The Evolution of Consciousness- Honouring the Inner Dimensions of Future Education

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that our consciousness as a species is evolving and that we are able now to become active players in this process. New models of education need to be developed that allow for this rather than educate for the 'human past'. The European Enlightenment saw the culmination of the development of the rational, logical processes of thinking that had been initiated in Ancient Greece by Aristotle. The domination by this form of Reason over the 'pre-rational', mythic and pictorial forms of thinking has become the trademark of Western scientific and academic thinking, and increasingly with globalisation has become the dominant orthodox form of thinking in mainstream educational organisations around the world. Taken to its logical extension, this worldview spawned the industrial revolution, with its mechanistic model of human nature and later on, its factory model of schooling.

Yet, from as early as a century after the Enlightenment, even in Europe , the limitations of the 'objective' rational scientific worldview as a way of understanding Spirit or the subjective self/soul began to emerge. The philosophies of early 18th century Idealism, Neo-humanism and Romanticism paved the way for a resurgence of interest in the ideals of Platonic ancient Greece and other more spiritually integrated cultures such as ancient India . The idealists and leading romantics were also futurists who reflected forward to a coming trans-rational age where the fragmentation of instrumental rationality would be transcended by higher-order, more integral forms of thinking. These more integrated epistemologies seeded 200 years ago have been picked up by leading-edge educators over the last hundred years (eg Steiner, Montessori, Aurobindo, Sarkar) in an attempt to create educational approaches that are more attuned than the factory model for children of a trans-rational age. The integral education model currently being developed from Ken Wilber's integral philosophy attempts to transcend and include the best of these integrally informed approaches to education, in particular to bring a greater emphasis to the inner dimensions of the human being which have been largely overlooked in the industrial age, factory model of schooling currently being exported all over the globe as part of the 'MacDonaldisation of education'.