comes to us from the Latin educere, which means “to lead out” or “to draw out.” Where education in the common parlance has become a process of adding cumulative layers to one’s store of knowledge, the true aim of education is to call forth that which is essential to the individual. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 0: The Fool (29.09 MB) | We have it all wrong when we ask children what they want to be when they grow up. The fool asks us who we want to be; education is the process of answering that question. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 1: The Magician (40.08 MB) | Didactic learning shouldn’t be an end in itself. Rather, it should be a part of a continuing cycle of learning, wherein students are given opportunities to engage with their areas of interest in a more personal way, at levels including more than simply their intellects, and toward ends more meaningful than a score on a final test. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 2: The High Priestess (33.82 MB) | Our inner, emotional nature is the basis of the meaning that our learning both depends upon and fuels. Without it, we become unbalanced between head and heart, and our learning can lead to the dead end of nihilism. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 3: The Empress (32.7 MB) | True education isn’t merely a preparation for life. Education is a process of life itself. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 4: The Emperor (38.76 MB) | The day-to-day things we do in schools might be used toward the ends of freedom; they can also be used toward the ends of domination. Every interaction in schools places students within political contexts. It puts them in categories of haves or have-nots, of leaders or followers, and ultimately of masters or slaves. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 5: The Heirophant (30.21 MB) | There is a sort of bliss that can come when one is on just the right path of learning. When one is on the path of bliss, things happen just as they are supposed to. Serendipities abound. Circumstances that couldn’t have been organized ahead of time magically appear. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 6: The Lovers (44.22 MB) | Education isn’t a process of being told what to think at the hands of experts. It is stepping out into the unknown territory of ourselves. It is in every way the Hero’s Journey. | Apr 22, 2007 |
| Chapter 7: The Chariot (23.16 MB) | The spirit of education insists that we clear the road ahead of us of the roadblocks that stand in our way. We can learn our way out of the nihilism, the despair, the depression, the consumerism, the addiction: whatever form of mental blocks we’ve put between the stirrings within us and our destiny. We can become ourselves. | Apr 29, 2007 |
| Chapter 8: Strength (20 MB) | Our acorn grows with no urging from us if we allow it sufficient room; the strength that we derive from our passion clears the space for it, and protects it while it grows. The more unabashedly we claim our passion, the more fully we become who we were meant to be. | Apr 29, 2007 |
| Chapter 9: The Hermit (25.2 MB) | It’s a satisfying thing to shop at the bazaar of ideas, outfitting our internal spaces with just the right accoutrements. It is how we find our home in the world, and how we make it comfortable. It is how we make it uniquely our own. The spirit of learning, however, insists that we do so along the lines set out for us by that which is within us. It doesn’t do to take on another’s ideas just for sake of appearances. It doesn’t do to seek knowledge, no matter how important or socially redeeming, that doesn’t resonate with who we are. | May 6, 2007 |
| Chapter 10: Wheel of Fortune (22.16 MB) | The wheel of fortune isn’t intended to tell us that some of us will win and some will lose; it’s trying to give us a big picture in which each of our lives might come to be seen as a meaningful part of a whole. | May 6, 2007 |
| Chapter 11: Justice (44.46 MB) | Ideas aren’t dangerous. An idea is little more than a collection of words, a little packet of information, a plaything. An idea believed: now that is dangerous. | May 13, 2007 |
| Chapter 12: The Hanged Man (25.31 MB) | We need to be willing to take a different look at our world, to incorporate ideas that challenge the ways in which we’ve constructed our sense of reality, and to consider that reality is more complex than we have made it out to be. | May 20, 2007 |
| Chapter 13: Death (25.11 MB) | At root, transformative learning isn’t about learning at all. Rather, it’s about forgetting some of the lies we’ve been taught about ourselves, and the rediscovery of what has been true all along. | May 20, 2007 |
| Chapter 14: Temperance (37.15 MB) | Transformative learning helps us express our fullness as humans. We find a way out of the ruts that humans are so good at creating and wallowing within. We find a path through the blockages (most of our own creation) that keep us from taking the opportunities for growth and change that life constantly hands us. This is liberation. | Jun 3, 2007 |
| Chapter 15: The Devil (38.32 MB) | We are not intended to be creatures who maintain a singular level of consciousness. We weren’t created as beings whose purpose is to be entrapped by the world around us. The acorn is the mechanism of our intellectual and spiritual evolution. | Jun 9, 2007 |
| Chapter 16: The Tower (36.6 MB) | As we educate ourselves, we reclaim our power. Before too long, we begin exercising it. This is the nature of democracy, though those espousing their version of the term wouldn’t have us think so. | Jun 9, 2007 |
| Chapter 17: The Star (28.05 MB) | Perhaps the future of education looks like this: perhaps it will begin with who we truly are as humans. Perhaps it will aid us in knowing our world, not only in a mechanistic way but in a complete way, with depths of beauty and mystery intact. Perhaps we’ll come to understand that we are a part of the earth, and that we can look around us and know, finally, that here we can be at home. | Jun 17, 2007 |
| Chapter 18: The Moon (29.97 MB) | Let’s build a society where education can serve the purpose inherent in the word itself: educing that which is within us. Let’s build a society wherein people are honored and valued just because they’ve agreed to come to the planet and offer their individuality to the collective. | Jun 17, 2007 |
| Chapter 19: The Sun (34.81 MB) | When our minds are clear, when we know who we are and where we’re going, we finally sense that learning isn’t really a struggle. It may remain difficult, but that difficulty a pure one, a challenge we set for ourselves as we strive to transform our knowledge of the world into something that more fully parallels the world as it really is. | Jun 17, 2007 |
| Chapter 20: Judgment (35.51 MB) | In the end, it doesn't matter who we are as individuals so much as it matters that we all stood up together when we were called. We are all the same; we are all different. If we can find the synthesis between these two truths, then we've got it. | Jun 27, 2007 |
| Chapter 21: The World (22.83 MB) | If we do manage against the odds to make something of ourselves as a species, eventually the universe will come knocking. We have a lot we might offer. We don't know what that is yet, but we will. I suspect it will have little to do with our technological abilities or our scientific knowledge or our arts; I suspect our gifts will be more along the lines of our vivid imaginations, our powerful sense of beauty, or our great capacity for love. | Jun 27, 2007 |