View source for Evolutionary Waves in 20th to 21st Century Education


=Discussion=

Jennifer Gidley:

"I propose that there have been three waves of educational impulses since the beginning of the 20th century that have contributed to the evolution of education.  


==First Wave: Weak Signals from the Early 20th Century==

Although much of European and Anglo education did lose its initial idealist/romantic impulse during the 19th century, and succumbed to the weight of industrialism, secularism, and materialism, new threads began to emerge in various parts of the world in the early 20th century. There were Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner in continental Europe, Alfred North Whitehead in the UK, John Dewey in the USA and Sri Aurobindo in India all pioneeering more integral, organic educational approaches that provided a counter-weight to the dominant factory model. They emphasised imagination, aesthetics, organic thinking, practical engagement, creativity, spirituality, and other features that reflect the emergent integral consciousness. These educational pioneers were also futures-oriented in that they all subscribed in some way to evolutionary notions of consciousness, culture and even cosmos. However, these approaches have mostly remained marginalised, or in the case of Dewey's initiative, been appropriated in a reduced form by the mainstream system as so called "progressive education." 


==Second Wave: “Alternative” Education as a Trend by the 1970s== 

What I call the second wave was sparked by the dramatic consciousness changes that erupted in 1968 with the student protests in Paris, followed rapidly by the 1969 Woodstock Peace Festival in the USA, which laid foundations for a youth peace movement against the Vietnam War. These events also paralleled the arrival of futures studies on the academic scene with the journal Futures being founded in 1968 along with significant global meetings such as Mankind 2000 that led to the forming of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF). These events coincided with the beginning of various "new age" movements, including participatory politics, new forms of music, east-west spiritual-philosophical dialogues, new gender relations, post-nuclear family lifestyles and recreational use of “designer” drugs. These movements were taken up quite strongly in the Anglo countries, particularly in pockets of the USA and, at least indirectly, began to shift ideas about formal education. The 1970s to 1990s saw a broadening of alternative educational modes, including home-schooling [108], holistic education [109-111], critical pedagogy [3, 4], futures education [112-116], and a raft of educational reforms within mainstream settings. All were critical of the formal, modernist 'factory-model' of mass education. Most sought to broaden education beyond the simple information-processing model based on a mechanistic view of the human being to a more holistic, creative, multifaceted, embodied and participatory approach. Yet not all honour the spiritual needs or the multi-layered nature of the developing child, as part of a consciously evolving human species. Furthermore, these approaches are still minor threads and unfortunately most approaches are also isolationist in relation to each other. 



==Third Wave: Rich Imaginaries of Educational Futures for the 21st Century==

What I would call third wave approaches to evolving education are reflected in the plethora of new postformal—or evolutionary—pedagogies, which have emerged, particularly over the last decade. I have identified over a dozen emerging pedagogical approaches that in some way, either directly or indirectly, facilitate the evolution of postformal-integral-planetary consciousness. I have begun the process of hermeneutic dialogue among them, but of course much more research needs to be done."

(https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/15623015.pdf)

[[Category:Education]]
[[Category:Integral Theory]]