Douglas Sloan

(Resource Center for Redesigning Education, 1994)

Insight-Imagination is an illuminating presentation of the cultural issues we face as we move from the factory model of schooling to more organic, ecological ways of teaching and learning. Douglas Sloan, one of today’s leading thinkers on the cultural, epistemological, and spiritual foundations of education, inquires deeply into the effects of the modern, scientific worldview and demonstrates that our predominant “technicist” way of knowing the world is alienating and destructive. “Nature,” he points out, “has become fair game for being broken down through experimental manipulation into its parts, which can then be reassembled to yield great technological power, but for purposes totally alien to nature’s own requirements.”

How can we know “nature’s own requirements” for healthy human development and a culture that remains in harmony with all of life? Sloan describes a holistic way of knowing through feeling, imagination, and reflective engagement with the world, a way of knowing which leads, not to the possession of discrete facts, but to genuine insight that is alive with meaning and moral significance. “To know the inside of nature would entail a different relationship to her than one of alienated manipulation and exploitation, and it would require deep qualitative, personal changes in ourselves as knowers” (p. 178). Sloan demonstrates how a holistic approach to education would nourish this different relationship to nature.

Insight-Imagination is a thoughtful critique and synthesis of ideas from modern physics (particularly the work of David Bohm) and postmodern philosophy (including the thinking of Michael Polanyi and Owen Barfield). Still, the book is written in plain, fresh language that makes these powerful ideas accessible to anyone concerned with the cultural and ecological issues facing education today. First published in the same year that A Nation at Risk sparked a national campaign for more strenuous political and economic demands on schooling, Insight-Imagination offers an alternative vision: an education that reconnects us with our ecological and spiritual roots.

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