Parker Palmer

(Harper SanFrancisco, 1993)

This is a classic essay by one of the outstanding educational thinkers of our time. Parker Palmer was a student of Robert Bellah (Habits of the Heart) and shares Bellah’s deep concern for modern society’s loss of community and shared, sustaining values. He is also a spiritual seeker who was affiliated for several years with the Quaker retreat center Pendle Hill. To Know as We are Known expresses these concerns in lyrical, heartfelt prose. Palmer examines the modern tendency to objectify knowledge in order to “divide and conquer creation” and demonstrates that this is a fundamentally alienating and violent way to conceive the world. He proposes, instead, that true knowledge involves a mutual relationship between person and world — a relationship which calls upon us as individuals, and as a culture, to approach our experience with humility, reverence, imagination, and feeling. Holistic knowing is deep self-knowlege that engages the person morally and spiritually with the life around oneself.

“Why assume that sensation and rationality are the only points of correspondence between the human self and the world? Why assume so, when the human self is rich with other capacities — intuition, empathy, emotion, and faith, to name but a few? If there is nothing to be known by these faculties, why do we have them?” (p. 52)

Palmer’s search for a holistic and relational form of truth finds nourishment in the New Testament and other Christian writings. He believes that as a teacher, Jesus is a model of personal truth — of abstract moral principles given “a human frame”; “his call to truth is a call to community — with him, with each other, with creation and its Creator” (p. 49). Palmer illustrates this further by describing the teaching methods of fourth-century monastic communities. Yet this book is not a manual for religious education; its profound universal message is that modern objectivist culture needs to become grounded in a moral/spiritual/communal dimension that it presently lacks and, indeed, actively discourages.

A significant portion of the book attempts to “translate the theory of personal truth into a practical pedagogy.” For Palmer, “to teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced,” and he writes in much detail about the attitudes, skills. and approaches an educator might need to create such a space. He emphasizes openness (willingness to encounter what is new), boundaries (appropriate structure) and “hospitality” (a welcoming, compassionate environment). To Know as We are Known invites all educators to explore a path to wholeness, meaning, and relationship.

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