Education Mojo

This article is our humble attempt to ponder the urgent need for renewal within educational structures, or rather, to reimagine our fundamental understanding of what education can be. We were moved to write this while reading The Divine Within by Aldous Huxley, who sharply observed that “although for hundreds of years we have been talking about mens sana in corpore sano, we really have not paid any serious attention to the problem of training the mind-body, the instrument which has to do with the learning, which has to do with the living... We pour this verbal stuff into them without in any way preparing the organism for life or for understanding its position in the world—who it is, where it stands, how it is related to the universe. Moreover, we do not even prepare the child to have any proper relation with its own mind-body.”

While we may not fully resonate with all of Huxley’s historical terminology, his central critique remains searingly accurate: traditional schooling is utterly disembodied. It treats children as empty vessels to be filled with abstract data. This approach breeds structural fragmentation: a person emerging from this system might know how to pass a standardized test, but they are often left unequipped to inhabit their own skin, process internal experiences, or relate to others with genuine attentiveness, discernment, and care.

What we’d like to do here is to think aloud about alternative approaches to learning, about possible pathways that facilitate the emergence of an ecological sense of self capable of sustaining both inner and outer belonging. If we sculpt our lives through ways we pay attention, imagine what’s possible and express it in the world, how do we expand awareness and imagination beyond the established perceptual logic of the current educational paradigm, and link large scale thinking to the immediate reality of everyday life?

Why change

We are born into the world full of history, established ways and conventions that are often rather resistant to modification. And even if we would want to change certain things, often we actually end up embodying and reproducing systems that pre-exist us, so it’s not always easy to consciously sort this inherited baggage out: what can stay and what needs to go. Yet, times are changing, and it becomes undeniably clear that the “factory model” of education doesn’t fit into contemporary world(s) any longer.

Briefly summarized, the current practices of education don’t fit into our contemporary worldview anymore for several reasons. One is the crisis of fulfillment. Even those who successfully navigate and feel supported by the current system often confess not living fulfilling lives. Standardized pathways focus narrowly on imparting isolated skills or accumulating information. They fail to nurture a balanced human being, ignoring the vital landscape of a learner's hopes, talents, fears, passions, and aspirations. As indeed, what we offer to the world around us is entirely dependent on how we engage with the world within us.

Another is the Illusion of 'training'. In the standardized model, we are obsessed with human productivity, viewing people through a lens of instrumental utility. But human beings cannot be mechanically "trained". Human beings develop. They are their own agencies. Education does not engineer potential, it can only encourage, support, shrink, or expand the potentials that are already there.

The other reason could be called alienation and social cost. Such instrumental approach inevitably alienates those who do not fit the standardized mould, leaving them behind. Societal consequences of this exclusion are far-reaching, manifesting as systemic unemployment, depression, anxiety, and disenfranchisement. The current value system simply fails even to recognize the diverse talents of many.

To address deeper the neglect of the body we already mentioned that conventional education promotes, we could say that the human body is often reduced to a vehicle for the brain, to judgment of its appearance, or to oppressive clarifications and stereotypes of cultural prejudice. Children are trained to formulate opinions, win arguments, solve abstractions, and make decisions to please external authorities. Rarely are they encouraged to listen to their intuition, engage sincerely with others (humans or more-than-humans), or locate and express their embodied sense of truth. The world of the body is one where physicality, emotions, spirit, intellect and connection to the environment are unified. Embodied cognition science changes our basic assumptions about human nature and intelligence. It shifts the view from the solitary detached little “I” inside one’s head who rules the whole organism and gives it orders, toward a deeply integrated view of the body as a self-organizing interrelated system.

Another reason current educational model fails contemporary reality can be thought of as de-contextualization. We are taught in a school, but we do not learn from a place. Traditional education is universalized and de-contextualized, referring to abstract environments rather than immediate realities. This abstracts the observer's own position entirely. Senses-based encounters and personal experiences are rarely legitimized as valid sources of knowledge. Qualities like empathy and embodied attentiveness - the very foundations of participation in the world - are pushed to the margins. While scientific models and systematic analysis are vital tools for organizing thought, they are not knowledge in and of themselves. True knowledge is spatial and truth is contextual. As Einstein reminds us, all information and matter exist in relative interdependence with the location and velocity of the observer.

Finally, the ultimate trouble with the current approach is a consequence of the previous ones - it is a mindset of segregation. Potentially central piece to the crisis of the current approach is its insistence on compartmentalized thinking. As integrated body-mind organisms in space, we contain ecosystems within us and participate in broader ecosystems in an interconnected complex world. Acknowledging the embodied and embedded nature of human existence means honoring both our uniqueness and our deep interconnectedness with the larger web of life. When humans become technologically powerful yet profoundly disconnected from both their inner landscapes and the natural systems of the planet, we become capable of rendering our Earth unliveable.

Plurality of worlds

“As human beings, we all live in two worlds. There is the world that exists whether or not you exist. It was there before you came into it, and it will be there when you have gone. This is the world of objects, events, and other people; it is the world around you. There is another world that exists only because you exist: the private world of your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, the world within you. This world came into being when you did, and it will cease when you do. We only know the world around us through the world within us, through the senses by which we perceive it and the ideas by which we make sense of it.” 

—  Ken Robinson, Creative Schools

The inherent interrelatedness between human inner and outer experiences is undeniable. The binaries we have historically been trained to separate (objectivity versus subjectivity, facts versus values, thinking versus feeling) are, in reality, deeply intertwined. What we see, how we pay attention, and how we interpret reality are continuously shaped by our emotions, accumulated knowledge, personal or even ancestral experiences we have or haven’t integrated. Traditional education turns its gaze almost entirely outward, virtually ignoring the inner landscape of the learner. Yet, as Anaïs Nin beautifully wrote, “I do not see the world as it is, I see it as I am.” What we contribute to the outer world is fundamentally affected by how deeply we belong in our inner world.

Norms tend to calcify into forms, trapping the vitality of life within them. While the transformative process of melting down these old structures can feel chaotic, it remains infinitely better than the dead order of a rigid doctrine. In Creative Schools, Ken Robinson compares an education that honours life to the cultivation of plants: “Gardeners know that they don’t make plants grow.” Instead, he proposes that we realign learning with the four core principles of organic farming. The first one is health - nurturing holistic well-being, including being well intellectually, physically, spiritually and socially. The second one is ecology - acknowledging the interdependence within and without. Third is fairness - cultivating personal talents and latent potentials of every student. And the fourth one is care - creating optimum conditions for students’ development with compassion and practical wisdom.

Our understanding of values emerges when we return to the roots, asking foundational questions, like What do I care for? How am I present in my environment? Where am I going? Who am I walking with? There is often a direct correlation between the systemic rise in stress, anxiety, and depression and the profound mismatch between a person's natural inclinations and ideas disconnected from their felt sense. When our roots are damaged, we lose touch with this inborn compass - the somatic intelligence that tells us what we need, what serves us, and what harms us. Disempowered, we feel compelled to consult external experts for every step, relying entirely on the highly restricted, reductionist definition of intelligence prized by the traditional school model with its logical, verbal, and quantitative measurement.

The purpose of education could be to offer a larger “portfolio of capacities”, that would allow us to be better attuned to ourselves, each other and the changing world around. Such education would not only be an education of the mind, with exploitative and reductionist relation to the body, but would include the education of intuition, imagination, attentiveness, relationality, and somatic awareness, as crucial components that can contribute to informing our decisions and point us to other practices. In such an approach it is important that those who teach or guide the learners are also willing to continuously learn.

Educational philosophy and practice: a case study

This philosophy directly shapes our daily practice at Foresta KIDS and Seasonal Academy. It’s an ongoing adventure, through which we continuously recreate the learning processes, and also ourselves, over and over. Reflecting on our own childhoods, we remember an education so far removed from lived life that we felt compelled to build something radically different. From Foresta’s inception, we wanted to explore learning formats that would be rooted in complexities of everyday life, learn to trust the body as a sensitive membrane reflecting our attunement and relationships, search for balance between thinking and feeling, activity and contemplation, expand capacities for attention and empathy around and within, and be rooted in joy. 

Learning formats are containers. A kind of flexible structures that can support people in being present, being honestly themselves, and attentive to others. We see our role in holding space. What holds it is attention. Attention as both — respect towards life as it unfolds, not trying to impose things from outside but rather being facilitators, and as care, as an ability to be involved, to give what we feel is needed in different moments, to guide, to share our knowledge and experiences when required. An example of such attention in action is education of senses through experiences. For instance, instead of looking at a tree in a book, we find it much more interesting to go to the tree, feel it, touch it, smell it, climb it, and then we can come back and draw, sculpt, play, write, talk to share our experiences, and yes of course, also look into the book! It is a sensitivity that goes both ways - to the world around as well as to oneself, and the processes of one's embodied being.

As an attempt to structure our own thinking in drawing parallels between the different learning formats we host for different people, we are mapping here some principles of our work (that is in turn inspired by the work of many visionary educators who came before us, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Shalva Amonashvili, Maria Montessori, Vasyl Sukhomlynsky, John Dewey, Rudolf Steiner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Michael Duane, Dorothy Heathcote, A.S.Neill, Elena Makarova, and many others).

* Bringing theory and practice together
The limitations of theories is that they tend to make people cling to a learned mental model, even when it’s not working in the present conditions of real world, or even people try to fit the new world into an old system of thinking. Practice is extremely important. It invites people to be present in whatever the situation is, and act as the situation requires, to be attentive, to find solutions. 

* Honouring complexity
Humans are complex embodied organisms, where everything is connected with everything. For example, physical wellbeing cannot be separated from emotional, mental and environmental. Complexity is interdisciplinary, it offers to approach the learning process not around a specific discipline, but around a chosen subject, where distinct perspectives can meet.

* A “religion” of attention
Process of learning is a process of self-discovery and receptiveness towards one’s perception, as well as weaving of deeper and more honest relationships, learning to listen and hear, look and see, be and let be. The more attentive we become the more we can trust (or be more comfortable with) the unknown and support the organic flow rather trying to fit reality into a fixed structure. 

* Inquiry-based approach
It means that everything begins with a question and not with a ready answer, which asks for personal agency and critical thinking. Critical thinking involves interpreting what’s intended, understanding the context, hidden values and feelings. In the age of information it means learning to separate facts from opinions, sense from nonsense, honesty from deception. It also includes engaging with knowledge as opposed to “having” it. We do not own knowledge, rather we build on it. Everything changes continuously, what we know today will be different tomorrow. 

* Focus on creativity
We understand creativity as an inherent drive to experiment, inquire, develop critical thinking, ask questions, generate ideas and apply them in practice, to respond imaginatively to life, stay open-minded, adapt, and find ways for being and doing that feel meaningful. We are multitudes, learning to dance with our multifaceted versatile qualities, and to express thoughts and feelings in a range of media, forms, and materials.

* Cultures of collaboration
We value encounters on eye-level. Education is an encounter between someone who knows something and someone who knows something else. Everyone is a teacher and a student. Mixed age groups, formed by shared interests and wishes to explore together are interesting too. Trust and empathy stay the base.

* Learning outdoors
Rather than being inside enclosed walls, we always prefer to be under the shade of trees, or climbing them, observing wildlife, experiencing the changing seasons, engaging into direct experiences with the living world that cultivate natural empathy and environmental awareness.

* Rooted in joy
Through and with enthusiasm, brain creates new connections so that we are able to learn, grow and feel inspired to live. As neurobiologist Gerald Hüther’s research demonstrates, the brain requires emotional resonance to grow. When we are inspired, the brain experiences a surge of emotional vitality that creates lasting neural connections. True learning cannot be coerced through dry compliance. It flourishes when inspiring a profound joyful desire to live.

Free play: an architecture of improvisation

Let’s zoom into one of the coordinates on this map we’ve roughly sketched, on one of the primary engines that makes learning joyful — free play. Free play as an unstructured time and space to explore the world without much external guidance is an extremely valuable and necessary activity for any age group. It develops curiosity, willingness to try, to experiment, to make mistakes, and try again. It fosters autonomy of an individual - through independent action to find out what works for them and what doesn’t, what they like and don’t, to better understand who they are in this process, and what is their way. 

Free play is improvisation, but it still gives a framework, within which people can experience different situations, try things out, explore, create, learn, communicate, handle situations, be changed by each other, and discover things about themselves, their reactions, emotions, abilities. In free play a person learns how multifaceted and versatile they are, how different feelings and ways of being can be possible, how everyone can be many things. For example, in stories about animals, each animal is a kind of crystallization of a character, a certain aspect of personality, a possible way of being: the rabbit, the bear, the wolf - everyone stands for something, has different qualities and ways to relate to the world. In play anyone can try out a myriad of roles. Players learn to listen, to express themselves, to develop creative impulses, to sympathize, to contribute to the common process, to take responsibility according to personal curiosity. From such responsibility, intention and purpose are born. Different roles, different reactions, different plots, different characters - everyone has their own voice and right to exist. The world expands. This is true for children as much as for adults. Grown-up’s work and play are two sides of the same thing unwilling to exist without one another. Authentic play is built on work, on something real and committed. Deepest work is built on play, on something light and fluid. 

Children are explorers, curious of all life, natural learners, interested to try, experiment, and experience. In free play they have space to follow their curiosity, find real questions and form intentions, to develop freely as their own growth requires. Adult is a reference point for a child. Many times children learn their ways of being from who we are and how we act, and not from what we say or want them to be. Adult responsible for a child day to day of course influences the world of a child and brings their own order to it. That’s important of course. However we see it as equally important for kids to be in a structure that takes seriously their needs, ideas, wishes, and acts, and doesn’t try to interfere into those. In free play adults's role is oscillating between co-creator and attendant, accompanying children in a journey, but leaving them to invent, create, and act in their own reality. 

If we allow ourselves to dream and trust our dreams, we could say, that education for any age group is, potentially, a way to explore the vast architecture of perspectives and possibilities in life. True learning is much more than instruction or preparation for utility. True learning can make a sanctuary for a more meaningful life. It can be a catalyst for collective renewal, honouring the natural rhythms of human growth as much as our kinship with the more-than-human communities of life. Weaving us back into the vast living tapestry of the entangled planetary existence, education can recognize that individual fulfilment and societal renewal are inseparable from each other and from the broader planetary health.

Written in 2018