John P. Miller

(OISE Press, 1988)

Holistic education, as John P. Miller defines it in this seminal work, is essentially concerned with connections in human experience — connections between mind and body, between linear thinking and intuitive ways of knowing, between academic disciplines, between individual and community, and between the personal self and the transpersonal Self that all spiritual traditions believe to exist beyond the personal ego. The Holistic Curriculum concisely describes how holistic thinking integrates spiritual and scientific perspectives, drawing upon romantic, humanistic, and other radical alternatives to the atomistic worldview of the modern age.

Miller’s most useful theoretical contribution is his description of three broad educational models: “Transmission” (the conservative, reductionistic philosophy that dominates modern educational practice), “Transaction” (pragmatic, liberal reform movements based on Deweyan naturalism), and “Transformation” (holistic and other radical approaches that call into question the cultural and epistemological roots of modern education).

The author is a leading scholar at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and has been working for many years to implement holistic education in public schools in Canada. The Holistic Curriculum is not merely a visionary portrayal of education in some postmodern utopia — it is a manifesto for serious educational change that is actually taking place in schools today. This is a groundbreaking yet very readable and accessible book not well known in the U.S. It offers dynamic, positive responses to the challenges facing today’s schools — such as the needs of a diverse multicultural community and, in a larger sense, the personal and social fragmentation accompanying the decline of the industrial age.

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