10th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL
ASSOCIATION OF COGNITIVE EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY (IACEP)
University of Durham, England, July 10-14 2005
Going
Beyond
Thinking
Skills:
Reviving
Understanding of Higher Human Faculties
an
by Jeremy Henzell-Thomas
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the vital need for a revival of an understanding
of the nature and extent of higher human cognitive faculties at a
time of profound educational crisis when the dominance of a narrow
utilitarian concept of schooling for the workplace is bound up with a
pervasive failure to awaken and nourish such higher faculties in
young people.
This failure will be examined in the wider paradigmatic context
of the dispiriting materialism or “reign of quantity” which can be
regarded as one of the chief deformities of the contemporary world.
Associated with this deformity is the reduction, since the so-called
“Enlightenment”, of the original spiritual sense of Intellect as a
“seeing” faculty centred in the Heart to its lower rational level as
a predominantly thinking, discursive and logical faculty situated in
the brain. It will be further argued that so pervasive has been the
impact of reductionist scientism in Western thought that the original
meaning of the word ‘intellect’ is no longer generally retrievable in
Western culture as a means of distinguishing the higher faculty from
the lower one.
Related to this need is the pressing need to revive the notion of
qualitative education itself, as opposed to the quantitative
evaluative approaches derived from target-driven “techno-management”
which reduce human beings to conforming and performing cogs in the
industrial machine. Truly qualitative education (as opposed to
impoverished
quantitative
approaches
masquerading
as
“quality
assurance”) can only be based on a mature understanding of the full
range of human faculties - cognitive, affective and spiritual.
The paper will attempt to restore the authentic meaning of human
intellect (Greek nous, Arabic ‘aql) with reference to key concepts in
various spiritual traditions. Special attention will be given to
Islamic spirituality, with its rich and subtle description of the
hierarchy of human faculties. It will show how this vision of higher
intellectual faculties, encompassing above all the capacity for
symbolic understanding and insight, transcends the fixation on
rational “thinking” so characteristic of conventional approaches to
cognition and cognitive education and offers to young people the
possibility of ways of seeing and perceiving which reflect their
deepest capacities as human beings.
I would like to say from the outset that it is not a
purely academic interest which has motivated this paper.
I have been involved in the practical education of young
people in one way or another for my whole working life,
as a teacher, a director of studies, a teacher trainer, a
university lecturer, a research supervisor, and now as
the director of an educational foundation, and it seems
1
to me that we are in the grip of a profound educational
crisis1 which requires a total re-assessment of the
nature, purpose and methodology of education.
Above all, this re-assessment requires the revival of an
understanding
of
higher
human
faculties,
and
in
particular the reclamation of the true nature of human
Intellection. The historical reduction and degradation of
this faculty in Western culture has ensured that the
Intellect is now almost invariably associated not with a
quality of Intellection or spiritual Intelligence, which
is essentially a perceptive, intuitive, contemplative
faculty of direct insight, innate and common to all human
beings, but with the processes of intellectualising,
thinking, conscious deliberation and logical reasoning
which have been so good at solving analytic and
technological problems and so successful in driving
forward
what we are conditioned by our own ideology to
regard as “progress and development”.
Phrases like
“driving forward”, or “ratcheting up”, so
common in management-speak and political spin these days,
tell us a lot about what this inflation of the lower
intellect represents – now, more than ever, not just
“driving”
and
“motivating”
us
to
goal-driven
and
purposeful activity, but increasingly out of balance and
in dangerous “over-drive” as our workforce, oppressed by
impatient and urgent demands to produce and “deliver”
more and more in less and less time,2 and overwhelmed by
unmanageably complex “systems”,3 is driven to ever-higher
levels of stress, exhaustion, and demoralisation.
Brian Thorne4 reminds us that it is the “blind slumber”
ingrained in the lives of modern Western men and women,
which is “fast becoming the collective neurosis of our
contemporary culture”.5 It is ironic that the frenetic
hyperactivity of modern life is actually a form of
chronic sloth, which really means not laziness but
forgetfulness6 of the one thing that is needful.
That one thing that is needful can be defined in many
ways, and we shouldn’t switch off if the words some
people use are different from ours and come from
disciplines, perspectives, or traditions of which we are
ignorant or which make us feel uneasy. These days, in our
predominantly secular society, it tends to be the
language of religion which provokes such unease, or even
downright hostility. We need to discover and articulate
the essential unity behind all those perspectives which
honour the innate capacities of the fully human being,
2
whether the words used to describe them and the methods
used to nurture them come from psychology, education, the
creative arts, linguistics, literature, history, cultural
studies, science, mythology, philosophy, spirituality or
religion. We need synthetic, interdisciplinary minds
which can discern the deep structure of shared concepts
and values behind divisive terminology.
In this way we may conceive of the one thing that is
needful as the development of higher cognitive and
perceptive faculties, such as insight and symbolic
understanding; we may see it as an essentially relational
and affective mode of awareness increasingly at risk in a
culture which gives such eminence to thinking,7 and
increasingly to that abstract, quasi-autistic, autonomous
kind of thinking which, under the false banner of
“objectivity”,8 engenders inhuman, monolithic systems; we
may conceive of it as the education of the soul, or of
the heart, or the development of full human potential, or
the awareness of the sacred, or a relationship with the
divine; or we may choose to describe it as the attainment
of self-realisation, or the knowledge of a higher reality
or a Supreme Being, or, indeed, the consciousness and
love of God, however we may name that ultimate Truth. We
should not be bound by words, affiliations and limiting
identities to such an extent that we only feel
comfortable with a set vocabulary which articulates a
single outlook or tradition.
But, forgetting that one thing, however we may describe
it, we go implacably about our business, striving,
competing,
achieving,
performing,
multi-tasking,
outwitting, texting, ‘phoning, e-mailing, upgrading,
optimising, ratcheting up standards, modelling best
practice, driving forward the agenda, pushing the
envelope, managing risks, managing time, planning short-,
medium- and long-term goals, strategising, formulating
policies and putting them in place, chairing meetings,
imposing sound commercial disciplines, meeting targets
and deadlines, building cohesive teams, brainstorming,
giving power-point presentations, rooting out dead wood,
appraising,
inspecting,
evaluating,
assessing,
monitoring, testing, improving efficiency, providing
quality assurance, specifying performance indicators,
checking tick-boxes, defining outcomes, imposing systems
of accountability, pressurising, oppressing, bullying,
fast-tracking, networking,
and of course, dare I say,
conferencing, and even video-conferencing, and above all,
delivering,9 as Thorne says, “the list of frenetic
activities and judgmental processes is endless”.10 Have we
3
forgotten that to “deliver”, in its original meaning, is
to “set free”,11 not to enslave either ourselves or
others?
Many years ago I studied for my Ph.D. research the
cognitive processes of my students at the University of
Technology in Papua New Guinea, who were trying to learn
scientific concepts in what was for them a third language
(English) from the standpoint of an indigenous culture
which only two generations before them had been described
by Australian explorers as “stone age”.
On that note, I wonder if you heard about the recent
archaeological research which suggests that Palaeolithic
Man (that is, Old Stone Age Man, before the comparative
modernity of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age) only had to
work three hours a day in order to sustain himself and
his family. The rest of his time was spent in family and
social life, the arts, leisure, ritual and reflection.
We have come a long way since the Old Stone Age! I am
reminded of President Eisenhower’s prediction in the
1950’s that within ten years Americans would only be
working four days a week because of labour-saving
devices. Look at them now! And look at us, too! So strong
is the conditioning wrought by the myth of progress, so
powerful these illusions, that we fail to see what is
before our very eyes.
Earlier this year, I picked up the Guardian12 on my way to
speak at a conference on Higher Education in Developing
Countries in London and noticed an article about our
oppressive work culture. Next to the headline “Work is a
four letter word for those in their 30s”, there was a
striking photograph of a dejected young man sitting on a
flight of stone steps, briefcase between his legs,
leaning forward onto tightly clasped hands, with the
caption: “Stressed, worried and overworked…the price of
climbing
the
career
ladder
is
too
high
for
thirtysomethings”. The article, reporting the findings of
a study by the Employers’ Forum on Age, also reports the
findings of Brian Thorne, derived from his psychotherapeutic encounters, that workers in their thirties
“gradually tumble to the fact that work has become the
totality of their existence and so much of their energy,
intellect and emotion goes into making their way up the
hierarchical ladder. They are exhausted and they realise
they are losing touch with their friends or missing out
on aspects of their children’s development that can never
recur.”
4
I thought of a young man I know, for the young man on the
steps looked a bit like him. Working in a pressurised job
in London in the field of ethical business practice,
about to be married, and pursuing a part-time M.A. to
enhance his promotion prospects, he fortunately has the
wisdom and integrity not to allow himself to be swallowed
up, but I know he battles constantly with the challenge
to balance his need for success with his need to be a
well-rounded human being and to hold on to core values.
I thought too of a young woman, striving so hard to
complete her training as a teacher. A born teacher of
young children, with a two-year old daughter of her own,
longing to impart the joy13 and delight of learning
through play, observation and discovery, I see her
shackled by the wretched apparatus of policies, planning,
objectives,
targets,
strategies
and
“assessment
opportunities”, and every budding insight and spontaneous
inspiration blighted or straitjacketed by the demand
always to make explicit how they comply with these
“systems”
and
how
they
conform
to
the
lifeless
terminology in which they are framed.14
I recall an
article in the Independent which reported the insanity
that children are to be assessed on their physical,
emotional, intellectual and social development between
the ages of three and six, a task which will necessitate
the completion of 3,510 tickboxes for a class of 30
children.15
My heart goes out to all young people today, labouring as
they do under the yoke of our impoverished view of human
faculties and human potential. When will we begin to
understand what our children hunger for, and nourish
them? If anyone deserves an ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour
Order) is has to be the ideologues, architects and
enforcers of government educational policy who repeatedly
state that the number-one priority of education in this
country is not the acquisition of liberating knowledge,
the nourishment of the imagination, the development of
character or the realisation of what it means to be fully
human, but the driving forward of national economic
development goals so that we can all continue perpetually
to increase our material standards of living to the
detriment of our own happiness and quality of life.16 And
I do not even touch on the destruction of the livelihoods
of the less “advanced” and the degradation of the
environment necessitated by our insatiable greed.
And the government’s answer? The introduction, so I have
just heard, of the inspiring subject of money management
5
into the primary school curriculum – the basics of
savings, spending and running a budget. Our educational
vision and philosophy is now moulded not by those who
know how to educate (that is, from Latin educere, to
“draw out” our innate potential as human beings17) but by
people who know how to run an efficient economy. Their
overuse of the term “delivery” to describe the successful
realisation of their policies reflects well their natural
affinity with the world of shopping.
A columnist in The Independent newspaper, referring to
our education secretary of the time as “Bruiser Clarke
the
boffin-basher”,
believes
that
“his
dead-eyed
utilitarian code reduces education to churning out
limited, wealth-producing units.”18 Indeed, if you want to
produce the modern equivalent of a regimented empireserving army of ledger clerks and petty officials (that
is, an army of unquestioning and conforming cogs in the
economic machine) you don’t need creative people with
imagination,19
apart
from
those
who
misuse
their
imaginative powers to manipulate consumers. Least of all
do you need emotionally intelligent people, or reflective
and self-aware people, or people of spiritual vision. You
don’t even need people who can think much beyond the kind
of functional “thinking skills” which reduce the miracle
of the human mind to mere rationalisation.20 To use a
chilling phrase I recently heard uttered by a scientist
heralding the future development of the human race, what
you ideally need are
people with a “digitally re21
mastered consciousness.”
But to return to the theme of not seeing what is before
our very eyes, an American philanthropist recently sent
me the details of some recent research in visual
perception which was aired on National Public Radio and
which suggests that “if you don’t see something often,
you often don’t see it”.22 The context of this was a
discussion about how to address the problem of ignorance
of other cultures, or worse, cultural prejudice, and how
to deal with it (and the wider issues raised by the
pernicious doctrine of the Clash of Civilisations)
through inter-cultural education – not a strong card in
the American educational system nor in their corporationdominated media.
I replied by referring to my research in Papua New
Guinea, which found, on the other hand, that “if you see
something too often, you may see nothing else”. A degree
of top-down or concept-driven processing is of course
essential if we are to process material rapidly. In the
6
field of visual perception, it is well known that in the
case
of
ambiguous
images,
the
brain
tended
to
disambiguate
them
on
the
basis
of
familiar
or
stereotypical views derived from our knowledge of the
world.
However, when semantic expectations or global schemata
become fixed scripts instead of merely provisional
hypotheses they can override new information which we
need to process more slowly and accurately from the
bottom up through syntactic and lexical analysis if we
are to update and refine the state of our existing
knowledge.23
It is of course well known to cognitive
scientists
that
effective
learning
requires
an
oscillation or interplay between top-down and bottom-up
processes, or, in philosophical language, a process of
dialectic or critical engagement by which ideas are
cumulatively refined.
This is, after all, one of the
founding principles of Western civilisation.24
And yet, our one-sided, reductionist view of the
Intellect has become so entrenched in our culture that it
has become very difficult to reclaim its authentic
meaning, purpose and scope. People have simply forgotten
what it is. “If you don’t see something often, you often
don’t see it, but if you see something too often, you may
see nothing else”.
As I was writing this paper, it became very clear to me
that there is a pressing need to connect up the dots
between various approaches to cognition which reflect
that disillusionment with the over-emphasis on the lower
level of the intellect in our culture and education
system
what
Guy
Claxton
calls
“d-mode”,
or
25
“deliberation mode”
and defines as the sort of
intelligence concerned with
“figuring matters out,
weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and
solving problems…a way of knowing that relies on reason
and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking. We often
call this intelligence ‘intellect’.”26 “You are not
thinking;” said Neils Bohr to Albert Einstein, “you are
merely being logical.”
Claxton himself points out that growing dissatisfaction
with the assumption that d-mode is the be-all and end-all
of human cognition is reflected in various alternative
approaches to the notion of intelligence, such as Howard
Gardner’s ‘multiple intelligences’ and Daniel Goleman’s
‘emotional intelligence’. However, as he rightly says,
“to understand more broadly how the different facets of
7
intelligence fit together, we have to find an approach
that does not presuppose the primacy of the intellect.”27
(my emphasis).
I would want to add to these alternative approaches the
work of scientists such as F. David Peat,28 who have
synthesised
anthropology,
history,
linguistics,
metaphysics, cosmology and even quantum theory to
describe the way in which the worldviews and indigenous
teachings of traditional peoples differ profoundly from
the way of seeing the world embedded in us by linear
Western science. If there is any clearer example of a
fixed
script
which
prevents
learning,
it
is
the
profoundly
limiting
assumption
that
other
‘nonscientific’ modes of enquiry are invalid, and that
indigenous science should not be called a science at all.
As Peat says, “this is the inevitable conclusion within a
worldview whose values are dominated by the need for
progress,
development,
evolution,
and
the
linear
29
unfolding of time”.
But most of all, I want to connect these vital
correctives and re-orientations with the much more
spacious view of human Intellect which is shared by all
living spiritual traditions. I would like to give special
attention to the insights we can gain from Islamic
spirituality, with its rich and subtle description of the
hierarchy of human faculties, as a means of reviving this
enriched vision of human Intellect, which has such
profound educational implications at this time.
In this way, we don’t need, as Claxton suggests, “to find
an approach that does not presuppose the primacy of the
intellect”, but only need to redefine what the human
Intellect is, and give it back its capital ‘I’. This is a
work of reclamation, of revival of an original concept,
rather than the formulation of a novel concept. This
wisdom is already accessible to us, and we only need to
connect it up to the findings of modern research in
exactly the same way as Peat’s work has shown the
remarkable resemblance between the indigenous teachings
of native American peoples and the insights that are
emerging from modern science.
But before we excavate this unifying concept, let me
briefly summarise the characteristics of Claxton’s ‘dmode’. I hesitate to connect ‘d-mode’ with the stated
aims of the IACEP, but they seem rather similar.
8
The IACEP website states that “perception, thinking,
learning and problem solving can be understood and
ultimately improved by the development and application of
systematic, identifiable, and communicable processes of
logical thinking.”
D-mode
~ is a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on
deliberate conscious thinking which works well when the
problem it is facing can be easily conceptualised;
~ is much more interested in finding answers and
solutions than in examining the questions;
~ assumes that the way is sees the situation is the way
it is… and the idea that the fault may be in the way the
situation
is
perceived
or
‘framed’…does
not
come
naturally to d-mode;
~ sees conscious, articulate understanding as the
essential basis for action, and thought as the essential
problem-solving tool;
~ seeks and prefers clarity, and neither likes nor values
confusion;
~ operates with a sense of urgency and impatience;
~ is purposeful and effortful rather than playful;
~ is precise;
~ relies on literal and explicit language ;
~ works with concepts and generalisations;
~ works well when tackling problems which can be treated
as an assemblage of nameable parts
and are therefore
accessible to the function of language in segmenting and
analysing.30
Claxton contrasts d-mode with slower, “unconscious”
processes such as “ruminating, mulling things over; being
contemplative or meditative” and cites recent scientific
evidence
which “shows convincingly that the more
patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly
suited to making sense of situations that are intricate,
shadowy
or
ill
defined.”31
He
believes
that
the
overemphasis in recent years on the evolution and
function of the conscious mind (as, for instance, in the
work of Dennett, Penrose, and Ornstein) has caused us to
continue to overvalue those modes of mind that are most
associated with consciousness and to ignore those that
are less conscious, or require a different image of mind.
“Much of this wave of research and speculation on
consciousness must be seen as symptomatic of our cultural
obsession with the conscious intellect and not a
corrective to it.” 32
9
He continues: “Our culture has come to ignore or
undervalue
[slow ways of knowing], to treat them as
marginal or merely recreational…The individuals and
societies of the West have rather lost touch with the
value of contemplation. Only active thinking is regarded
as productive”.33
Again, “We find ourselves in a culture which has lost
sight (not least in the education system) of some
fundamental distinctions, like those between being wise,
being clever, having your ‘wits’ about you, and being
merely well informed. We have been inadvertently trapped
in a single mode of mind that is characterised by
information-gathering, intellect and impatience, one that
requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful and
to ‘show your working’. We are thus committed (and
restricted) to those ways of knowing that can function in
such a high-speed mental climate: predominantly those
that use language34 (or other symbol systems) as a medium
and deliberation as a method…. However, to tap into those
other modes of knowing which require patience, intuition
and relaxation, we must “dare to wait”, for such knowing
“emerges from, and is a response to, not-knowing.” 35
To rehabilitate the slow ways of knowing, the “crucial
step…is not the acquisition of a new psychological
technology [Claxton lists brainstorming, visualisation,
mnemonics and I would also add accelerated learning, with
its revealing connotations of speed and urgency] but a
revised understanding of the human mind…Clever mental
techniques… miss the point if they leave in place the
same questing, restless attitude of mind. In many courses
on ‘creative management’…instead of calling a meeting to
‘discuss’ the problem, you call one to ‘brainstorm’ it,
or to get people to draw it with crayons. But the
pressure for results…is still there.” 36
F. David Peat calls the more leisurely process of
learning “coming-to-knowing”.37 “Each person learns for
himself or herself through the processes of growing up in
contact with nature and society; by observing, watching,
listening, and dreaming.”38 This sounds very much like
Claxton’s “learning by osmosis”.
Peat points out that
Polanyi’s notion of “tacit knowledge” also comes close to
this vision of coming-to-knowing.39 This knowledge,
according to Polanyi, is not transmitted through books or
verbal instruction but is known through the whole of
one’s being through direct experience and relationship
with the thing to be known.
10
Peat maintains that the natural tendency in Western
culture is to “warn, help, teach, instruct and improve”
instead
of
allowing
people
to
learn
from
their
experience.40 Under the heading “A Story about Knowledge
and Knowing”41 he relates a story told by Joe Couture, a
therapist and traditional healer, which
explores the
implications of these two ways of knowing and the clash
between a Western education and his own Blackfoot
background. The story shows how traditional people teach
by telling stories which come out of their direct
experiences rather than from the simple imparting of
facts or the application of abstract logical reasoning.
In this case a Native Elder, speaking about the
experience of his grandson at a local school,
“had no
need to analyse the philosophy of the local school board
or discuss the relative value of different worldviews. He
simply told a story… which brought into focus some of the
things that people were sensing and feeling about the
school’s effect on the community.”
The story the Elder told was about the time when he was a
boy and had to make a long trip along the Yukon River to
Dawson City. His old pickup truck had broken down and he
had faced a journey of over a hundred miles and under
adverse conditions. In the end he had made it through.
The old man said that his grandson could now read and
write, but he was sure that if the boy were to make the
same journey alone he would never make it back.
This story reminds me of another one, related by the
Harvard educationalist Roland Barth in his book Learning
By Heart:42
“On June 17, 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia
negotiated a treaty with the Indians of the Six nations at
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Indians were invited to send boys to
William and Mary College. The next day they declined the offer:
“We know that you highly esteem the type of learning taught in
those colleges, and that the maintenance of our young men while
with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced that
you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you
heartily. But you, who are wise must know that different nations
have different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not
take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of Education happen not
to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience in it.
Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the
Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all
of your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad
runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods – not fit
for Hunters, Warriors, nor counsellors, they were totally good
for nothing.
“We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind offer,
tho’ we decline accepting it; and to show our grateful Sense of
it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their
11
Sons, we will take Care of their Educations, instruct them in all
we know, and make Men of them.”
Barth is relating this story to illustrate the tension
between what he calls the top-down teacher-centred
Transmission of Information model of learning (or “Sit ‘n
Git”) and the Experiential model, and to the value of
adventure education programs.
Now, we might easily dismiss the story as largely
irrelevant. After all, you might say, what need is there
in the modern world for the preservation of a culture so
dependent on the manly skills of running, living in the
woods, and fighting, even if we might agree that the
other skill so prized by the Indians of the Six Nations –
that of counselling - is very much in demand.43 And, to
return to the story told by the Blackfoot Elder, how
often is the need going to arise for the skills which
require a boy to travel a hundred miles in rugged country
in adverse conditions in order to get home? These days,
children don’t even need to walk to school, so perilous
is such a journey considered to be by their parents.
However, commenting on the story, Barth44 reports research
which has shown that students who participate in
adventure programs show significant improvement in their
problem-solving abilities, leadership skills, social
skills and independence. Furthermore, the gains of such
students continued to be realised after the experience in
contrast to educational programs where the learning gains
fade rapidly after the program ends.
There is a deeper dimension to contact with nature – one
which Barth doesn’t really address, partially seduced as
he is by the d-mode dimension of proven ”benefits”,
“gains” and “improvements” in “problem-solving”. If he
didn’t write as well as he did, he might tell us that
these are some of the useful gains that are, to use the
hideous term,
“delivered” by adventure education
programs.
As Al-Ghazali45 puts it, “tasting (Arabic dhawq46) is the
only way to certitude.” Al-Ghazali also points out that
tasting (or internalisation through experience) is the
only way to go beyond the “conventional learning of the
age, treating as it did only the more superficial aspects
of man’s condition”. In his day, he was referring to
formal religious knowledge without spiritual experience
as the limiting “conventional learning of the age”, but
these days we might just as well see such conventional
limitations in an educational system which increasingly
12
detaches young people from that experience of “tasting”
or direct experience.47
Rumi,48 another great Sufi, taught that “The Intellect of
intellect is your kernel; the intellect is only the
husk.”49
Unfortunately, in our culture, it is the husk of the
intellect (with that small ‘i’) which has been promoted
beyond its station to masquerade as the pinnacle of human
cognitive development. Piaget is partly to blame,
demoting
as
he
does
the
intuitive,
practical
50
intelligence
to the infantile level of
“sensorimotor
intelligence” which is dominant during the first two years
of life, to be superseded and transformed in due course
by more powerful, abstract, intellectual ways of knowing
– notably, the “formal operations” of hypotheticodeductive thinking and theory construction. Claxton
points out that there is an implicit assumption in
Piaget’s ‘stage theory’ of development that d-mode is the
highest from of intelligence, and his influence on
several generations of educators has ensured that
“schools, even primary schools and kindergartens, saw
their job as weaning children off their reliance on their
senses and their intuition, and encouraging them to
become deliberators and explainers as fast as possible.” 51
It is surely the case that the development of the
rational mind has even undermined those capacities which
we
all
naturally
possessed
at
earlier
stages
of
development, such as the capacity for awe and wonder in
the face of mysteries which are inaccessible to the mind.
The original meaning of the word understand in English
was ‘to stand in the midst of’ – that is, to understand
by direct experience and engagement.52
The word understand is the only instance in modern
English of the survival of the prefix under as meaning
‘between’ or ‘among’ (as in Old English undersecan, ‘to
investigate, seek amongst’). In all other cases the
prefix means ‘below’ or ‘beneath’. Old English
understandan meant literally ‘to stand in the midst of’.
Modern German verstehen (from Middle High German verstan)
is based on a different prefix (ver-) which means ‘in
front, or on top of’, so verstehen literally means ‘to
stand in front of, or on top of’. Ionic Greek epístasthai, ‘to understand’ also means to ‘stand on top
of, stand over’.
13
Two types of understanding are implicated here:
understanding through direct experience and engagement
(‘standing amongst’ – understandan) and understanding
through observation (‘standing in front of, or on top of
- verstehen). Significantly, it was these two forms of
learning which Francis Bacon regarded as the basis of his
learning by ‘induction’, that is, learning by experience
and observation, as opposed to the outmoded methods of
medieval scholasticism based on abstract logic and
authority. The revival of experience and observation was
at the root of the scientific revolution in Europe.
However, in the history of the West, the notion of
‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere
‘experimentation’. ‘Standing in front of, or on top of’
(i.e. objectivity, objectification) has taken precedence
over ‘standing in the midst of’ (subjectivity, direct
experience, tasting). In other words, Bacon’s notion of
‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere
‘experimentation’, which explains the spectacular success
of the scientific method to the detriment of other forms
of inquiry and perception involving faculties of direct
insight.
To put “d-mode” or “formal operations” in their place,
the function of the lower level of the intellect (Latin
ratio, Greek dianoia) in all spiritual traditions is to
acquire and extend knowledge not for its own sake but for
the purpose of verifying the innate Knowledge of higher
realities which exists in the innermost Heart of every
human being and which is directly accessible to the
higher intellectual function (Latin intellectus, Greek
nous).
The Arabic word for Intellect, ‘aql,53 organically
combines reason and the higher intellect in its sense of
intelligence-understanding, or mind-heart. In its highest
sense it is the “universal principle of all intelligence,
a principle which transcends the limiting conditions of
the mind”.54 Ibn Sina (Avicenna)55 refers to this higher
faculty of intellection as the Active Intellect,56 the
means of approaching the Divine Intellect, of which it is
a reflection. It is through the Intellect, if purified,
that man can know the inner essence or principles (logoi)
of created things by means of direct apprehension or
spiritual perception. The Intellect is the faculty which
dwells in the depth of the soul and constitutes the
innermost
aspect
of
the
Heart,57
the
organ
of
58
contemplation.
It is this faculty, again, which confers
14
on us the capacity to penetrate to mythical, archetypal
and symbolic meanings. “We know the truth, not only by
reason, but also by the heart”, said Blaise Pascal.
It is important to realise that the multi-levelled
conception of Intellect denoted by the word ‘aql not only
encompasses both reason and insight, or conceptualisation
through language and direct spiritual perception, but
also includes a moral dimension. The conception of
‘excellence’
expressed in the Arabic word ihsan is in
fact inseparable from goodness and virtue, whereas the
Western conception of ‘excellence’ is more
often than not limited to personal mastery, achievement
and success. The moral and cognitive dimensions are
therefore
intertwined,
and
not
separated.59
In
a
hierarchically ordered conception of human faculties,
cognitive psychology is part of moral philosophy, which
is itself
derived from, and subordinate to,
spiritual
revelation.60
In a detailed study of the concept of ‘aql, appropriately
titled “Between wisdom and reason: aspects of ‘aql (mindcognition)”, Crow states that “the mystery of human
intelligence or cognition is the subject of current
neurological-based studies in the field of ‘cognitive
psychology’” He points out that “investigators in
different fields are now questioning the definition of
intelligence accepted by many scientists (the single
unitary entity or g factor, for general intelligence),
and
are
advancing
concepts
such
as
emotional
intelligence, social intelligence, or moral intelligence,
as well as ‘wisdom’… Noteworthy is the re-appearance of
the term ‘wisdom’, connoting a combination of social and
moral intelligence, or in traditional terms: that blend
of knowledge and understanding within one’s being
manifested
in
personal
integrity,
conscience,
and
effective behaviour.”61
He concludes that one of the key components of the
concept of ‘intelligence’ expressed by the term ‘aql was
“ethical-spiritual:
teaching how to rectify one’s
integrity and to cause one’s human impulses, faculties
and latent powers to flourish, with the purified emotions
promoting the operation of a higher intelligence”62
Peat explains that “knowledge, within a traditional
society, is not the stuff of books but the stuff of life.
Even in the English language that word knowledge has its
origins in a verb or activity.63 In medieval times it
served as a verb somewhat like our modern to acknowledge,
15
and it meant to own the knowledge of something and
perceive something as true. In turn, the origins of the
verb lay in yet another process – the verb to know –
which is a term of extremely ancient Aryan origins that
had to do with perception, recognition, and the ability
to distinguish.64 From this Indo-European base, gn-/gon/gen-, we also of course derive the English words denote
and notion, as well as cognition, although Shipley points
out that the authentic concept underlying cognition is
Greek gnosis, “higher knowledge of spiritual things”. “I
know, therefore I can”, proclaims Shipley, presumably
parodying the less generative65 (and hence essentially
sterile) Descartian axiom “I think, therefore I am”.
Thus, to the earliest peoples of Europe and Asia
knowledge and knowing had more to do with a
discriminating perception of the mind and the senses than
with the accumulation of facts.” 66 (my emphasis).
This discriminating perception is also something quite
different from abstract thinking and reasoning. The
origin of the English word think also goes back to an
ancient Indo-European root, whose connotations were not
restricted to conceptual thought processes but
encompassed perception, reflection, imagination, knowing,
feeling, thankfulness, and goodwill – faculties of mindheart.67
In modern Western culture, however, the original meaning
of the word ‘Intellect is no longer generally retrievable
as a means of distinguishing the higher faculty from the
lower one.68 Albert Einstein, one of the greatest
constructers of scientific theory, warned against the
over-valuation of the rational mind: “The intuitive mind
is a sacred gift; the rational mind is a faithful
servant. We have created a society that honours the
servant and has forgotten the gift.” Thomas Moore also
writes of the way in which the over-valuation of the
rational
intellect
not
only
diminishes
inidividual
potential but also de-souls our institutions : “Without
an animated, educated heart,” he writes, “the intellect
appears superior, and we give too much attention and
value to it. Our institutions and ideas then lack the
humanizing breath of the soul.”69
It
is
therefore
hardly
surprising
that
there
is
widespread suspicion of ‘intellectuals’ and growing
disillusionment
with
scientism.70
People
sense
the
inhumanity and arrogance of reason detached from the
heart. There can be no true intellectuality without human
16
values and spiritual intelligence. Every teacher should
follow T.S. Eliot’s wise dictum that “It is in fact a
part of the function of education to help us escape
not from our own time, for we are bound by that - but
from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our
own time.” Scholars, researchers and teachers bound
themselves by such limitations are hardly in a position
to help others escape from them.
The devastating loss of the authentic meaning of
Intelligence and the absurdly disproportionate emphasis
given
to
lower
levels
of
rationality
is
largely
responsible
for
the
debilitating
instructional
and
schooling regime we now see masquerading as education71–
an oppressive, sclerotic and soulless utilitarian regime
sustained
by
blinkered
and
robotic
materialists,
technocrats, IT professionals, managerialists, control
freaks, testers, measurers and surveillance agencies;
overwhelming and crippling teachers with unworkably
complex
systems
of
recording
and
accountability;
negating
creativity
and
imagination
through
the
cumulative imposition of one burdensome initiative after
another; confounding the exploration of that potentially
expansive inner space through the tyranny of timepressure devoted almost entirely to arid or trivial
objectives;
demoralising and dispiriting72 our young
people with an ever-increasing weight of factual content73
and obsessive testing, and totally failing to answer
their hunger for meaning, inspire their deeper human
aspirations or engage soul or spirit.
The rampant decline in the mental health of children and
adolescents, revealed by studies which have exposed the
growing incidence of stress, depression, compulsive
disorders and even suicide, is now a national disgrace,
and they carry this malaise into their adult life, where
it is further compounded by an oppressive work culture.74
And not content with the oppression of our own young
people by this reductionism which confuses genuine
qualitative education with mere efficiency and quantity
of output, it seems we also wish to export this malaise
to other countries in the name of progress and
development.75
I am not referring here to the imminent colonisation of
France and the destruction of the French social model by
more efficient and competitive Anglo-Saxon free-market
economics (although as an Englishman living and working
in France I hope that
17
the likely spread of this virus can at least be averted
for a while so that we can continue to enjoy what remains
of a civilised existence based on a knowledge of how to
live and how to relate to other people through a real
sense of community and a respect for relaxed leisure time
spent with family and friends).
No, the malaise is spreading much further afield. At a
conference on Higher Education in Developing Countries in
London,76 at which I spoke about the need to revive an
authentic notion of qualitative education based on the
education of the higher faculties of mankind, it dismayed
me to see an almost total dominance of Western models of
so-called “quality assurance”, for such is the reach and
influence of this debilitating virus whose global
hegemony takes away any confidence which educators in
other cultural settings might have in their own approach
to ensuring quality based on their own traditions.77
None of these exported models had any concept of a higher
education based on the higher faculties of mankind – that
is a truly qualitative education of the human being –
even though they claimed to assure “quality” in Arab
universities,
usually
by
reforming
structures
and
improving management styles. Neither did any of them have
any concept of how the reclamation of the finest elements
of traditional Islamic civilisation might contribute to
quality. It was sad to see a once great civilisation
reduced to offering apologetic imitations of the worst of
Western
education,
which
is
based
not
on
any
understanding of higher human faculties, and increasingly
not even on an intermediate concept of humane education.
The American social critic Neil Postman coined the word
‘technopoly’ to describe our dominant worldview (now, it
seems,
increasingly
homogenizing
the
world
through
globalisation) based on the belief that “the primary, if
not the only goal of human labour and thought is
efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects
superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment
cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity,
ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity
is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be
measured either does not exist or is of no value; and
that the affairs of citizens are best guided and
conducted by ‘experts’”.78
I would like to wrap up this appeal for the revival of
Intelligence with another point about the use of
language.
Unlike
Arabic,
for
example,
English
is
18
relatively limited in its ability to express the kind of
concepts we need in order to understand the nature and
range
of
human
faculties
and
the
hierarchical
relationship between them. This is because of the
semantic degradation of key concepts which has occurred
as words have passed into English from other languages
(especially those ancient languages which retained that
perennial wisdom) and also as English words themselves
have changed their meanings over time. The tri-literal
root system in Arabic enables the connotations of words
to be recovered, but original meanings in English can
only often be recovered through a scholarly process of
etymological research, often going back to Indo-European
roots. How many people, apart from medievalists, know the
original meaning of the word ‘cunning’, for example?79 How
many people unfamiliar with the Classics can recover the
original meaning of ‘intellect’ or ‘idea’?
Related to this is the confusion in terminology which
arises from one word in English having to cover different
concepts or different nuances of the same concept.
“Intelligence” is a prime example. The words ‘conscious’
and ‘unconscious’ also pose awkward ambiguities. Claxton
makes the important point that “we need new metaphors and
images for the relationship between conscious and
unconscious which escape from the polarisation to which
both Descartes and Freud, from their different sides,
subscribed.”80 “The confusion of the unconscious with the
pathologically repressed Freudian subconscious, “the sump
of the mind into which sink experiences, impulses and
ideas too awful or dangerous to allow into consciousness”
reflects the acceptance of the other extreme, “the basic
Cartesian premise that consciousness is intelligent81 and
controlled”. This polarisation forces us to believe that
“consciousness
is
other
than
and
opposed
to,
unconsciousness”, which is “emotional, irrational, wild
and alien.”82
Because of these potential confusions, Claxton has to use
various expressions according
to
context
to
convey
what
he
calls
the
“dark,
inaccessible layers” of the contemplative “tortoise
mind”, and to avoid potential confusion with the Freudian
subconscious: hence, we have ‘the unconscious’,
‘the
intelligent unconscious’, ‘the cognitive unconscious’ or
the ‘undermind’.
But the polarisation is hard to escape, and we are still
left with a limiting association between the ‘conscious
mind’ and the merely conscious reasoning of d-mode.
19
However, this is clearly not what is meant by the use of
the term ‘conscious’ and “consciousness” in the language
of spiritual traditions. To be ‘conscious’ of the Supreme
Reality83 (however we may name it) is hardly something
accessible to the ‘hare brain’ of ‘conscious thinking’,
in Claxton’s terms. Paradoxically, it has more to do with
what Claxton calls the ‘intelligent unconscious’, with
its capacity for ‘tasting’, direct perception and
contemplation. In this sense, there are aspects of
Claxton’s ‘unconscious’ which point to a level of
consciousness which is ‘higher’ than what he calls the
‘conscious’. Such problems with terminology can lead to
some quite intractable conundrums.
Some resolution is offered by the Arabic word shahid,
‘conscious mind’, which refers in the Qur’an to the
“awakening of the deeper layers of man’s consciousness”,
in contrast to sa-iq, “the complex of primal and
instinctive
urges
and
inordinate,
unrestrained
84
appetites”.
This seems to be contrasting something like
Claxton’s “intelligent unconscious” with something like
the Freudian subconscious. The key phrase is “the deeper
layers of man’s consciousness” which clearly refers to a
level of consciousness (whether “under” or “over”),
beyond the “conscious thinking” of d-mode.85
To
envisage
the
ultimate
and
deepest
level
of
consciousness as the Centre is perhaps the best way for
us to escape from the awkward linearity of the metaphor
provided by the vertical dimension, but the exploration
of that metaphor is beyond the scope of this paper.
Educational Implications
What are the educational implications of the revival of
the full range of human faculties? How can teachers use
such knowledge to educate our young people?
This is a huge question, because the restitution of such
a vision in education depends to a very large extent on
the revival of the idea of civilisation itself. Bertrand
Russell said that “teachers are more than any other class
the guardians of civilization”, but what kind of
civilisation was Russell talking about?
Without an
understanding of what a true civilisation is, and without
any embodiment of that truth in our own lives, we may be
unwitting disseminators of that deformed and impoverished
notion of ‘civilisation’ that I have been at pains to
expose in this essay.86
20
Ananda Coomaraswamy, in his essay “What is civilisation?”
contrasts what he calls “true civilisation” derived from
an “inspired tradition” based on perennial wisdom with
its deformation in the modern industrialised West. “The
one considers man’s needs; the other considers his wants,
to which no limit can be set, and of which the number is
artificially multiplied by advertisement”. Our modern
‘civilisation’, based as it is on notions of social
advancement, ambition, competition, free enterprise,
individualism,87 growth, expanding consumer ‘choice,’88 and
quantitative output for profit creates a perpetually
expanding world market for its surplus, produced by those
whom Dr. Albert Schweitzer called “over-occupied men”. It
is, according to Coomaraswamy, “the incubus of world
trade that makes of industrial ‘civilisations’ a ‘curse
to humanity’ and from the industrial concept of progress
…that modern wars have arisen and will arise; it on the
same impoverished soil that empires have grown, and by
the same greed that innumerable civilisations have been
destroyed.”89
Since educational policy is inextricably linked to this
impoverished view of ‘civilisation’ and the equally
impoverished and lopsided view of human faculties that
such a ‘civilisation’ demands for its survival and
expansion, and since such policy now dictates to teachers
that the first priority of a ‘quality’ education is to
serve the economy,90 a huge challenge confronts teachers
if they are to rise above this miserable aim, which
demeans both themselves and the children they teach, and
live up to Russell’s dictum that they are, above all
others, the “guardians of civilisation”.
To serve, first and foremost, the economy, and at the
same
time
to
follow
the
requirement
to
find
“opportunities”
to
weave
“moral
and
spiritual
development” through the whole curriculum, can do little
more than superimpose empty platitudes upon it. Nothing
more enlightening can come out of an inverted system in
which the superordinate position is usurped by what is
naturally subordinate to it. We might hope to weave a
gold thread here or there to illuminate the uniformly
grey and lifeless texture of the material we are given to
work with, to give our young people some glimpses of
their true potential and of the vast range of their human
faculties. We might hope to animate their souls for a
moment in the midst of all that urgent and purposeful
thinking, talking, instructing and telling.91 We might
aspire to show them the way to what it means to be a
21
better human being in a better world, and to give them
hope for the future.92
There are always exceptional and inspiring teachers who
can do this, who can plant imperishable seeds in the
hearts and minds of their students. But the wholesale
revival of a qualitative education of the soul and the
rediscovery of an authentic intellectual life is an
enterprise which now works against the drift of our
‘system’93 - for that is the parody that a civilisation
becomes when it is stripped of true intellectuality,
moral valuation and spiritual substance. Worse, devoid of
any transcendent principles, such systems inevitably
crystallise further into regimes, both conceptual and
political, which imprison and stifle the human spirit.
In the end, like the regime depicted in Orwell’s 1984,
they actively deny and invert the truth. I heard only
this morning on BBC Radio 494 one of the most absurd
illustrations of the tyranny exerted by IT systems. A man
went into W.H.Smith, picked up a TV aerial from a shelf,
and took it to the cash desk. The cashier, however,
refused to sell it to him because the computer said it
was out of stock. Apparently, members of our workforce
are now not only deficient in independent thinking, but
unable even to accept the existence of an object placed
before their very eyes. Is this the outcome of our
educational system?
The task is indeed huge, but I don’t want to depress you.
We have to accept that we live in an increasingly secular
society95 in which few people subscribe to a view of human
faculties which places consciousness of a Supreme Reality
at the top of the tree, even if they might accept some
version of this knowledge phrased in a different kind of
language, often watered down to avoid any reference to
the Divine96 and avoiding
any association with formal
religion - such as wisdom, self-realisation, spiritual
perception,
contemplative
insight,
analogical
and
metaphorical thinking, mythic and symbolic understanding,
Claxton’s “intelligent unconscious”, Polanyi’s “tacit
knowledge”, Peat’s “coming-to-knowing”, or the cognitive
faculty which is at home with paradox and ambiguity. We
can describe it in countless ways using the language of
many disciplines.
And the level of education which activates these
faculties, or at least gives some credence to some
version of them, is obviously not something which need be
restricted to Religious Education (RE), even if it is
22
most interesting to note that, according to a recent
survey, the popularity of RE amongst secondary school
students can be attributed partly to the fact that it is
one of the few school subjects which allows students to
develop
the
skills
of
philosophical
enquiry
and
reflection.97
Even if we cannot embrace an explicit concept of
spiritual education, we can still honour an intermediate
concept of humane education typical of the best liberal98
arts programs, which are in themselves a preparation for
the development of spiritual intelligence and integrate
higher-order cognitive activity into a holistic context:
engagement in the creative arts as a means to engage the
soul,
kindle
the
imagination,99
develop
aesthetic
awareness and stimulate the connectivity of the brain;100
courses which develop communication skills,101 including
discussion102 and dialectic;103 courses which develop
understanding of the human condition,104 a pluralistic and
compassionate outlook which values and respects diversity
and actively fosters inter-cultural dialogue;105 courses
which
give
opportunities
for
direct
experiential
learning, especially in the beauty and majesty of natural
settings;106 and, not least, courses which develop
character and transmit ethical values, whether applied to
personal conduct, relationships, citizenship, business
practice, or the care of the environment which is now
such a pressing concern for all of us.
We need to be aware how the education system is
continuing to compound the process of dehumanisation by
devaluing not only the creative arts and the qualitative
dimensions of science and mathematics,107 but also those
subjects which seek to understand the human condition in
all its diversity and complexity.108 The marginalisation
of the humanities, of history,109 archaeology, geography,
and modern languages, will only ensure that an ignorance
of the richness of human heritage and diversity is
compounded
by
an
incompetence
in
cross-cultural
communication, and this will remove our young people even
further from that rich educational experience which is a
prerequisite for truly human development.
All these arenas of education are intimately connected
with higher-order cognitive development even if they may
not set out and systematise links to an explicit taxonomy
of “thinking skills”.
If we are to revive a concept of holistic education, even
at an intermediate level, which values perception,
23
insight, contemplation, observation and experience, and
puts thinking in its place,110 we need to put into
practice those research findings which tell us that
visual and kinaesthetic learners far outnumber auditory
learners.111
If the learning of so many students is
enhanced by visual input112 and by the immediate sensory
stimulation of hands-on experience and action, it makes
little sense for schools to rely on predominantly verbal
instruction. A system based on such studied resistance to
the well-researched ways in which people actually learn
can only be a system embedded in ideological fixity.113
We must balance the seduction of hi-tech by providing
highly stimulating visual and tactile environments and by
using a range of multi-sensory teaching techniques.
But I also want to make a case for the revival of some
lost
verbal
skills,
particularly
the
revival
of
memorisation of complex verbal material as a vital tool
in developing higher-order cognitive faculties.114 We live
in an age where unsubstantiated opinions are increasingly
shouting down the meaningful thoughts of people who
actually know something and have something of substance
to say. People have electronic access to oceans of data
which they rarely know how to turn even into useful
information through selection of what is relevant, let
alone turn into knowledge or wisdom by connecting it up
to a wider context. History A-Level has recently been
described by a History specialist as “history for the MTV
generation – know a little but keep on repeating it”.115
Memorisation makes complex material accessible to the
brain for subsequent processing and lifelong reflection
and therefore provides a potent database for establishing
patterns and enhancing connections in the brain, as well
as providing a store of knowledge on which new knowledge
can be built, and with which substance and credibility
can be given to arguments.
Our educational process needs to reclaim memorisation in
those areas where it enhances deep learning. I have seen
shy
pupils
and
pupils
with
learning
difficulties
transformed by reciting poetry by heart or singing songs
learnt by heart in chorus in musical productions –
activities which not only foster expressive skills but
also enhance the self-esteem and self-confidence which
comes from a tangible achievement attained through effort
and practice.
In fact, all children, from those with
learning difficulties to the bright and gifted, benefit
from learning songs and I believe research shows there is
24
a transferable benefit to better mathematics and language
learning.
Learning poetry, like learning music for performance, has
transferable benefits, because this kind of verbatim
memorisation is developing potent cognitive strategies
for using a variety of patterns and cues – not just word
order, but also prosodic, metrical and rhyming patterns,
as well as various poetic devices, such as alliteration
and assonance, which build memorable connections between
words, and which are a common feature of epic poetry and
sacred text.116
Such skills were well developed in
societies
rich
in
oral
tradition,
and
of
course
encompassed not only skill in memorising but also the
expressive skills required for inspiring recitation.117
We should not forget that the genius of Shakespeare was
grounded in the memorisation culture of Elizabethan
England. Without that store of memorised knowledge, we
simply cannot recognise the wealth of allusions contained
in great literature.118
Imitation, too, was another
formative practice in that era. “One studies a great
piece of writing by one of the acknowledged giants of the
past, enters into a process of internalisation – an
alchemising through one’s own life and experience – and
then creates a poem of other work that is unique to the
writer yet has similarities to the original. This
practice enriches one’s ways of thinking, depends one’s
ability to allude to other forms, thickens the soup of
one’s mind.”119 The best schools will use imitation of
great models in this way, and not only in literature, but
also in art and music. It is important to realise that
this is not unthinking imitation, mere reproduction or
mechanical copying. It is using a model to catalyse a
creative process which draws on a variety of sources,
both external and internal.
As a counterbalance to the linearity and one-dimensional
explicitness of rational thought processes, we need to
encourage a mentality which can escape form the literal,
which is comfortable with analogical thinking, metaphor,
and symbolism, with fable, parable and allegory, with the
heightened language of poetry, with ellipsis, with
paradox
and
ambiguity,
and
with
the
constructive
confrontations and asynchronies which emerge from the
process of dialectic. Dialectical thinking, regarded by
Riegel as the highest stage of cognitive development,120
is a powerful means of transcending the limitations of
dichotomization.121
25
This advanced style of thought places the human being in
an inter-world, an isthmus or meeting-place (Arabic
barzakh), a point of intersection. It strives to unify
opposites, to attain balance, to resolve conflict,
affirming and incorporating logical polarities rather
than seeking to avoid contradiction and paradox through
one-sided adherence to a single perspective or paradigm.
In these times of cultural and ideological confrontation,
it would be hard to think of a more pressing educational
imperative.
Dialectical thinking (and the intellectual connectedness
which its promotes) should be one of the major planks of
a holistic education, together with deep reflection122
(which enables learners to connect with their innermost
selves123 and thereby promote spiritual connectedness) and
conversation and dialogue (which enable individuals to
connect with others and the society in which they live).
All of them need to be given time and space.
What distinguishes all these advanced processes and
activities
is
the
common
thread
of
establishing
relationship and connectivity, either between ideas,
between faculties and levels of being within oneself, or
between human souls. This is very far from the
isolationism, one-sidedness and solipsism (and their
pathological expression as a kind of cultural or societal
autism) which are the consequence of a type of mental
activity that can only dissect and atomise reality into
autonomous components124 or distance us from reality by
manipulating or inventing language which turns flesh-andblood experiences into manageable abstractions. C.S.
Lewis, commenting on the use of the word liquidate to
replace kill, describes this process as the use of
“pseudo-scientific” words to “disinfect”, and George
Orwell, referred to the same process as the use of
“euphemisms” to name things “without calling up mental
pictures of them.”125 (my emphasis). It will be readily
apparent how this reduction of concrete experience to
abstraction mirrors the reduction of perception to
conceptual thinking which is such an essential part of an
impoverished view of human faculties.126
Within a hierarchical concept of human faculties, the key
principles of relationship and connectivity are never
detached from another central principle – that of
orientation, which is semantically related to the concept
of origin.127 Advanced dialectic should not be confused
with that type of disorientated academic disputation
which is little more than clever intellectual gymnastics.
26
True
dialectic
is
concerned
not
with
peripheral
intellectualisation couched in barely comprehensible
abstractions, which is little more than playing with long
words, but with a process of convergence on a central and
unifying point of Truth through the application of
objective truth criteria. Authentic dialectic is always
orientated to the Centre, the origin of all things, the
dimensionless point beyond duality where the opposites
meet.
It goes without saying that the dialectical process is
not one either of compromise or loose relativism, but one
of
creative
tension
which
ultimately
transforms
contradictions into complementarities, releasing the
open-minded thinker from ingrained habits and conditioned
patterns of thought, established affiliations, fear of
change and instability, and reluctance to approach any
new ideas which are threatening to a rigid sense of
‘self’.128
Associated with this openness to change, uncertainty
instability is the willingness always to seek
evidence and the ability to resist premature closure
fixed conclusions. Albert Einstein said: “As far as
laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are
certain; and as far as they are certain, they do
refer to reality.”
and
new
and
the
not
not
Let me appeal too for a revival of play. Carl Jung said
that “the creation of something new is not accomplished
by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from
inner necessity.” The creative mind plays with objects it
loves.” With all that planning, managing, telling and
expounding, not to mention marking, assessing, and the
systematising
wherever
possible
of
cross-curricular
links, IT opportunities, special needs provision and risk
assessment, what time do teachers have left for play? And
if they cannot play, how can they create a culture of
play amongst their students?
Play relates to talk too, because playful talk is
creative activity in itself.
Play can express itself
through talk in a variety of ways: in joke-telling,
riddling, parody, satire, repartee, dramatic enactment,
mimicry, having fun with language – in all kinds of ways
which have little or nothing to do with the kind of
functional, expository language skills so indispensable
for purposeful rational thinking.
27
Above all, we must cultivate the capacity for awe129 and
wonder in the face of mysteries which are inaccessible to
the rational intellect - an innate, childlike capacity,
which, as I have already said, has been undermined by a
stage model of cognitive development (or ‘genetic
epistemology’, as Piaget called it) that regards abstract
reasoning or ‘formal operations’ as the pinnacle of human
cognition. Direct observation of the night sky ought to
be on every science curriculum, not simply to satisfy
curiosity about the workings of the universe (as if the
universe can be reduced to self-sufficient laws and
mechanisms or striking phenomena) but as a means to evoke
that sense of unfathomable mystery which Albert Einstein
regarded as the source not only of all true art, but also
the source of science130 itself: “The most beautiful thing
we can experience”, he said, is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and all science. He to whom this
emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are
closed.”
As well as the vastness of the night sky, that sense of
awe and wonder in the face of beauty and majesty can
equally well be cultivated in everyday encounters with
nature, in that sense of limitless multiplicity which
anyone who looks at nature with an open eye can perceive
in every shifting scene; but whatever it is, it is a
point
of
reference
with
something
infinite
and
unfathomable, far beyond the practical dimension of human
affairs.
This is not ‘observation’ in the sense of a trained eye,
whether of artist or scientist, noticing and recording
observable and measurable physical characteristics, such
as shape, dimension, texture, and other details, but a
deep supersensory faculty of
“imagination”, one of the
“mirrors of the Intellect”.131
If we fail to awaken and nourish this innate ability to
“see” and “taste”, as well as all those other perceptive
and insightful ways of knowing which are germane to an
authentic vision of higher human faculties, we leave our
young people with a bitter legacy based on our own
impoverished view of human potential: we leave them with
an impoverished view of themselves, other people, the
world and the universe, and one that gives them little
hope for the future beyond the increasingly frenetic
activity which they will need to sustain in order to
ensure their success in the world and to serve an
ideology
of
perpetual
material
‘growth’
and
28
‘development’. All educators would surely wish for them a
better future than one which is ultimately both immoral
and unsustainable.
Jeremy Henzell-Thomas
June 2005
Correspondence to jht@thebook.org
ENDNOTES
Dictionaries of Etymology
In explaining the etymology of English words, I have made
significant use of four sources:
Ayto, John, Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins.
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990.
Barnhart, Robert K. (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of
Etymology, edited by Edinburgh: Chambers, 1988.
Shipley, Joseph. T., The Origins of English Words: A
Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Baltimore:
The John Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Watkins, Calvert (ed.), The American
of Indo-European Roots,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Heritage Dictionary
I refer to these sources as Ayto, Barnhart, Shipley, and
Watkins, respectively.
Translations of the Qur’an
I have made use of four translations of the Qur’an:
‘Ali, ‘Abdullah Yusuf, The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an.
Beltsville, Maryland: Amana Publications, 1989.
Arberry, Arthur J., The Koran Interpreted. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982.
Asad, Muhammad, The Message of the Qur’an . Bath: The
Book Foundation, new edition, 2003.
Pickthall, Muhammad M., The Glorious Qur’an. New York:
Muslim World League, 1977.
29
I refer to these versions as Yusuf ‘Ali, Arberry, Asad,
and Pickthall respectively.
I have explored the way in which modern education
systems demoralise and dispirit young people through
their dominant regime of utilitarian schooling and
managerialism in a series of recent papers: HenzellThomas, J., ‘Passing Between the Clashing Rocks: The
Heroic Quest for a Common and Inclusive Identity’, The
Journal of Pastoral Care in Education, Spring, 2004;
‘Mythical Meaning, Religion and Soulful Education:
Reviving the Original Sense of Intellect’, paper
presented at the Reasons of the Heart Conference,
University of Edinburgh, September 2004; and ‘Quantity
Masquerading as Quality: Reviving an Authentic Notion of
Qualitative Education’, paper presented at a conference
on Higher Education in Developing Countries, Institute
for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan
University, London, February 2005.
1
See Gleick, James. Faster. London: Abacus, 2000, for a
dissection of our “unceasing struggle to squeeze as much
as we can into the 1,440 minutes of each day”.
2
On 21 June 2005, BBC radio 4 reported another
catastrophic failure of a government IT system – this
time, the one responsible for working out tax credits. A
few days later the same channel reported that one of the
many hard-up people who had received an overpayment as a
result of this “computer failure” was having £200 per
month deducted form her bank account in ‘repayments’ (1
July 2005) even though the amount recovered should have
only been £3 per month. An offocial questioned on the
programme explained that it was “impossible to stop the
computer”!
3
Professor Emeritus of Counselling Studies at the
University of East Anglia.
4
Thorne, Brian, Infinitely Beloved: The Challenge of
Divine Intimacy. Sarum Theological Lectures. London:
Dartford, Longman and Todd, 2003, p.50. Chapter 3 of this
book, “The Surveillance Culture and Economic
Imperialism”, was delivered as the Keynote lecture at the
10th International Conference on Education, Spirituality
and the Whole Child (Faith Feeling and Identity),
University of Surrey Roehampton, 26-28 June, 2003.
5
30
The Arabic word for forgetfulness, nisyan, is related to
the word for Man (insan), pointing to the forgetful
tendency which is ingrained in human beings.
6
The bias towards thinking over feeling in Western
culture, especially in corporate and business
environments, is well-known by practitioners of the MBTI
(Myers-Briggs Type Inventory) who are trained to make
corrections for it in scoring questionnaires.
7
Tarnas believes that the resolution of the crisis is
already emerging in various movements which reflect an
epochal shift in the contemporary psyche, a fulfilment of
the longing for a reunion with the feminine, a
reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union
of opposites. This can be seen in the “tremendous
emergence of the feminine in our culture...the widespread
opening up to feminine values by both men and women...in
the increasing sense of unity with the planet and all
forms of nature on it, in the increasing awareness of the
ecological and the growing reaction against political and
corporate policies supporting the domination and
exploitation of the environment, in the growing embrace
of the human community, in the accelerating collapse of
long-standing and ideological barriers separating the
world’s peoples, in the deepening recognition of the
value and necessity of partnership, pluralism, and the
interplay of many perspectives.”
I would add the important caveat that we are now at a
point of maximum intensification of those negative
aspects of masculine consciousness, as they attempt to
forestall the impending paradigm shift described by
Tarnas. This rearguard action, a typical occurrence as
old paradigms redouble their efforts to prevent change,
includes the co-opting into the masculine camp of a new
legion of women who have embraced an unbalanced masculine
modus operandi and have themselves abandoned the emerging
feminine values which Tarnas sees as the main hope for
the “epochal shift in the contemporary psyche”.
Similarly, alongside the “increasing awareness of the
ecological” is a potentially catastrophic acceleration in
the assault on bio-diversity and in climate change;
alongside the growing dissolution of “ideological
barriers separating the world’s peoples” we have the
pernicious doctrine of the Clash of Civilisations which
threatens to engulf the world in catastrophic conflict;
alongside the “deepening recognition of the value and
necessity of partnership, pluralism, and the interplay of
8
31
many perspectives”, we have the resurgence of dangerously
divisive forms of unilateralism, isolationism,
nationalism, patriotism, machismo, supremacist ideology,
and other forms of narrow identity politics. In all of
this we can see the common thread of an autonomous
solipsism which destroys relationship, and which has
reached the stage where it has assumed a pathological
character, a kind of societal and cultural autism. Never
has the need been greater for a concerted effort to
challenge those “corporate and political policies” which
sustain the old paradigm.
I would also add that the much vaunted “objectivity”
of Western civilisation is in fact a pseudo-objectivity,
for it is based not in any truly objective principles,
which can be derived only from spiritual tradition, but
in the illusion of an objectivity derived from rational
thinking. It has been said that Western civilisation,
despite its pretensions, is the least objective of all
civilisations because it has not truly objective criteria
with which to critique itself.
Nancy Kline compares what she calls a ‘Thinking
Environment’ with ‘Male Conditioning’, as follows:
Thinking Environment
Male Conditioning
Listen
Take over and Talk
Ask Incisive Questions
Know everything
Establish equality
Assume superiority
Appreciate
Criticize
Be at ease
Control
Encourage
Compete
Feel
Toughen
Supply accurate information
Lie
Humanize the place
Conquer the place
Create diversity
Deride difference
From Kline, Nancy, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the
Human Mind. London: Ward Lock, 2001, p. 91.
Of course, there is also a negative female
conditioning which undermines a Thinking Environment.
Both male and female ‘conditioning’ (to use Kline’s
terminology) represent, in Aristotle’s terms, vices which
arise from defect or excess of virtues. Thus, criticism
(which Kline attributed to “male conditioning”) is an
excess of discernment, but its opposite - the
“appreciation” she associates with a Thinking Environment
- if in excess, could be regarded, to extend her own
terminology, as Female Conditioning, which appreciates
every idea equally without any discrimination. Similarly,
32
there is also obviously a golden mean when it comes to
“being at ease” (instead of “controlling”), “feeling”
(instead of “toughening”) and the other activities in the
left-hand column. A negative caricature of these
qualities could equally well be fashioned to represent a
set of polar opposites to the extremes of male
conditioning.
As I indicate later, the faculty of discernment
always carries a moral valuation in spiritual traditions,
as does the idea of the golden mean itself. Aristotle
finds moral lessons in geometry, to the extent that he
likens a “good man” to a “perfect cube”.
Our mathematics curriculum has lost any conception of
this convergence of mathematical proportion and human
virtue. Some years ago, as Director of Studies at a
school in England, I asked all Heads of Department to
consider how they could incorporate “moral and spiritual
development” into their subject areas, since this was
ideally required of the school by the National
Curriculum. The Head of Mathematics (together with many
other Heads of Department) resolutely refused to
acknowledge that there was any way in which his subject
could reflect such aims.
Even teachers these days no longer teach; they “deliver”
a curriculum, or a policy. “We should resist not only the
kind of language which reduces education to a kind of
soulless managerialism, but also the kind of language
which equates education with the postal service. Are
teachers only there to “deliver” programmes of study, as
if they were pre-packaged one-way parcels, mere items of
content to be transmitted into letter-box brains?
In
authentic spiritual traditions, the teacher is not only
responsible for the instruction and training of the mind
and the transmission of knowledge, but also with the
education of the whole being. Such traditions never
divorced the training of the mind from that of the soul.
In the Islamic tradition, for example, the teacher is
both a muallim (a transmitter of knowledge) and a murabbi
(a nurturer of souls)” (From Henzell-Thomas, J.,
“Mythical Meaning, Religion and Soulful Education:
Reviving the Original Sense of ‘Intellect’”. Paper
presented at the Reasons of the Heart Conference,
University of Edinburgh, September, 2004).
9
My own list of “frenetic activities and judgmental
processes” given here is an expansion of an original list
provided in Brian Thorne, op. cit. (See note 5).
10
33
Latin de- ‘away’ + liberare, ‘to free’, as in the
phrase “deliver us from evil”. The oppressive imperative
to ‘deliver’ has now become a form of bondage which could
not be further from its original meaning.
11
12
24 February 2005.
“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in
creative expression and knowledge.” ~ Albert Einstein.
Motto for the astronomy building of Junior College,
Pasadena, California.
13
The neglect of the education of the soul is
characterised by a lack of intimacy, by an over-emphasis
on “competencies” and “tools” – the distancing language
of technology, military strategy, surveillance, corporate
efficiency, quantification, target-setting and
managerialism.
14
“Do we need to tick the tots?” by Caroline Haydon, in
The Independent, 8 May, 2003.
15
The DfEE White Paper, Schools: Achieving Success
(London: HMSO, 2001) gives the game away in the first
paragraph of the Introduction: “The success of our
children at school is crucial to the economic health and
social cohesion of the country, as well as to their own
life chances and personal fulfilment” (my italics).
Notice the priorities which are placed first in this
sentence. In an exclusive interview reported in the Times
Educational Supplement of 5 July 2002, Blair himself has
confirmed this agenda: “Education”, he says “is and
remains the absolute number one priority for the country
because without a quality education system and an
educated workforce, we cannot succeed economically” (my
italics). The real priority is clear, and it is the same
one (economic power) as that which governs educational
policy in the White Paper.
Widespread over-emphasis of the applied sciences over
the social sciences and humanities in higher education is
increasingly prevalent worldwide. An example is the call
for a 60:40 ratio for natural and applied sciences to
social science and humanities in Malaysian universities,
as well as the establishment of specialized technology
universities. Such imbalance puts national economic
development goals over individual human development, and
regards the educational process as a factory for
producing human “products” and “resources” to drive up
the pace of economic growth and national “success”.
16
34
This concept of drawing out latent potential is also
present in the common description of Islamic education as
tarbiyah - ‘nurturing’, ‘rearing’, ‘nourishing’ or
‘fostering’. Note also that the English word develop has
the etymological sense of “unwrap” (Old French des- +
voloper). In other words, educational development is a
process of remembering, activating, awakening, revealing
or bringing to light innate capacities.
17
18
Terence Blacker, The Independent, 12 May 2003.
The sociologist Harry Gracey links the elimination of
creativity to increasing conformity: “While children's
perceptions of the world and opportunities for genuine
spontaneity and creativity are being systematically
eliminated from the kindergarten, unquestioned obedience
to authority and rote learning of meaningless material
are being encouraged.” (Gracey, Harry L., "Learning the
Student Role: Kindergarten as Academic Boot Camp", in H.
Stub (ed.) The Sociology of Education: A Sourcebook,
1975).
In his publisher’s note to New York State Teacher
of the Year John Taylor Gatto’s challenging book, Dumbing
Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
(New Society Publishers, 1992) David H. Albert refers to
the words of the social philosopher Hannah Arendt that
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to
instil convictions but to destroy the capacity to form
any”. (Arendt, Hanna, Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1968, p.168). Gatto’s indictment of
the assumptions and structures which underlie modern
state schooling in the USA exposes the same deadening
utilitarian agenda which informs British educational
policy, an agenda geared to turning children into cogs in
an economic machine, children who are dependent,
conforming, materialistic, and lacking in curiosity,
imagination, self-knowledge and powers of reflection.
“It is very nearly impossible,” said James Baldwin,
to become an educated person in a country so distrustful
of the independent mind.” And William Harris, US
Commissioner of Education, proudly said in 1889 that “our
schools have been scientifically designed to prevent
over-education from happening...The average American
[should be] content with their humble role in life,
because they're not tempted to think about any other
role."
In 2003, The Times Educational Supplement (TES)
launched a campaign called Target Creativity to “liberate
creativity in primary schools.” An article in the issue
19
35
of 2 May 2003 (“Say ‘no’ targets”) cites a poll as
evidence that “targets are…stifling opportunities for
both children and teachers to be creative”. Earlier in
the same year a group of famous musicians, including Sir
James Galway and Julian Lloyd Webber, wrote to Tony Blair
to raise “their grave concern about the increasing
marginalisation of music” in schools caused by the
overwhelming pressure of tests and targets (reported in
TES 9 May 2003). They believe that if the subject is
not rescued from the margins of school life, Britain will
develop a generation of musically illiterate students.
The problem here goes beyond the issue of musical
illiteracy, because the benefits of musical education are
transferable to other subjects. Well-attested research
has found that learning to play a musical instrument can
dramatically enhance human intelligence, probably because
of the patterning activity stimulated in the brain. The
mental mechanisms which process music are deeply entwined
with brain functions such as spatial relations, memory
and language. Spatial intelligence is crucial for
engineering, computational abilities and technical
design. Other creative people, including novelists Doris
Lessing and Philip Pullman, have joined with the
musicians to support the new TES campaign.
This is all very well, but, please, let us not
restrict the notion of creativity to an exclusively
Western concept of creative arts. A recent BBC radio 4
series on the Sikh community included a program in which
a young Sikh woman talked about the prejudice she had
experienced in secondary school from teachers and
examiners who had devalued and even openly scorned her
artwork because it was too “traditional” and did not
conform to their Eurocentric modernist assumptions about
what constituted “creative” work. In this example, the
diversity strand of the Citizenship program of the
National Curriculum is actively flouted, although it may
well be that this strand will more typically be simply
given lip service in a curriculum overloaded with
examinable content and taught by teachers deficient in
inter-cultural knowledge and skills.
I do not include in this arid category the enriched
“thinking skills” approach which promotes “philosophical
enquiry” amongst children in the classroom. See Fisher,
R., Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry in the
Classroom. London: Continuum, 1998. This is a promising
extension of thinking skills which goes beyond the
“critical thinking” approaches which focus so exclusively
on the logical analysis of “arguments”. One such book,
20
36
for example, covers: Identifying arguments; persuading
and arguing; recognising the importance of arguments;
arguing, explaining and summarising; analysing arguments:
showing argument structure as a diagram; finding more
detail in arguments; exploring weakness in arguments,
etc.
21
BBC Radio 4, 26 August 2004.
"NPR : Researchers Take a Closer Look at Vision". See
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4680
386
22
I remember from my research days an experimental
artificial intelligence program developed, I believe by
Roger Schank at MIT, to “read” and summarise texts
rapidly for US Congress. In order to read rapidly you
need to activate global schemata which can make
predictions about content, because a bottom-up parser
analysing every grammatical and syntactic cue, though
more accurate, would be very slow. I believe the AI
challenge was to discover how you could combine top-down
with bottom-up data-driven processing, and when the
slower data-driven processing should kick in so as to
check on the accuracy of the comprehension state. Schank
developed an essentially top-down parser so as to enhance
speed of processing. It summarised an article entitled
“Pope’s Death Shakes the Western Hemisphere” as “Pope
killed in an Earthquake”. This is a classic example of
script-driven top-down processing – the program merely
sampled lexical items in the text, taking no notice of
syntactic structure, and generated an “Earthquake” script
on the basis of those items. It then fitted the Pope into
the Earthquake script.
23
This founding principle is partly based on Plato’s
affirmation that the process of philosophical dialectic
(that is the testing process of critical enquiry through
discourse, dialogue and discussion) is utterly distinct
from and immeasurably superior to rhetoric, which, if not
firmly subordinated to knowledge and reason, is roundly
condemned as emotional manipulation. It is this legacy
which has ultimately ensured that “in the contemporary
usage of all modern European languages, outside the
specialized vocabulary of certain antiquarian and
literary critical coteries, the word rhetorical is
unfailingly pejorative. Rhetoric now roughly connotes the
dissembling, manipulative abuse of linguistic resources
for self-serving ends, usually in a political context.”
24
37
(Wardy, R. ‘Rhetoric’, in J. Brunschwig and G. Lloyd
(eds.), Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge.
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2000, p. 465).
Claxton, Guy, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind: Why
Intelligence Increases When you Think Less. London:
Fourth Estate, 1997.
25
26
Ibid., p. 2.
27
Ibid., p.16.
Peat, F. David, Blackfoot Physics. London: Fourth
Estate, 1994.
28
29
Ibid., p. xiii.
30
Summarised from Claxton, op. cit., pp. 2-10.
Claxton (Ibid., p. 3) makes the important point that
“poets have always known the limitations of conscious,
deliberate thinking” and that “the sages and mystics of
all religious traditions attest to the spontaneous
transformation of experience that occurs when one
embraces the ‘impersonal mystery’ at the core of mental
life, whether this mystery is the ‘godhead’ of Meister
Eckhart or the ‘Unborn’ of Zen master Bankei.”
31
32
Ibid., pp. 227-228.
33
Ibid., p. 4.
“In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are
all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage.
Education begins where it should terminate, and youth,
instead of being led to the development of their
faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire
a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other
men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or
becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the
ideas the words should convey.” ~ William Duane,
Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky,
1822.
34
35
Op. cit., p. 6.
36
Ibid. p.13.
37
F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics, op. cit., p. 57.
38
Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke: “Everything is gestation and
bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a
feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark,
in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach
of one’s intelligence, and await with deep humility and
patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is
living the artist’s life. Being an artist means not
reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which
does not force its sap, and stands confident in the
storms of spring without the fear that after them may
come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the
patient, who are there as though eternity lay before
them, so unconcernedly still and wide.”
I would add that although Rilke associates this mode
of knowing with “living the artist’s life”, it should not
be regarded as some special way of knowing accessible
only to creative artist, geniuses, mystics and the like.
This misappropriation of common and innate human
faculties by “artists”, as if they have special gifts of
perception and sensibility denied to the ordinary run of
men and women, is another aberration of contemporary
Western culture. In the same way, traditional societies
do not have a heavily demarcated concept of “musical” and
“unmusical” people. All members of the community
participate in music, which is a communal activity
essential to collective psychic health.
The gradual degradation of the meaning of the word
genius attests to this misappropriation of innate human
faculties (accessible to all). Latin genius originally
meant “deity of generation and birth” and comes
ultimately from the Indo-European base gn-/gon-/gen-,
‘know’ and ‘produce’ (source of English gene, generate,
genitive etc. See note 64). It broadened out considerably
in meaning, initially to ‘attendant spirit’, the sense in
which English originally acquired it. By the 17th century,
the sense of ‘person of outstanding intellectual
ability’, which is derived from a comparatively rare
Latin sense of ‘intellectual capacity’ had largely
displaced the more universal sense. (See Ayto, p. 252).
Many cases of semantic degeneration of this kind emanate
from the inception of the Age of Reason, and many reflect
a reduction of higher human faculties.
The word originality is another example. Its original
Greek sense was “in accordance with our original nature”
– that is, in Arabic terms, in accordance with our fitra,
our innate disposition or essential nature. Originality
was an ordinary, innate capacity common to all human
beings, such that, for the ancient Greeks, even a
‘simple’ illiterate person had an innate understanding of
39
the universal principles represented, say, by geometry.
Indeed, it was that very simplicity which could be seen
as a qualification for access to such archetypal
understanding. Etymologically, the word simple denotes
‘same-fold’ - that is, not multifarious, exactly what is
denoted by the original meaning of ‘identity’. It goes
back ultimately to a compound formed from prehistoric
Indo-European sm-, sem-, som-‘same’ (source also of
English same, similar, single, etc) and pl- ‘fold’. This
passed into Latin as simplus, ‘single’. The ‘simple’
person is a ‘single’ undivided person, a person who is
always ‘the same’, true to himself or herself. Simplicity
is like a mirror which reflects the divine unity at the
core of every human being, but which is more often than
not concealed by the complex and multifarious stratagems
of the false self, including those engineered and
orchestrated by the faculty of discursive reasoning. This
lower aspect of the human intellect seeks always to
ensure its own survival at the expense of the whole mind.
As with so many words in the English language, there
was a shift in the meaning of the word originality in the
eighteenth century with the consolidation of the Age of
Reason, the so-called Enlightenment. This began with a
shift from the sense of a universal human capacity to the
sense of an ‘extraordinary ability’, rather like the
notion of ‘genius’ which arose in the 17th century. Later,
the sense shifted further to that of ‘inventiveness’,
‘innovation’ and ‘individualism’, to the extent that the
modern-day connotation can even encompass the bizarre and
the abnormal. The historical trajectory of this term is
itself a fascinating commentary on how, as a result of
the erosion of traditional wisdom, the outermost sheath
of the human psyche (the conditioned individual
“personality”) has gradually take precedence over its
innermost core or heart where the divine qualities are
reflected.
Originality is largely no longer regarded as an
expression of our original nature, something emanating
from our divine origin, but is often reduced to the level
of inventive conjectures, self-obsessed pretensions,
flights of subjective imagination and fantasy, and
ephemeral shifts in fashion coloured by the preferences
and aversions associated with our own personal
conditioning. The archetypal qualities inherent in the
original disposition of the human being, those qualities
emerging from the centre and reflecting the divine
attributes of perfection (the Beautiful Names of God in
the Islamic tradition), have been reduced merely to the
accidental qualities of individual egos facing no longer
40
towards a unifying centre, a single point, but scattered
on the periphery in a state of fragmentation,
disconnection and disorientation. (For further discussion
of historical semantic shifts of words denoting key
concepts of universal human identity, see HenzellThomas, J., “Passing Between the Clashing Rocks: The
Heroic Quest for a Common and Inclusive Identity”,
Journal of Pastoral Care in Education, Spring, 2004.
Claxton (op. cit., p. 14) reminds us that “Another
step in the recovery of the slower ways of knowing is to
recognise that these forms of cognition are not the
exclusive province of special groups of people – poets,
mystics or sages – nor do they appear only on special
occasions. They have sometimes been talked about in
rather mystifying ways, as the work of ‘the muse’, or as
signifying great gifts, or special states of grace. Such
talk makes slow knowing look rather awesome and arcane.
One feels intimidated, as if such mental modes were
beyond the reach of ordinary mortals…This is a false and
unhelpful impression…A ‘poetic way of knowing’…is
accessible, and of value, to anyone. And though it cannot
be trained, taught or engineered, it can be cultivated by
anyone”.
38
Peat, op. cit., p. 59.
39
Ibid., p. 66.
The importance of learning through the senses may be
recognised as appropriate at very early stages of the
mainstream Western curriculum, in accordance with
Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development, which
demotes the intuitive, practical intelligence to the
infantile level of “sensorimotor intelligence”. This mode
is dominant during the first two years of life, but is
superseded by more powerful, abstract, intellectual ways
of knowing. Thirty years ago, the sociologist Harry
Gracey had lamented the fact that “children's perceptions
of the world and opportunities for genuine spontaneity
and creativity are being systematically eliminated from
the kindergarten.” (Gracey, op. cit.)
The restitution of learning through the senses was
part of the reform of educational practice in the 17th
century in England, based as it was on the realization
that medieval scholasticism had given rise to an arid
educational process based on abstract reasoning and
verbatim memorisation. This was the time of the
scientific revolution - the realization that truth could
40
41
be found out through actual observation and experience
rather than recourse to authority.
What went wrong was that the notion of “experience”
as the ground of truth was narrowly applied only as
“experimentation”, which gave rise to the fallacy that
the only reality was the observable world accessible to
the senses, and the only truth was that which could be
verified by measurement. Hence, the suspicion of
introspection even today. By limiting science to
experimentation, the balance between inward experience
(the source of spiritual insight) and external
observation (the basis of scientific method) was
destroyed. Such balance between religious and scientific
outlooks was germane to the philosophy of Roger Bacon,
one of the founding fathers of empiricism, himself
strongly influenced by Islamic thinkers, especially Ibn
Sina.
As a result of the narrowing of the notion of
‘experience’, the mind of Western man became
externalised, focused only on observable and quantifiable
realities. Inward experience, the source of a deeper
science or wisdom, was no longer to be trusted; the
capacity for contemplation, the source of spiritual
insight, was neglected, and the very idea of a hidden
Reality, beyond the reach of human perception, was denied
(See note 52 for a discussion of the etymology of the
English word understand which shows how this word
originally meant ‘stand in the midst of’).
The Qur’an tells us that it is a “book for those who
believe in the existence of that which is beyond the
reach of human perception” (2:3). Asad comments that the
Arabic word al-ghayb, commonly and erroneously,
translated as “the Unseen”, is used in the Qur’an to
denote all those sectors or phases of reality which lie
beyond the reach of human perception and cannot,
therefore, be proved or disproved by scientific
observation or even adequately comprised within the
accepted categories of speculative thought: as, for
instance, the existence of God and of a definite purpose
underlying the universe, life after death, the real
nature of time, the existence of spiritual forces and
their inter-action, and so forth. Only a person who is
convinced that the ultimate reality comprises far more
than our observable environment can attain to belief in
God and, thus, to a belief that life has meaning and
purpose.”
The rejection of inward experience as a ground of
knowledge also ensured that the Book of Nature, too, was
desacralised and divested of its significance, in the
42
sense that its beautiful and majestic signs (ayat),
symbols (rumuz), and similitudes (amthal) - whether in
the “far horizons” or within ourselves - were no longer
seen as pointing beyond themselves to the existence of a
Creator who had invested everything with “due measure and
proportion,” but only as phenomena referring to nothing
outside their own self-sufficient laws and mechanisms.
41
Peat, op. cit., p. 57.
Barth, Roland S., Learning by Heart. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2001, pp. 49-50.
42
43
See note 72.
44
Op. cit.
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was one of the greatest figures
in Islamic philosophy and Sufism.
45
T.J. Winter, Introduction to Al-Ghazali, Kitab dhikr
al-mawt wa-ma ba’dahu (The Remembrance of Death and the
Afterlife), Book 40 of Ihya ªulum al-din (The Revival of
Religious Sciences). Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, p.
xvii.
Arabic dhawq can be defined as: “Physical taste; but
in mysticism the term means direct experience of truth.
In this context, dhawq is similar to the words
‘sapience’, or wisdom, derived from the Latin sapere,
which means primarily to taste and by extension, to
‘discriminate’, ‘to know’”. (Glassé, Cyril, The Concise
Encyclopaedia of Islam. London: Stacey International,
revised edition 2001, p. 116).
As the Sufi dictum
goes: “He who tastes, knows.” “Ultimately, real
knowledge of [the food and life of the soul] is the
‘tasting of its flavour’, the ‘spiritual savouring’
(dhawq) that men of discernment speak of, which almost
simultaneously unveils the reality and truth of the
matter to the spiritual vision (kashf).” (Al-Attas, Syed
Muhammad Naguib,The Concept of Education in Islam: A
Framework for an Islamic Philosophy of Education. Kuala
Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and
Civilisation (ISTAC), 1980, pp. 24-25).
46
Claxton (op. cit., p. 19) states that “the original
design specification of learning does not include the
production of conscious rationales. Knowing, at root, is
implicit, practical, intuitive.” In relation to the
removal of children from direct experience, I once
47
43
observed, as an inspector, a very good hands-on lesson
for Year 5 pupils, in which the teacher had brought into
the class specimens of clay, loam and sandy soils for the
children to handle. At the end of the lesson, the teacher
anxiously came up to me and apologised because, in her
words, “the children should have been wearing plastic
gloves” in accordance with health and safety policy! In
June 2005, it was announced on BBC radio 4 that a primary
school has banned children from bringing egg boxes into
school (for model making) because they might contain
“dangerous bacteria”.
Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), poet and
universal spiritual guide.
48
Rumi, Mathnawi III, 2527-2528, from Jewels of
Remembrance, A Daybook of Spiritual Guidance from the
Wisdom of Rumi, selected and translated by Camille and
Kabir Helminski. Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books, 1996.
49
A further extract from this selection elaborates on the
difference between the two kinds of intelligence”:
There
are two kinds of intelligence.
One is like that acquired by a child at school
from books and teachers, new ideas and memorization.
Your intelligence may become superior to others,
but retaining all that knowledge is a burden.
You who are so busy searching for knowledge
must be a preserving tablet, but the preserved tablet
is the one who has gone beyond all this.
For the other kind of intelligence is the gift of God:
its fountain is deep within the soul.
When the water of God-given knowledge surges from the
breast,
it never stagnates or becomes impure.
And if its way to the outside is blocked, what harm is
there?
For it flows continually from the house of the heart.
The acquired intelligence is like the conduits
which run into the house from the streets:
if those pipes become blocked, the house is bereft of
water.
Seek the fountain within yourself.
[Rumi, Mathnawi,
IV, 1960-1968]
Claxton (op. cit. p. 20) reports that “people’s ability
to pick up the skills that their everyday lives require –
50
44
their ‘practical intelligence’, as Harvard psychologist
Robert Sternberg puts it – is independent of their
intellectual or linguistic facility.” This is
demonstrated by Brazilian street children, who can do
quite complex mental arithmetical operations by school
standards in order to run their businesses, despite the
fact that they are supposed to have low mathematical
ability according to tests. Claxton also reports the case
of people who work as handicappers at American
racecourses who “are able to make calculations, based on
a highly intricate model involving as many as seven
different variables, yet their ability to do so is
completely unrelated to their IQ scores.” (See Carraher,
T.N., Carreher, D. and Schliemann, A.D., ‘Mathematics in
the street and in schools’, British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, Vol 3 (1985), pp. 21-9. Ceci,
S.J. and Liker, J., ‘A day at the races: a study of IQ,
expertise and cognitive complexity’, Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 115 (1986), pp.
255-66.
51
Claxton, op. cit., p.21.
The word understand is the only instance in modern
English of the survival of the prefix under as meaning
‘between’ or ‘among’ (as in Old English undersecan, ‘to
investigate, seek amongst’). In all other cases the
prefix means ‘below’ or ‘beneath’. Old English
understandan meant literally ‘to stand in the midst of’.
Modern German verstehen (from Middle High German
verstan) is based on a different prefix (ver-) which
means ‘in front, or on top of’, so verstehen literally
means ‘to stand in front of, or on top of’. Ionic Greek
epí-stasthai, ‘to understand’ also meats to ‘stand on
top of, stand over’.
Two types of understanding are implicated here:
understanding through direct experience and engagement
(‘standing amongst’ – understandan) and understanding
through observation (‘standing in front of, or on top of
- verstehen). Significantly, it was these two forms of
learning which Francis Bacon regarded as the basis of his
learning by ‘induction’, that is, learning by experience
and observation, as opposed to the outmoded methods of
medieval scholasticism based on abstract logic and
authority. The revival of experience and observation was
at the root of the scientific revolution in Europe.
However, in the history of the West, the notion of
‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere
‘experimentation’. ‘Standing in front of, or on top of’
(i.e. pseudo-objectivity, objectification) has taken
45
52
precedence over ‘standing in the midst of’ (direct
experience, tasting). In other words, Bacon’s notion of
‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere
‘experimentation’, which explains the spectacular success
of the scientific method to the detriment of other forms
of inquiry and perception involving faculties of direct
insight. (See previous note 40)
The Arabic root ‘QL has the sense of ‘binding’ and
‘withholding’,
i.e.
the
faculty
of
judgment,
discrimination and clarification and the intellectual
power of speech (nutq) which enables man, the “language
animal”, to articulate words in meaningful patterns. To
Adam was imparted the Names (Qur’an 2:31), and in one
sense this knowledge confers on man the faculty of
logical definition and the making of distinctions which
underlies abstract, conceptual thought. However, as I
explain above, the faculty encompasses more than logical
reasoning and verbal conceptualisation.
Glassé points out that al-‘Aql (lit. “intellect”) is
“sometimes used to mean “reason” or “thinking”, but its
highest and metaphysical sense, as used in Islamic
philosophy, corresponds to the intellect or nous, as
understood in Platonism and Neoplatonism. It is the
faculty which, in the microcosm or in man, is the
embodiment of Being or Spirit….
“It is also what the Koran calls ar-Ruh (lit.
“spirit”). The “Unity of the Intellect”, or the essential
identity of the Intellect in the metacosm (what is beyond
the created world), the microcosm (man), and the
macrocosm (the world, which is the manifestation of the
possibilities of the metacosm), was expressed as a theory
by Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d.595/1198), the philosopher and
chief interpreter of Aristotle. But it is also implicit
in most Islamic metaphysics when the question of ‘aql
arises, even where there is little or no apparent
connection with philosophy or mysticism.
“This “Intellect”….is veiled behind discursive
thought or reason; nevertheless, it is essentially the
same – or not other – than its celestial prototype.
Through this transcendent Intellect man is capable of the
“recognition” of Reality and of knowing the world,
because the world is in fact contained within him, as the
world is contained in being. The intellect makes possible
direct knowledge, or intellection, which amounts to
“revelation” on the plane of the microcosm, where the
subject – because of his capacity for perfect
objectivity, comprehends the object, seizes or
“assimilates” it, and realizes an identity between the
53
46
subject (his own mind) and the object. It is thus that
Plato, and later St. Augustine, described knowing as
remembering.
“It is the presence of the Intellect within man
which sets him apart from animals who participate in the
cosmic Intellect peripherally, but do not contain it,
since they do not occupy the “center” as does man. It is
thus also that Adam knew the names of the objects of
creation, whereas the angels did not, being also
peripheral, that is, not containing the projection of the
Divine Intellect within them. The Angels, it is true,
were superior to Adam in that they were less limited in
their form; yet they bowed to him because he was truly
vicegerent of God on earth, khalifatu ‘Llahi fi-l ard….”
(Glassé, op. cit., p. 55).
Burckhardt, Titus, An Introduction to Sufism,
translated by D.M. Matheson. London: Thorsons, 1995,
p.94. “Here it must be made quite plain that the term
‘intellect’ (al-‘aql) is in practice applied at more than
one level: it may designate the universal principle of
all intelligence, a principle which transcends the
limiting conditions of the mind; but the direct
reflection of Universal Intellect in thought may also be
called ‘intellect’ and in this case it corresponds to
what the ancients called reason.”
54
Ibn Sina, (c.980-1037), known as Avicenna in the West,
champion of Islamic Neo-Platonism, was the most
influential of all Arabic philosopher-scientists.
55
Ibn Sina agreed with the Greek philosophers that the
development of intellect (illumination of the mind) is
the true aim of man (where intellect is the instrument of
acquiring knowledge in order to understand what is real,
universal and necessary). The process of human cognition
is a gradual progression or ascent from the lowest
condition of potentiality to the highest condition of
actuality, where what is stored in the Active Intellect
is apprehended. The intellect of man is attuned to the
divine intellect and through proper education will
eventually be absorbed in it. Ibn Sina calls this
progression ittisal, i.e. ‘connection with the Active
Intellect’.
56
Al-Attas, op. cit., p. 14, states that “ ‘Aql is
synonymous with qalb…the spiritual organ of cognition in
the heart.”
57
47
In the Bible, too, both in the Old and New
Testaments, it is the heart (Hebrew leb/lebab, cognate
with Arabic lubb/albab) not the brain, which is regarded
as the centre of consciousness, thought and will. The
emotions are usually connected with the lower organs.
Modern usage typically gives precedence to mental
processes by regarding the ‘mind’ as the seat of
consciousness and demotes the heart by making it the seat
of emotions. That the heart is regarded as the seat of
the intellect and the will, as well as feeling, is shown
by The First Commandment, which, according to C. Ryder
Smith (The Bible Doctrine of Man, 1951) probably means
“You shall love (agapan) the Lord your God with all your
heart – that is with all your soul, and with all your
mind and with all your strength”. See the entry on HEART
in The Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1980, Vol. 2, p. 625, for detailed
references to the function of the heart throughout the
Bible.
Martin Lings describes the “centre of the macrocosm”
as the “Heart” of the human being – “not the bodily organ
of that name but the soul’s central faculty which…must be
considered as being above and beyond the psychic
domain…The capital letter is used to denote this
distinction. Moreover since this centre reflects a whole
hierarchy of centres which transcend it, the term Heart
is also sometimes used of Spirit, and ultimately of the
Supreme Centre, the Divine Self.” Lings, Martin, Symbol
and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence.
Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1991, pp. 2-3.
This is described in very Islamic terms as the “Eye of
the Heart ” in the Makarian Homilies (the Orthodox
Christian Tradition of Hesychasm).
58
Unlike so many “critical thinking” approaches which
focus almost exclusively on techniques of reasoning,
Robert Fisher tries to include some aspects of the moral
dimension as a key element of teaching thinking. “Ideal
critical thinkers”, he says, “display a number of
intellectual virtues: seeking truth (they care that their
beliefs are true; they therefore seek alternatives, and
support views only to the extent that they are justified
by available information), being honest (with yourself
and other people), and respecting the dignity and the
worth of others (listening attentively to the views of
others, avoiding scorn and intimidation of others, and
showing concern about the welfare of others).”
59
48
See Fisher, R., Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry
in the Classroom. London: Continuum, 1998, p. 9.
“Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have
been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or
because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe
what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the
teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and
analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the
benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine
believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.” (my
emphasis) ~
Gautama Buddha.
The sense of moral valuation is also present in various
Arabic words in the Qur’an (other than ‘aql) which
denote the faculties of discernment and insight. Asad
explains that the word furqan, for example, means a
standard or criterion to discern the true from the false
and what is right form what is wrong. The word al-a’raf,
‘the faculty of discernment’, carries the same
connotation of ‘perceiving what is right’, as does the
word rushd, ‘consciousness of what is right’. The word
shahid, ‘conscious mind’, refers to the “awakening of the
deeper layers of man’s consciousness”, in contrast to
sa-iq, “the complex of …instinctive urges and inordinate,
unrestrained appetites”. The word basirah, denoting the
“faculty of conscious understanding based on insight, and
verifiable by the intellect (i.e. accessible to reason)”
also includes that moral sense or criterion (furqan)
which provides the essential orientation for perceiving
the truth. The same applies to albab, ‘insight’. Al-Attas
(op. cit. p. 14) defines the “real nature of ‘aql” as “a
spiritual substance by which the rational soul (al-nafs
al-natiqah) recognises and distinguishes truth from
falsehood”.
60
See Crow, Karim Douglas, “Between wisdom and reason:
Aspects of ‘aql (Mind-Cognition) in Early Islam”,
Islamica, Vol. 3. Number 1, Summer 1999, pp 49-64.
61
Crow (ibid.) describes this “higher intelligence” as
“a form of ‘cognitive prehension’ (‘aql, ma’rifa). It
was this knowledge of virtue and vice, of good and evil,
forming an objective moral law based on an ethic of
natural reason and conscience, wherein ‘aql was
understood to enshrine the innate apprehension of truth
opening onto reception of guidance leading through an
infinite gradation of spiritual cognition to the divine
reality.”
62
49
Peat (op. cit. p. 57) notes how our own indigenous
view of knowledge has over time been transformed into a
noun, “something that could be categorised,
conceptualised, collected, and sorted within the filing
cabinets of the mind.” Associated with this static, nounbased form of knowledge is the desire to “manipulate,
control and exploit.” Descartes proclaimed that “Knowing
the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars…men
can become masters and possessors of nature” and Francis
Bacon, one of the heralds of modern scientism, suggested
that in order to gain such knowledge “nature should be
placed upon the rack and tortured to reveal her secrets”.
The distinction between verb-based and noun-based
languages is of prime importance in understanding
different worldviews. Peat explores the difference in an
essay on his website
(http://www.fdavidpeat.com/bibliography/essays/heal.htm),
thus: “the verb-based language system of the Montegnais
(a people living in the Labrador region of north eastern
Canada who have still managed to preserve much of their
traditional hunting life) reflects a worldview common to
all the Algonkin families of languages. This is a
worldview (shared also by the Blackfoot) of process,
transformation, renewal and animation (i.e. verb-based) a dance of nature, as opposed to the dominant Western
paradigm derived from an ‘objective’ mathematics which
remains rooted in (and is a refinement of) noun-based
language and noun-based categories.”
Peat exhorts us to be aware of “the enormous power
of European languages to reinforce a particular world
view” and to realise that our mathematics is “a
refinement of noun-based languages” and “remains rooted
in the idea of noun-categories.” It has “specifically
developed to avoid ambiguity, confusion and multiplicity
of meaning. Indeed, these are both its strengths and
weaknesses, for while our mathematics is well adapted to
make calculations and express abstract relationships it
cannot deal with quality, value, ambiguity and feeling.”
It is important to add here that literacy (written
language) itself reinforces noun-based categories, since
written language is derived from the need to store
complex material (originally lists or inventories of
things) which cannot easily be remembered, and, in so
doing, to release more cognitive capacity for processing.
Modern mathematics is inconceivable without written
language because it is beyond human short-term memory
capacity (7 plus or minus two disconnected items) to hold
enough material to enable processing capacity to work on
it. This has to be done on paper. As Vygotsky explains,
63
50
written language is a "technological amplifier" of a
certain kind of cognitive capacity - the kind which has
given us our scientific and technological worldview. It
can therefore be argued that societies based on oral
tradition, far from being "primitive" societies which use
a pre-literate and therefore "inferior" mode of
communication, actually preserve a primordial form of
communication which has not succumbed to the abstraction
and pseudo-objectivity which is typical of noun-based
consciousness.
The underlying sense of an ‘idea’ as that which is
‘seen’ or ‘perceived’ (rather than that which is
‘thought’) comes from the Indo-European root ueid-,
meaning ‘look at, see’. This root gives us Sanskrit Veda,
knowledge, as in the sacred books of Hinduism (vidya is
‘knowledge’ - i.e. ‘seeing’ in Sanskrit, and a-vidya is
‘ignorance’, or at best ‘imperfect knowledge’, literally
‘not seeing’ or ‘blind’). The same root ueid- gives us
Greek eidos and idea, as we have seen, and Latin videre
(‘to see’) from which our own English derivatives are
legion. The word “white” is a derivative of the same root
from Celtic, and literally means “easily seen”.
It is worth noting also that the original sense of
the Greek word idea, used by Plato in the specialised
sense ‘archetypal form’ or ‘ideal prototype’, is the
‘look’ ‘appearance’ or ‘image’ of something. The word
‘idol’ comes from the Greek eidos (‘form, shape’) which
itself comes form the same root as idea. The early
English sense before 1398 was the Platonic ‘general or
ideal form, type or model’. The more general and
abstract sense of ‘notion, mental conception’ is not
found in English, as far as I know, before 1645.
So, the underlying concept is that of ‘seeing’ not of
‘thinking’. As with so many words which had kept a
measure of their original meaning in the medieval period,
the sense of ‘idea’ as something ‘seen’ was reduced in
the post-Renaissance world to something ‘thought’. A
concrete experience, a ‘tasting’ (dhawq), was reduced to
an abstraction. “I see, therefore I know” becomes the
wretched Descartian axiom “I think, therefore I am”.
(See note 97 for further discussion of the difference
between ‘imaginal’ and conceptual modes of knowing).
The revisioning of what it means to know can also be
observed in the semantic degradation in post-medieval
English of certain words which connect ‘knowing’ with
‘skill’ or ‘ability’. Thus, the word ‘cunning’, which now
has the sense of ‘skilfully deceitful’ (from the 16th
century), originally had the sense of ‘learned’, but its
64
51
relationship to the word ‘can’ (preserved in Scots ‘ken’)
shows how this ‘learning’ was conceived not essentially
as abstract knowledge but as knowledge gained through
innate ability, perception and experience. This is a
striking example of how the ideology of post-medieval
scientism perverted the original meaning of a word so as
to banish original ways of knowing. The word ‘craft’
still preserves both meanings: the sense of ‘skill’ or a
‘trade’/‘profession’ and the degraded sense which reduces
it to mere ‘craftiness’ or ‘cunning’. The original
Germanic sense of ‘craft’ was ‘strength’, which is still
preserved in other Germanic languages apart from English.
The second major sense of the root gn-/gon-/gen-, apart
form know, is generate, although the two meanings are
very much entwined. Shipley points out that the 1611 King
James Bible tells us that “Adam knew his wife, Eve, and
she conceived” (Genesis 4:1), so the idea of knowledge
and familiarity (carnal and mental) is closely connected
here with the act of ‘begetting’. This sense remains in
German Kind (child) and English kindle. In Sanskrit, the
root becomes yoni, the intercrural cleft,the base for the
erect lingam. Latin or Greek not only give us generate,
but also generous, germ, germinate, native, natal,
nation, innate, nature, progeny, pregnant, genitive (the
case of origin), generic, gender, engender, gonad,
genesis (with its multitude of compounds), gene,
eugenics, genius (friendly spirit assigned to us at birth
– see note 37) and gentle, which originally meant ‘of
gentle birth’ (and hence a gentleman). The connection
between birth and the virtue of gentleness is also
preserved in the Germanic word kind. The head of the
kin/kindred is the king, whose virtues should include
kindness. Macbeth’s murder of his cousin, King Duncan is
all the more ‘unkind’ (i.e. unnatural) because it
involved the murder of his own ‘kin’.
65
66
67
Peat, op. cit., p.56.
The ‘seeing’ dimension of this composite notion of
‘thinking’ is reminiscent of the underlying sense of the
English word idea as that which is ‘seen’ or ‘perceived’
(rather than that which is ‘thought’) which, as I have
explained in note 63, comes from the Indo-European root
ueid- meaning ‘look at, see’.
It is also striking how the original meaning of the
English word think includes the spiritual-ethical sense
of ‘gratitude’. This primordial sense is expressed in
Shipley’s distillation: “Methinks mankind has daily cause
for thanksgiving “ (Shipley, p. 414). In Arabic the root
52
KFR, meaning ‘to deny the truth’, has the associated
sense of ‘ungratefulness’ or ‘thanklessness’, even though
its derivative kafir is commonly mistranslated as
‘unbeliever’.
The English word think goes back to two senses in Old
English, but only the later meaning has survived into
modern English. Old English thencan meant ‘to conceive in
the mind, think’ but this is a variant of thyncan which
preserves the original meaning, “to seem”, ‘to cause to
appear to oneself’, or, in Ayto’s entry, ‘to cause
images, reflections to appear to oneself’ (Ayto p. 528).
Old Icelandic thekkja, cognate with Old English thencan,
meant ‘to perceive, know’, and another cognate Gothic
thankjan carries the reflective sense of ‘to consider,
meditate’.
The noun thought is derived from thohte, the past
tense of thenkan. According to Barnhart (p.1134),
“Because of the close semantic relationship and a sharing
of forms (thought and think), these two different words,
now both spelled think, became thoroughly confused in
early modern English, which has led to the complete
submersion of the form think to seem, to appear.” This
obsolete latter sense has survived only in the archaic
form ‘methinks’ (literally ‘it seems to me’).
Other cognates outside Germanic may include Old Latin
tongere, ‘to know’, and
Tocharian tankw, ‘to love’. The Indo-European root is
tong-, which carries the sense
of ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’. The word thank is also
derived from it through Germanic
*thankaz, ‘thought, gratitude’ and Old English thanc,
which carried the multiple sense
of ‘thought, thoughtfulness, goodwill, thankfulness and
thanks’. See also Watkins,
p. 93.
In the Qur’an, words derived from the Arabic root
FKR are variously translated as
‘consider’ (Yusuf ‘Ali), ‘reflect’ (Arberry), ‘think’
(‘Asad), and ‘take thought’
(Pickthall). The root appears in only two forms, once in
the form fakkara and
seventeen times in the word tafakkara, and if the
contexts for the occurrence of these
are examined, it will be found that they almost
invariably refer to the manifest ‘signs’
(Arabic ayat) or ‘similitudes’ (Arabic amthal) which God
sets forth for man to reflect
upon. Many of these signs are the wonders of creation,
thus:
53
“And it is He who has spread the earth wide and placed on
it firm mountains and
running waters, and created thereon two sexes of every
kind of plant; and it is He who
causes the night to cover the day. Surely, in all this
there are signs for people who
reflect.” (Qur’an, 13:3)
[Note: I prefer the more concrete sense of Arberry’s
phrase “signs for a people who
reflect” to Asad’s rather more abstract translation,
“messages for people
who think”.]
“It is He who sends down water from the skies; you drink
thereof, and so drink the
plants upon which you pasture your beasts; and by virtue
thereof He causes crops to
grow for you, and olive trees, and date-palms, and
grapes, and all other kinds of fruit:
in this, behold, there is a sign indeed for people who
reflect. (Qur’an 16: 10-11).
“And among His wonders is this: He creates for you mates
out of your own
Kind, so that you might incline towards them, and He
engenders love and tenderness
between you: in this, behold, there are signs indeed for
a people who reflect.” (Qur’an
30:21)
In the Qur’an, the act of ‘thinking’ or ‘reflecting’
is therefore a deep meditative or
contemplative act in response to the visible signs of
God’s bounty. It therefore also
includes the moral dimension of thankfulness, which comes
from the realisation that
the wonders of creation, including everything upon the
earth, are the bounty given to
us by God.
The Arabic sense of “think” in the root FKR therefore
connects closely with the sense of the Indo-European
root tong-, which is the origin of both the English words
think and thank. Malik Badri, defines tafakkar as a
“cognitive-spiritual activity in which the rational
mind, emotion and spirit are combined”. (See Badri, M.
Contemplation: An Islamic Psychospiritual Study.
Herndon: IIIT, 2000).
54
Deep thinking or reflecting is therefore, in its
primordial sense, a concrete act of “seeing”, and the
activation of the moral sense of gratitude which comes
from understanding the spiritual “significance” of what
is seen. It is not an abstract conceptual process
occurring in the brain, but a composite activity of
cognition, perception, feeling and valuation.
The convergence of this vision of “thinking” across
two apparently unrelated groups of languages (Semitic
and Indo-European) gives credence to the idea of
universal primordial concepts (the Names imparted to
Adam) embedded in the human mind- heart.
Of added interest is the fact that the Qur’an
explicitly connects the faculty of tafakkar with that of
‘aql. Following verse 3 of Surah 13, which tells us some
of the wonders which are “signs for people who reflect
(yatafakkarun)”, verse 4 expounds further “signs” for
those who “understand” (ya’qiluun):
“And there are on earth many tracts of land close by one
another and yet widely differing from one another; and
there are on it vineyards, and fields of grain, and datepalms growing in clusters from one root or standing
alone, all watered with the same water: and yet, some of
them have We favoured above others by way of the food
which they provide for man and beast. Verily, in all
this there are signs indeed for people who understand!”
(Qur’an 13:4).
Asad prefers the phrase ‘use their reason’, but I
prefer ‘understand’ - the translation of ya’qiluun
favoured by both Yusuf ‘Ali and Arberry. The sense of
‘aql might equally well be translated here as ‘insight’
(i.e. “people of insight”). Asad himself also on occasion
translates ‘aql as ‘insight’ (e.g.39:17-18), although
more usually as ‘reason’. He also uses the word ‘insight’
to translate Arabic albab, another faculty of the Heart
activated in the contemplation of the wonders of
creation:
“Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth,
and in the succession of night and day, there are indeed
signs for all those who are endowed with insight, and who
remember God when they stand, and when they sit, and then
they lie down to sleep, and thus reflect on the creation
of the heavens and the earth: O our Sustainer! Thou has
created aught of this without meaning and
purpose….(Qur’an 3: 190-191).
55
In the Islamic philosophy of Mulla Sadra, the
perfection of man resides in the perfection of his soul.
The Arabic word natiqah, although usually translated as
‘rational’, must not be reduced to the modern
understanding of this term, in the same way as the term
‘aql must not be reduced to the lower level of the
intellect alone. The word natiqah in Arabic still
contains all the depth of meaning which such terms as
nous, intellectus and even ratio possessed before
Cartesianism and empiricism deprived reason of its
connection with the intellect and reduced it for the most
part to its rapport merely with the outer senses. (For a
masterly discussion of this desacralisation of the
intellect, see chapter 1 ,”Knowledge and its
desacralisation”, in Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Knowledge and
the Sacred. New York: State University of New York Press,
1980.
68
Moore, Thomas (ed.), The Education of the Soul. New
York: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 5.
69
On 28 June 2005, a report aired on BBC radio
highlighted the steep decline in applications from
students to study Mathematics at higher level. The
retreat from Mathematics is another symptom of the
disillusionment with quantitative scientism, discussed in
note 69, in relation to the report published by the joint
Royal Society and Joint Mathematical Council working
group in July 2000 which criticised the reduction in the
teaching of mathematics to nothing but numbers.
70
I have criticized in some detail elsewhere the
profound malaise in our education system caused by the
dominance of a narrow, quantitative, utilitarian concept
of schooling derived from target-driven regimes of
techno-managerialism which reduce human beings to
conforming and performing cogs in industrial machines so
as to drive forward national economic development goals.
(See Henzell-Thomas, J. “Mythical Meaning, Religion and
Soulful Education: Reviving the Original Sense of
Intellect”, Reasons of the Heart Conference, University
of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 9-12 September 2004). See also
my Excellence in Islamic Education, on the website of the
Book Foundation www.TheBook.org).
The most obvious sign of the “Reign of Quantity” in
our educational system is the debilitating testing regime
tied into league tables of “performance” – a relentless
and unremitting treadmill of assessment of uninspiring
objectives and dangerously narrow prescriptive content.
71
56
Research by Cambridge University for the National Union
of Teachers refers to a testing “insanity” which is
gripping primary schools in the UK (The Independent, 5
July, 2002). Almost half the weekly timetable is now
taken up by mathematics and English lessons and thousands
of children as young as seven are being tested every week
on their reading. The disproportionate emphasis on the
teaching and perpetual testing of a narrow band of
literacy and numeracy skills, which are deemed to be
essential for economic survival, is taking the heart and
soul out of education. A survey has shown that over half
of seven-year olds suffered from stress before taking
standard Assessment Tests (SATs) (“A generation of the
hunched and slumped”, by Michael McMahon, in The
Independent, 27 April, 2003). A poll carried out in
September 2002 found that testing had replaced bullying
as the biggest fear for schoolchildren during their
schooldays (“The obsession with exams and targets is
destroying childhood”, by Richard Garner, The
Independent, 21 September, 2002).
This regime coerces
pupils in English schools to take more than 100 exams and
tests in their school years.
The same national obsession with standardised testing
can be seen in the USA, where its failure is leading many
to call for a repudiation of all educational centralized
planning. According to Jeffrey Tucker, Vice-President of
the Mises Institute, preparation for tests on a narrow
band of prescriptive content in core subjects has become
the sum total of all public-school education in the USA.
“Advanced students”, he says, “are bored out of their
minds, while weak students are relentlessly frustrated.”
(“Another Central Plan Fails”, by Jeffrey Tucker, posted
3 January 2003 on www.mises.org).
A study from Arizona State University, the first to
examine the issue nationally, has confirmed what we might
have expected – that there is an inverse relationship
between the ability to pass the tests and the scores on
independent tools like the SAT and ACT. The latter comes
up with a measure of the student’s mastery of the ability
to think and solve problems, whereas the school exams
only measure whether students have mastered the material
on the tests. Again, it is hardly surprising that despite
all this testing, more than half of America’s best
students make it to university without picking up more
than an elementary grasp of how to write. This is the
finding of a recent report by the National Commission on
Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, which also
tells us that three-quarters of American students at
high-school grades equivalent to our sixth-form level are
57
never given written assignments in humanities classes
(“Best students ‘barely literate’”, by Stephen Phillips,
Times Educational Supplement, 9 May, 2003.) According to
the writer of the report, “there is a total devaluation
of teaching of good writing and, along with that,
intelligent reading.”
It is this unsustainable system which is driving the
revival of homeschooling across America, with its
“attention to individual needs, the flexibility that
allows students to develop in unique ways”, and its
“employment of localized knowledge and resources.”
Other signs of the Reign of Quantity are evident in
the reduction of Mathematics and Science to mere numbers
and facts. A joint Royal Society and Joint Mathematical
Council working group reported in July 2000 that the
teaching of mathematics was increasingly being reduced to
nothing but numbers, and that the death of geometry, the
study of shape and space, in mathematics education could
only be to the detriment of visual and spatial
intelligence (Times Educational Supplement, 18 January,
2001 – Curriculum Special: Mathematics). It is known that
spatial intelligence is crucial for engineering,
computational abilities and technical design.
A report on science teaching at GCSE level drawn up
by Dr. Ian Gibson, Chairman of the House of Commons
Science and Technology Committee, found much of science
teaching “boring, pointless and stultifying” with far too
much weight given to facts and content. Few opportunities
were given for experimentation, little connection was
made with topical modern developments and controversial
issues, let alone with that sense of wonder and mystery
which authentic science evokes. The scientific method
itself was rarely taught, and the limitations of science
hardly ever addressed. (Today programme, Radio 4, 11
July, 2002 and Times Educational Supplement, 12 July,
2002).
The Times Educational Supplement of 2 January 2004
(“Attack on science ‘by numbers’” by Warwick Mansell)
reports Jonathan Osborne, professor of science education
at King’s College London, as saying that the shepherding
of pupils through GCSE practicals was like a set of
“recipe-like steps” which had very little to do with the
process of scientific exploration. He points out that at
GCSE, assessment of investigation is dominated by just
three experiments: measuring the resistance of a wire,
the rates of chemical reaction and the rate of osmosis in
a potato, which is “a bit like reducing the teaching of
performance in music to three standard scales on a
recorder. Any teacher with even half an understanding of
58
science knows that this approach …bears as much relation
to science as painting by numbers does to art.”
Such recent critiques of modern science education
recapitulate Walt Whitman’s distaste for the mechanistic
and materialistic reduction of Science to mere
calculation:
“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
~ Walt Whitman (American poet, 1819-1892)
I deliberately refer to this kind of schooling as
“dispiriting” and “demoralising” because these
debilitating effects are the outcome of an educational
process which often gives no real place to spiritual and
moral development apart from the generalised lip-service
paid to them in the common platitudes found in school
mission statements.
72
“What usually happens in the educational process is
that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and
paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they
have lost their innate capabilities.” ~ R. Buckminster
Fuller, US inventor.
73
Brian Thorne, Emeritus Professor of Counselling Studies
at the University of Norwich, describes how in his
psycho-therapeutic work, he ministers in his consulting
room to an ever-growing stream of angry, burnt-out,
deeply unfulfilled people who sacrificed their souls in
the frantic pursuit of personal achievement and material
success. Bound by the imperative to “deliver” so much of
what is useless and ephemeral they had failed to see to
their own “deliverance”, which in its original meaning is
simply their liberation from all such oppression and
illusion.
Brian Thorne’s experience is confirmed by recent
studies which have exposed the scandalous increase in
depression, self-harm and even suicide amongst young
people, including schoolchildren, with a growing number
74
59
of websites offering advice to young people who want to
take their own lives about the best methods of killing
themselves. The Independent on Sunday (12 September
2004) reports that the suicide rate in Britain today is
now three times higher among schoolchildren than it was
20 years ago, with children as young as five being
treated for self-harming. The main causes of self-harm
amongst children and teenagers in the UK – believed to be
the highest in Europe – are bullying at school and exam
stress as well as an abusive parent or bereavement. A
poll carried out in September 2002 found that testing had
replaced bullying as the biggest fear for schoolchildren
during their schooldays (“The obsession with exams and
targets is destroying childhood”, by Richard Garner, The
Independent, 21 September, 2002).
In an article in The Guardian (“Doubt and depression
burden teenage girls”, 24 February 2005), Lucy Ward
reports the findings of a poll commissioned by the
magazine Bliss that “the vast majority of teenage girls
in Britain suffer depression and self-doubt, blaming
excessive pressure to look good and succeed in school.
Nine out of ten say they feel depressed, 42% feel low
regularly, and 6% think life is not worth living…84% felt
burdened with too much homework and coursework at school,
and almost two-thirds thought there was too much pressure
to succeed academically. Most admitted crying over their
homework…Bullying also featured high, 66% admitting that
they had been bullied, mainly by other girls.” The
article also referred to last Autumn’s Time Trends study
on adolescent mental health by the Institute of
Psychiatry, King’s College London and the University of
Manchester, which reveals a sharp overall decline in the
mental health of teenagers in the past 25 years. Amongst
its findings was the startling revelation that 37% of
teenage girls believed they suffered from obsessive
compulsive disorder.
And this stressful existence is not confined to
schoolchildren. In the same edition of The Guardian (24
February 2005) next to the headline “Work is a four
letter word for those in their 30s”, there is a striking
photograph of a dejected young man sitting on a flight of
stone steps, briefcase between his legs, leaning forward
onto tightly clasped hands, with the caption: “Stressed,
worried and overworked…the price of climbing the career
ladder is too high for thirtysomethings”. The article,
reporting the findings of a study by the Employers’ Forum
on Age, also reports the findings of Brian Thorne,
derived from his psycho-therapeutic encounters, that
workers in their thirties “gradually tumble to the fact
60
that work has become the totality of their existence and
so much of their energy, intellect and emotion goes into
making their way up the hierarchical ladder. They are
exhausted and they realise they are losing touch with
their friends or missing out on aspects of their children
development that can never recur.”
Professor Louis Appleby, the British Government’s
mental health ‘tsar’, said earlier this year that the way
to deal with the problem of declining mental health in
children and adolescents was to bring in an “army of
therapists”, as if it were the children who are “sick”
instead of the culture and school system in which they
growing up. A wiser approach would surely be to attempt
to rectify an educational system which not only
demoralises and dispirits, but also causes widespread
disaffection, depression and even suicide. These
debilitating effects are the outcome of an educational
process which often gives no real place to spiritual and
moral development apart from the generalised lip-service
paid to them in school mission statements. Dispirited and
demoralised school pupils are also increasingly
disaffected, as is clearly shown by truancy statistics
which show that truancy is continuing to rise despite
government measures designed to tackle this problem. The
BBC Radio 4 News of 15 September 2004 reported that an
average of 49,000 pupils were absent from school every
day in the year up to April 2004.
“One test of the correctness of educational procedure
is the happiness of the child” said Maria Montessori.
The reduction of the notion of ‘quality’ to that of
mere quantity, is a necessary consequence of the blatant
secularism which “admits of nothing divine, has
categorised all aspects of our life by negating the human
spirit (ruh) and the heart (qalb), which are the essence
of our inner being, and in so doing “has created a
society in which life is considered to be simply an
interplay of physical and chemical forces, morality a
human construct, and spirituality …a mere
psychologization of human experiences.” See Shaikh Abdul
Mabud, “Beyond the curriculum: the secular crusade”,
editorial, Muslim Education Quarterly, Vo. 21, No. 1 & 2
(Autumn and Winter issues combined), 2004.
75
Henzell-Thomas, J. “Quantity Masquerading as Quality:
Reviving an Authentic Notion of Qualitative Education”,
paper presented at a Conference on Higher Education in
Developing Countries With a Focus on Muslim Contexts at
The Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, 2425 February 2005.
76
61
It is not only indigenous cultural traditions which can
provide models of management appropriate to their
settings, but religious and spiritual traditions can do
the same, since the principles and values upheld by both
indigenous and global spiritual traditions often
converge, even if the language in which they are
articulated is markedly different. In both the
Christianity and Islam, for examples, there need be no
necessary conflict between the pursuit of efficiency and
the pursuit of higher values. In a paper on the
application of religious models to educational
administration, Aref Atari has shown how the
implementation of both the Christian model of ServiceStewardship” and the Islamic “Khalifah” model “entails a
radical transformation in management, thought and
practice” away from a hierarchically organised
bureaucratic Western model to a what he calls a “caring
and sharing spirit”. In this climate, trust, love,
sympathy, mercy, cooperation, tolerance and altruism are
at least as important as efficiency, effectiveness,
competition, professional ambition and achievement. The
outcome is an organisation which is both “virtue-based
and excellence-oriented”. Shurah-based management,
empowering and working with others, replaces a top-down
approach which manipulates, controls and works through
others. (Atari, Aref T. M., “Christian ‘ServiceStewardship’ and Islamic ‘Khalifah’: Emerging models in
educational administration”, American Journal of Islamic
Social Sciences, Vol. 17, Summer 2000, No. 2, p. 29 ff.).
I would, however, avoid the misleading dichotomy set
up by Atari between “excellence” and “virtue”, since the
Islamic conception of “excellence” (ihsan) is in fact
inseparable from virtue, whereas, as I pointed out
earlier in this paper, the Western conception of
“excellence” is more often than not limited to personal
achievement and the attainment of “success”. We have to
remember that the first priority of the government is the
economy. The DfEE White Paper, Schools: Achieving Success
(London: HMSO, 2001) gives the game away in the first
paragraph of the Introduction: “The success of our
children at school is crucial to the economic health and
social cohesion of the country, as well as to their own
life chances and personal fulfilment” (my italics).
Notice the priorities which are placed first in this
sentence. In an exclusive interview reported in the Times
Educational Supplement of 5 July 2002, Blair himself has
confirmed this agenda: “Education”, he says “is and
remains the absolute number one priority for the country
77
62
because without a quality education system and an
educated workforce, we cannot succeed economically” (my
emphasis). The real priority is clear, and it is the same
one (economic power) as that which governs educational
policy in the White Paper.
Widespread over-emphasis of the applied sciences over
the social sciences and humanities in higher education is
increasingly prevalent worldwide. An example is the call
for a 60:40 ratio for natural and applied sciences to
social science and humanities in Malaysian universities,
as well as the establishment of specialized technology
universities. Such imbalance puts national economic
development goals over individual human development, and
regards the educational process as a factory for
producing human “products” and “resources” to drive up
the pace of economic growth and national “success”.
Neil Postman, Technopoly. New York: Knopf, 1992.
Claxton (op. cit., p.5) relates that “until ten years
ago, a Ladakhi wedding lasted a fortnight. But their
lifestyle rapidly altered following the introduction of
some simple ‘labour-saving’ changes: tools, such as the
Rotovator, to make ploughing quicker and easier; and some
new crops and livestock, such as dairy cows. Compared to
the traditional yak, cows yield more milk than a family
needs, creating a surplus which can be turned into cheese
and sold to bring in some extra cash…unfortunately this
apparently benign ‘aid package’ also gave the Ladakhis a
new view of time – as something in short supply. Instead
of the Rotovators and the cows generating more leisure,
they have in fact reduced it. People are now busier than
they were: busy creating wealth – and ‘saving time’.
Today a Ladakhi wedding lasts less than a day…Within the
Western mindset, time becomes a commodity, and one
inevitable consequence is the urge to ‘think faster’: to
solve problems and make the decisions quickly.”
78
79
See note 63.
80
Claxton, op. cit., p. 13.
I would obviously much prefer the word ‘rational’ here,
rather than Claxton’s ‘intelligent’.
81
82
Ibid., pp. 223-224.
The Qur’an, for example, describes itself as a Book
which is meant to be “a guidance for all the Godconscious”. The Arabic word translated here by Asad as
83
63
“God-conscious” is muttaqi, a derivative of taqwa, which
expresses a range of meanings. These encompass the sense
of awareness, awe, and guarding oneself against things
which are harmful to one’s spiritual life. As we see so
often in Arabic terms referring to human faculties, they
encompass both cognitive and moral dimensions (see note
60 for further examples).
The translation and definition here is by Asad. In note
60, I discussed the meaning of shahid in relation to
other Arabic words which denote the faculty of insight or
discernment.
84
This is clear from the fact that the verb shahida (from
which shahid is derived) means ‘to observe’ and
‘perceive’ as well as ‘to witness’ and ‘give testimony’.
As Glassé points out, “the word shahida has double
significance typical of the genius of the Arabic
language. It embraces the acts of seeing perceiving and
then of declaring that one has seen or perceived [and
living it out]. The key to this is the link between act
and speech, which in the Arabic soul, is so swift and
spontaneous that many words bear a double significance
reflecting it. For example, dhikr (“memory”) is also
“mention”, that is, the verbalisation of memory.”
(Glassé, op. cit, p. 417).
85
“What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the
days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left
unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers -- they
work only too hard already. The combined folly of a
civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing
them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational
structure that is built upon sand.” ~ Dorothy L. Sayers.
86
Lancelot Law Whyte is right on the mark when he refers
to the “moral mistake” and “intellectual error” in “the
European and Western ideal of the self-aware individual
confronting destiny with his own indomitable will and
sceptical reason as the only factors on which he can
rely…for it has exaggerated the ethical, philosophical
and scientific importance of the awareness of the
individual.” He goes on to say that “one of the main
factors exposing this inadequate ideal is the [re]discovery of the unconscious mind . That is why the idea
of the unconscious is the supreme revolutionary
conception of the modern age.” From Whyte, Lancelot Law,
The Unconscious before Freud. London: Julian Friedmann,
1978, quoted in Claxton, op. cit., p. 223.
87
64
The supposed demand by “consumers” for more and more
“choice” has now become a mantra used by supermarkets and
other commercial interests to justify the continual
expansion of their outlets. On the BBC radio 4 programme
You and Yours of 28 June 2005, we were informed in a
discussion about voluntary euthanasia that people now
want the same “control” and “choice” over the manner of
their death as they do over their “life-style”.
88
In Coomaraswamy, Anaanda K., What is Civilisation? And
Other Essays. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1989, p. 7.
Coomaraswamy cites as examples of these destroyers of
civilisations the “Spaniards in South America” and the
“Japanese in Korea”. Many more could be added, including
the settlers in Native America, and, closer to our time,
the Chinese in Tibet.
89
See note 16, which refers to Blair’s statement that
“Education is and remains the absolute number one
priority for the country because without a quality
education system and an educated workforce, we cannot
succeed economically.” (my emphasis).
90
“I think my deepest criticism of the educational system
at that period [junior high and high school], and that
also applies to other periods, is that it's all based
upon a distrust of the student. Don't trust him to follow
his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him
what he should think; tell him what he should learn.
Consequently at the very age when he should be developing
adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when
he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to
make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is,
instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether
it fits him or not.” ~
Carl Rogers, U.S. psychologist,
in Evans, R. Carl Rogers: The Man and His Ideas, 1975, p.
39.
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher
explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great
teacher inspires.” ~ William Arthur Ward.
91
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we
love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and
by the same token to save it from that ruin, which,
except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and
the young, would be inevitable.” ~ Hannah Arendt,
Teaching as Leading.
92
65
“An intelligent fool can make things bigger, more
complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius
and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.”
~ Albert Einstein.
93
94
You and Yours, 24 June 2005.
The most recent survey of religious belief in Britain
found that, of the 74 per cent of the population who
described themselves as Christians, their religion was
rated the least important to their identity out of ten
factors in their lives. This Home Office Survey, based
on 15,500 interviews, and reported in the The Independent
of 18 August, 2004 (“Faith plays a minor role in lives of
most white Christians” by Nigel Morris) found that
although the highest number (74 per cent) called
themselves Christians, “religious affiliation made little
difference to the lives of white adherents. When asked
what they considered important to their identity,
religion was cited by only 17 per cent of white
Christians, behind family, work, age, interests,
education, nationality, gender, income and social class.
For Black people, 70 per cent of whom say they are
Christian, religion is third, and Asians placed it
second, only behind family. The category “Asian” here
encompasses the majority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.
95
I am only too aware of how, in referring to the Divine,
I myself avoid any direct reference to God, and I trust
that this will not be regarded as a kind of capitulation
to the mentality which prefers to banish and consign God
to an apologetic footnote. Such are the demands upon us
to find a language, suitable to context, which is not
automatically associated with the supposed “conditioning”
of “normative religion”, and thereby accessible to people
unaffiliated with or discomforted by such “belief
systems”. It needs to be said, however, that this
concession is itself testimony to the conditioned mindset
of those who are unable to encompass the full range of
terminology which describes the nature and origin of
higher knowledge, and who imprison themselves in a
restricted vocabulary which is nothing more than a
reflection of their own “belief- systems”. But as Grace
has written, “Secular schools as opposed to religious
schools are not ideologically free zones. Secularism has
its own ideological assumptions about the human person,
the ideal society, the ideal system of schooling and the
meaning of human existence. While these assumptions may
not be formally codified into a curriculum subject
96
66
designated ‘secular education’ as an alternative to
‘religious education’ they characteristically permeate
the ethos and culture of state-provided secular schools
and form a crucial part of the ‘hidden curriculum’”.
(Grace, G.G., Catholic Schools: Mission, Markets and
Morality. London: Routledge-Falmer, 2002, p. 14.
A survey has shown that among secondary school students
aged 11 to 18, those who enjoy religious education (RE)
and see positive benefits for their own lives from
studying religion outnumber by four to one those who are
negative about RE. The report also gives examples of
statements by students which show that many students also
like RE because of the opportunities it gives for
expressing opinions, improving communication skills,
acquiring knowledge of other faiths, developing intercultural awareness and sensitivity, developing the skills
of philosophical enquiry and reflection, (my emphasis)
and pondering the meaning and purpose of life. See
Blaylock, L. (ed.), Listening to Young People in
Secondary Religious Education. Professional Council for
Religious Education (PCfRE) Report, 2001. This finding
forcefully contradicts the opinion of a well-known
atheist philosopher, aired on the BBC Moral Maze radio
programme, that the teaching of religion in schools was
“intellectual abuse”. The students themselves clearly to
do not agree with him.
97
The original sense in English of the word liberal was
‘generous’ and ‘appropriate to the cultural pursuits of a
free man. Its Latin root, liber, means to do what you
want to do, to "do your own thing", and this root also
gives us libido, an urge; libidinous, given to indulging
ones urges; and (borrowed from the Greek) libation, an
outpouring, libertarian and libertine (a rake or
debauchee). However, its earlier origin is from the
prehistoric Indo-European root leudh-, still intact in
Greek eleutheros ‘free’, which may have denoted the sense
of ‘being a member of a free people’ as opposed to ‘being
a slave’.
98
The “imagination” is another of those terms which
describe a multi-layered hierarchical concept, ranging
from the “imaginal” through the “imaginative”, to the
“imaginary”, but which is widely used without any
discrimination between different levels.
“Creative Imagination” in its highest sense (as used
by Henry Corbin, for example, to describe the spiritual
Intelligence of one such as Ibn ‘Arabi) is the faculty
99
67
which penetrates to “imaginal” worlds. ~ See Corbin,
Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. It is the
capacity for symbolic understanding, the spiritual
perception which unveils the hidden realities behind and
beyond observable signs and ‘similitudes’ (Arabic
amthal). It needs to be distinguished from the lower
levels of ‘creative imagination’ associated with those
forms of ‘imaginative’ artistic exploration which are not
connected with any awareness of the objective
significance of universal symbols, but are rather based
on subjective feelings, imaginings and even fantasies and
delusions. Jean Houston (op. cit.) puts it well when she
speaks of “the importance of teaching-learning
communities in stimulating, supporting and evoking each
other’s highest sensory, physical, psychological, mythic,
symbolic and spiritual capacities.” In such a community,
she says, “education is an adventure of the soul in which
our personal themes become joined with those of universal
reality.” (my emphasis)
Titus Burckhardt (op. cit., pp. 93-98),
discussing human intellectual faculties, describes
imagination (Arabic khayal) as “complementary to reason”.
Chittick elucidates this complementarity by explaining
that one of the basic differences between “ideas” and the
“higher loci of vision” referred to by Ibn ‘Arabi, is
that “the former is thought about, while the latter are
seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled. The imaginal
world is a sensory world, while the rational realm is
disengaged (mujarrad) from sensory attributes. The
rational faculty works by a process of stringing concepts
together and drawing conclusions, a process that the
Shaykh calls ‘reflection’ (fikr). In contrast, the
imaginal faculty works by inner perception that perceives
ideas in sensory form. Hence, imaginal perception may be
visual, but this vision does not take place with the
physical eyes; it may be auditory, but things are not
heard with the physical ears. Again, dreams prove that
everyone has non-physical sense experience.” (Chittick,
William C., Imaginal Worlds. Albany: State University of
New York Pres, 1994, pp. 69-70).
Burckhardt (op. cit.) expands thus: “In relation to
the intellectual pole of the mind imagination may be
considered as its plastic material; for this reason it
corresponds by analogy to the materia prima on which the
plastic continuity of the ‘cosmic dream’ depends just as,
subjectively, it depends on imagination.
“If the imagination can be a cause of illusion by
binding the intelligence to the level of sensory forms it
68
none the less also has a spiritually positive aspect in
so far as it fixes intellectual intuitions or
inspirations in the form of symbols. For imagination to
be able to assume this function it must have acquired in
full measure its plastic capacity; the misdeeds of
imagination come not so much from its development as from
its being enslaved by passion and feeling. Imagination
is one of the mirrors of Intellect; its perfection lies
in its remaining virginal and of wide compass.
“Some Sufi writers, including ‘Abd al’Karim al-Jïli,
have said that the dark pole of the mind is al-wahm, a
term which means conjecture and also opinion, suggestion
and suspicion and so mental illusion. This is the
reverse of the speculative freedom of the mind. The
power of illusion of the mind, as it were, fascinated by
an abyss; it is attracted by every unexhausted negative
possibility. When this power dominates the imagination,
imagination becomes the greatest obstacle to
spirituality.”
The transferable cognitive benefits of learning to
play a musical instrument have been well documented. The
mental mechanisms which process music are deeply entwined
with brain functions such as spatial relations, memory
and language. Jean Houston believes that “the best
schools will also use the power of drama to enrich the
learning experience. Through dramatic enactment in
theatre, the student explores the many guises of what it
is to be a human being, using a rich array of skills –
music, movement, rhetoric, expression and feeling – to
tour the landscape of human experience. What is more,
what is enacted is more readily remembered.” Houston,
referring to research which has shown a correlation
between proficiency in language arts and the amount of
time spent in movement activities, also recommends dance
as means to energize and stimulate the entire mind-body
system. See Houston, Jean, Jump Time: Shaping Your
Future in a World of Radical Change . New York: Jeremy P.
Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. Sardello also emphasises the
importance of art forms in the “education into soul”,
including myth, fairy tale, story, symbolic imagery,
poetry, drama, painting, music, and film…” (Sardello,
Robert, Facing the World with Soul. Hudson, NY:
Lindisfarne Press, 1992, p. 61.)
100
By “communication skills” I mean the whole range of
productive and receptive linguistic and paralinguistic
skills which are concerned with the communication of
information, knowledge and wisdom, and the establishment
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69
of relationships, and not merely the use of modern
technology to give visual impact to presentations! Powerpoint presentations may convey a sense of purposeful
efficiency, order and conciseness, but, by virtue of
their bullet-point style, may often never facilitate the
depth and connectivity of ideas nor the subtlety of
nuance typical of a mature “discourse”.
It might be hoped that with so much teacher talk in
our schools, a good proportion of it might be directed
towards the development of creative and critical thinking
and problem solving. Not so. In fact, a wide-ranging
survey of British secondary schools reveals less than ten
percent of teacher talk is concerned with the development
of higher order thinking skills. Most of it is directed
to mere control and management, including keeping order
and giving instructions. The rest of it (apart from the
paltry amount involved in getting students to think) is
low-level transmission of facts and information.
Roland Barth reports the estimate of John Goodlad and
others that 85 percent of lesson time in American schools
is taken up by a prevailing pedagogy based on teachers
talking and students listening, occasionally interspersed
with teacher-directed discussion. (See Barth, op. cit.,
p.32).
Unfortunately, a rigidly prescribed content-heavy
curriculum, with its emphasis on a narrow band of skills,
does not foster a culture of discussion. “I learned
most,” said St. Augustine, “not from those who taught me
but from those who talked with me.”
I also know from my experience observing teachers
that a climate of inspection and accountability leads to
over-managed lessons which deliberately leave no room for
spontaneous and unpredictable events, creative departures
(including unplanned digressions) or lively discussions,
which might “get out of hand” and be construed by
inspectors as a breakdown of effective “classroom
management” or loss of discipline. Again and again,
despite pleas to teachers not to produce supposedly
“model” lessons but simply to show their normal practice,
I have observed lessons in which nothing is allowed to
happen except the “delivery” of a specific “objective”.
Questioning is geared only to test that knowledge in
conformity with the objective has been assimilated.
Lateral thinking and divergent questioning is
discouraged. The outcome is a culture of mediocrity which
promotes “safety” in the “delivery” of “well-managed”
lessons which never depart from rigidly controlled
objectives.
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70
“When a teacher complains that students are "off
task" - a favorite bit of educational jargon - the
behaviorist will leap to the rescue with a program to get
them back "on" again. The more reasonable response to
this complaint is to ask, "What's the task?" Not
surprisingly, this way of framing the problem meets with
considerable resistance on the part of many educators.
More than once I have been huffily informed that life
isn't always interesting, and kids had better learn to
deal with this fact…Thus is the desire to control
children, or the unwillingness to create a worthwhile
curriculum, rationalized as being in the best interests
of the students.” ~ Alfie Kohn, social psychologist,
Punished by Rewards, 1993.
“Our entire school system is based on the notion of
passive students that must be "taught" if they are to
learn…Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each
year not just giving students a second-rate education,
but at the same time actively preventing them from
getting an education on their own. And I'm angry at how
school produces submissive students with battered egos.
Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning,
and of how much they can actually achieve on their own.”
~ Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review.
See note 24 for references to the importance of
dialectical thinking in human cognitive development.
103
In this category, I would include not only the
subjects of literature, history, geography, archaeology,
anthropology, sociology and languages (ancient and
modern), but also psychology. By this, I mean an
understanding of the authentic spiritual psychology which
addresses the hierarchical structure and dynamics of all
levels of the human psyche and which encompasses the
higher possibilities of man, and not the degradation of
psychology to a “psychologism” which reduces man only to
the level of the “commanding self” (Arabic an-nafs alammara) – that is, to the level of a self-gratifying
‘consumer’ or ‘hedonist’ driven by passions and
egocentric impulses. In the same way, “psychologism”
reduces all higher human aspirations, metaphysical
insights and religious beliefs to mere “constructions” of
the human mind or mere “compensatory mechanisms” which
seek to attach a hoped-for “meaning” to life. As such, it
is the inevitable product of a more general “scientism”
or “positivism” which denies any higher purpose to human
life. Even so-called Western “depth psychology”, which
speaks of the integration of the “self”, has little
104
71
conception of a Higher Self as described by spiritual
traditions.
By this I do not mean a bland multiculturalism or
syncretism but an active engagement with other
perspectives as a truth-seeking encounter.
105
By this, I do not necessarily mean the kind of
“adventure programs” praised by Roland Barth – see note
44 - as a means of developing “problem-solving
abilities, leadership skills, social skills and
independence.” Least of all do I mean the physical
challenges presented by “extreme” sports, which
substitute adrenalin rushes, the arrogant “conquest” of
nature and the wonders of technologically advanced
“equipment” for the peaceful absorption in its mysteries,
accessed by no equipment apart from the innate faculty of
contemplation.
106
107
See note 69.
The latest casualty, so I understand, is archaeology,
until now kept alive by only one examining board. This
goes hand in hand with the demise of history, a subject
whose ‘A’ level standard is now regarded as such a
narrow, limited and impoverished historical education
that Cambridge University no longer requires
undergraduate historians to have it. A Geographical
Association survey has found that “geography has been
dropped as a subject specialism by more than one quarter
of initial teacher-training institutions”. Humanities
simply do not have the status of core subjects such as
English, mathematics and science, so “young teachers who
want promotion will probably focus on core subjects”
(Times Educational Supplement, 15 March, 2002). More
recently, The Geographical Association has warned that
pupils’ education is being damaged by teachers’ overreliance on standard textbooks, (Times Educational
Supplement, 2 May, 2003) largely because many of those
teachers have not studied Geography themselves since the
age of fourteen. A survey by the Association of Language
Learning suggests that more than 1,000 schools in the UK
are planning to drop foreign language lessons for pupils
over 14. (Times Educational Supplement, 25 May, 2002.).
In February 2002, the German, Italian and Spanish
ambassadors had spoken out in an interview with The
Independent about the “sad” standard of language teaching
in the UK. Research from Sussex and Dundee universities,
reported in The Independent of 6 August 2004
108
72
(“Monolingual Brits miss out on European study” by
Dominic Hayes) found that among academics in the UK “the
general feeling was one of exasperation, but also
resignation, about the foreign languages scenario in the
UK”. The report states that “the problem of UK students’
generally poor and declining knowledge of foreign
languages came up again and again”.
Campaigners for a return to a more traditional
History syllabus in British schools have branded as a
“disgrace” for the state education system the results of
a BBC poll (reported in The Independent of 5 August
2004) which questioned 16- to 34-year-olds on their
historical knowledge, and I expect that a similar poll
might uncover even worse ignorance in the USA. History
specialists have declared the results to be “really
surprising” even if they do not necessarily share the
apoplectic outrage of the traditionalists. We need not
necessarily have sleepless nights at the finding of the
poll that only half of all age groups knew that the
marches of the Orangemen in Northern Ireland on 12 July
mark the Battle of the Boyne. However, we perhaps ought
to be seriously worried that 15 per-cent of 16- to 24year-olds thought that these marches celebrated the
victory at Helm’s Deep at the end of The Two Towers, the
second book in Tolkien’s Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.
Furthermore, one in 20 thought it was Gandalf, the
wizard, not Francis Drake, who had led the British fleet
to victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588. One in 5,
incidentally, thought it was Columbus. One in eight also
thought Anglo-Saxon Britain had been overrun by Napoleon.
We might want to concede that outraged traditionalists
have an important point to make about the decline in
historical knowledge, even if some of their concerns give
undue prominence to facts over understanding and
interpretation, and reflect dubious nationalistic
obsessions.
109
Although Islamic education is often defined as
tarbiyah (see note 17) – a ‘nurturing’ process - Al-Attas
(op. cit.) prefers to regard it as ta’dib, a word related
to adab. He defines this term in its true sense (before
its restriction and debasement of meaning to “a context
revolving around cultural refinement and social
etiquette”) as “discipline of body, mind and soul” which
enables man to recognise and acknowledge “his proper
place in the human order” (my emphasis) in relation to
his self, his family and his community. This order is
“arranged hierarchically in degrees (darajat) of
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73
excellence based on Qur’anic criteria of intelligence,
knowledge and virtue (ihsan)”. In this sense, adab is
“the reflection of wisdom (hikmah)” and “the spectacle
(mashhad) of justice (‘adl)…Within the dual nature of
man’s own self, the adab of his lower animal soul (alnafs al-hayawaniyyah) is to recognise and acknowledge its
subordinate position in relation to his higher rational
soul (al-nafs al-natiqah). My appeal to “put thinking in
its place” is no more than a request for adab, in its
true sense of ordering human faculties in a proper
hierarchy.
Confucius anticipated all this research, and expressed
it in much simpler language: “I hear and I forget. I see
and I remember. I do and I understand.”
111
By “visual input”, I do not mean sitting in front of
a computer monitor. In the present climate of distancing
from nature, fear of even the slightest physical risk,
and declining powers of observation of the real threedimensional world (as opposed to the increasing dominance
of screens and monitors mediating and impoverishing our
experience), we must nourish by every possible means the
connection of our young people to the beauty of the
natural world and the rich multi-sensory world of
experience it opens to them. I also know from experience
as a teacher of environmental studies that children gain
far more from direct and active observation of wildlife
than from any number of passive sessions watching videos
or dvds about the natural world, no matter how good.
Direct experience gives a much more memorable experience,
not only in the sense of its impact (which seems to
connect directly with the soul of the child and goes far
beyond the mere accumulation of facts) but also in the
sense of imprinting it on the memory. Again and again, I
have heard children recall, even years later, details of
garden birds or other animals observed in the wild, but
the same children remember virtually nothing even a few
days after seeing the same birds or animals on a video.
They will say with a kind of deep wistfulness, recalling
magical moments when they encountered living creatures,
“do you remember when we saw such-and-such”?
112
John W. Gardner once said: “I am entirely certain
that twenty years from now we will look back at education
as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that
we could have tolerated anything so primitive.” I don’t
know when he said this, but I wonder if the “primitive”
nature of the education system he critiqued has really
been replaced by anything more advanced.
74
113
This process is clearly not just verbal, but involves
the utilisation of non-verbal cues (spatial and visual
for example) to create additional pathways for recall.
114
The Head of History at Latymer School in North London
(Times Educational Supplement, 28 June 2002).
115
Faith schools, including traditional Islamic
madrasas, have traditionally kept alive the faculty of
human memory through memorisation of sacred text. It is
not unusual to find young children who have memorised the
entire Qur’an. However, verbatim memorisation clearly
does not, in itself, promote understanding of the text.
We need to be clear about the differences between memory
and memorisation. Research shows clearly that the most
effective memory is memory for meaning. What is
understood most deeply leaves the most prominent and
resilient memory traces. Deep comprehension of text, for
example, is based on an understanding of the deep
structure of the text (its underlying semantic
propositions and pragmatic intentions, and the inferences
we derive from them), not simply from the surface
arrangement of the words. While verbatim memorisation of
the text cannot help us to understand it, processing the
text in some other form can (taking notes, for example,
or discussing it, explaining it to others, summarising
it, making a diagram out of it, and so on). However, the
combination of verbatim memorisation for surface form and
memory for meaning is a powerful one.
116
Memorisation of stories, like that of poetry and
sacred text, is becoming a lost art.
117
The Director of the National Theatre has recently
bemoaned the fact that so few people today have even a
minimal knowledge of such allusions in the corpus of
great dramatic works.
Lord Quirk, the former President of the British
Academy and an eminent Professor of English Language and
Literature, has warned that fewer and fewer young people
have even the basic knowledge of Old Testament stories
and Greek myths which would enable them to understand
literature written before 1900. Although schools should
not be “captive to the past”, he said, “we are in an
alarming downward spiral towards a culture that values
only the contemporary.” Modern kids, he said, are
increasingly baffled by allusions which a hundred years
ago would have been “mother’s milk to any child at Sunday
118
75
school.” (Adapted from an article in The Independent, 30
June 2003).
119
Houston, Jean, op. cit.
See my Foreword to Wholeness and Holiness in
Education: An Islamic Perspective by Zahra Al Zeera.
Herndon: International Institute for Islamic Thought,
London, 2001 for a discussion about the importance of
dialectic in holistic education. It is worth noting that
Fowler associates dialectical thinking with the
development of faith. See Fowler, J.W., Faith: The
Structural Development Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1975.
120
I have commented as follows in a recent paper on the
myth of Jason’s passage through the Clashing Rocks as a
symbol of going beyond polarised thinking:
121
“In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, among the
greatest dangers faced by Jason and the Argonauts on
their quest for the Golden Fleece were the Clashing
Rocks, or Symplegades, which guarded the entrance to the
Black Sea like a gigantic pair of sliding doors, smashing
together and crushing ships between them. “As the
Argonauts rowed along the Bosporus, they could hear the
terrifying clash of the Rocks and the thunder of surf.
They released a dove and watched it fly ahead of them.
The Rocks converged on the dove nipping off its tail
feathers, but the bird got through. Then, as the Rocks
separated, the Argonauts rowed with all their might. A
well-timed push from the divine hand of Pallas Athene
helped the ship through the Rocks just as they slammed
together again, shearing off the mascot from Argo’s
stern. Argo had become the first ship to run the gauntlet
of the Rocks and survive. Thereafter the Clashing Rocks
remained rooted apart.” 121 (From the End Notes to
Symplegades by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. The whole article
is available for downloading on
www.livingheritage.org/symplegades.htm or
www.koslanda.com/symplegades .htm).
“Now… I could have chosen many other examples of the
same motif from many other cultures and traditions – that
is, the motif of the “Active Door” dividing the known
world from the unknown Beyond, and through which the hero
or seeker must pass to succeed in the quest, which is
none other, in essence, than the return to his or her
original home. To pass between the Rocks is to pass
through the “strait gate” or the “needle’s eye” between
76
the contrary pairs of opposites and beyond the polarity
which necessarily characterises the conditioned world.
It is to be guided by the lamp “lit from a blessed tree –
an olive-tree that is neither of the east nor the west”
(Qur’an 24:35). It is to follow the Middle Way, to find
the Truth which, as Boethius puts it, is a “mean between
contrary heresies”. I chose the Greek version of the
story because the image of the Clashing Rocks has a
startling relevance and resonance at a time when there is
so much talk of a Clash of Civilisations, and because it
shows us so clearly that the true hero is not the one who
takes up an adversarial position on either side but the
one who has the courage and intelligence to pass beyond
the opposites to the essential Unity which is both our
original identity and our ultimate goal as human beings.”
From Henzell-Thomas, J., ‘Passing Between the Clashing
Rocks: The Heroic Quest for a Common and Inclusive
Identity’, The Journal of Pastoral Care in Education,
Spring, 2004.
It is important to realise that the Argonauts needed
divine assistance (in this case “a well-timed push from
the hand of Pallas Athene”) to pass through the rocks.
The final push beyond the duality symbolised by the rocks
can only be made through an act of divine grace.
By “deep reflection” I mean the contemplative
activity defined by Malik Badri as a “cognitive-spiritual
activity in which the rational mind, emotion and spirit
are combined” (Arabic tafakkur). See Badri, M.
Contemplation: An Islamic Psychospiritual Study. Herndon:
IIIT, 2000. This does not necessarily imply a defined
‘method’ of meditation, or a visualisation ‘technique’,
although it may include such.
122
Deep reflection also promotes the self-awareness and
self-criticism which impels learners to seek change
within themselves. This is more than simply a
metacognitive awareness which gives one the ability to
analyse one’s own thought processes, but goes deeper into
the depths of the soul, allowing one to take conscious
control of one’s own development and, with grace, to
transform one’s whole being. “Verily, God does not
change men’s condition unless they change their inner
selves” (Qur’an 13:11). The Prophet Muhammad said: “He
who knows his own self, knows his Lord.” And according
to Lao Tzu, “One who knows much about others may be
learned, but one who understands himself is more
intelligent.” This stage requires the realisation,
embodiment or actualisation of knowledge.
123
77
The interconnectedness of all things is beautifully
illustrated by the discoveries of the Irish physicist
John Stewart Bell. Bell’s work, now supported by numerous
experiments, shows that, contrary to Einstein’s golden
rule that nothing can travel faster than light, things
have ‘non-local’ effects that stretch out instantaneously
through infinite distance. The movement of one atom in
this galaxy can immediately affect one in another galaxy,
as long as they began by being associated in a way called
“entanglement”. Bell showed that this action at a
distance is not just an idea, but an essential aspect of
reality.
There
are
profound
philosophical
and
spiritual
implications arising from this discovery, which has been
called the most important discovery in science. Every
particle in the Universe was once entangled because they
all came out of the Big Bang together and share identical
origins. Every particle retains a ‘memory’ of every other
particle in the Universe, and thus every particle in a
profound way ‘knows’ what every other particle is doing
at all times. In his holographic model of this
interconnected Universe, the physicist David Bohm shows
that each bit of the Universe – including each of us –
contains the entire Universe, so that Blake’s notion of
seeing the world in a grain of sand is not at all a
poetic fancy but an accurate observation.
We too, like every particle, share identical origins.
This is precisely where our identity lies, in that
primordial nature which originates from the divine
singularity. And because it originates from that
singularity, in which everything is entangled, our
identity is in essence the same as everyone else’s, even
though the diversity of forms is infinite. It is this
common identity which is expressed by the Arabic term
fitrah, ‘essential nature’ or ‘primordial disposition’.
124
“All men at times obey their vices: but it is when
cruelty, envy, and lust appear as the commands of a great
super-personal force that they can be exercised with
approval. The first symptom is in language. When to
‘kill’ becomes to ‘liquidate’ the process has begun. The
pseudo-scientific word disinfects the thing of blood and
tears, or pity and shame, and mercy itself can be
regarded as a sort of untidiness.” (C.S. Lewis, “A Reply
to Professor Haldane”, in Of This and Other Worlds,
Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1982, p.109. (my emphasis)
“The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at
pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere
υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very
78
125
language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate
unsocial elements.” C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man,
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1947, paperback ed. 1955.
p. 85.
George Orwell pointed out that, In order to defend
the indefensible – “things like the continuation of
British rule in India, the Russian purges and
deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan” –
“political language has to consist largely of euphemisms,
question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” Defenceless
villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machinegunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets:
this is called pacification. People are imprisoned for
years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or
sent to die of scurvy in Arctic limber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements. Such
phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without
calling up mental pictures of them.” (my emphasis) George
Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, in George
Orwell, A Collection of Essays, Harcourt Brace, 1981, pp.
166-167.
See also Sandra Silberstein, War of Words: Language,
Politics and 9/11. London: Routledge, 2002, for a
penetrating analysis of the “strategic deployment of
language” and the “troubling underside of patriotic
rhetoric” which fashioned a post-9/11 American identity.
It is worth noting that the -ism suffix, one of whose
chief grammatical functions is to denote a doctrine,
theory, system or ideology, became very active in English
from the sixteenth century. This suffix was borrowed
through French –isme or directly from Latin –ismus , isma, from Greek –ismos, isma, a suffix forming nouns of
action from verbs in –izein –ize.
126
It is instructive to note that the English words origin
and orient both come from the same source: Latin oriri
‘rise’. The verb orient (and its variant orientate, which
emerged in the nineteenth century) originally meant ‘turn
the face to the east’, the direction of the rising sun.
Orientation is an essential spiritual concept, whether
exoterically in terms of physical direction (as in the
qibla, the direction Muslims face in Islamic ritual
prayer, or facing east towards the altar for Christians)
or esoterically as the light of God, “neither of the East
nor the West”, the point of unity within the Heart which
the spiritual seeker strives to make his or her permanent
focus. Spiritual orientation entails the constant
remembrance of our origin, our point of ‘arising’, and
79
127
our inevitable ‘return’: “Verily, unto God do we belong
and, verily, unto Him we shall return.” (Qur’an 2:156).
The connection Al Zeera (op. cit.) makes between this
transformative state and the theory of dissipative
structures developed by the Nobel-prize winning physical
chemist, Ilya Prigogine, is instructive, for, according
to Prigogine, physical systems have the capacity to go
through periods of instability and then selforganisation, resulting in more complex systems. Thus,
“instability”, in its positive sense of freedom from onesided, crystallized thinking, is the key to greater
coherence and complexity. On a more mystical level, the
ultimate “resting place” of the one who has attained to
God-consciousness (taqwa), the station of permanent
“abiding” in God, is paradoxically a state of total
openness and surrender, a place of “no-place” in which
the limited self is extinguished. This can be equated
with the sixth and final stage of Fowler’s map of faith
development (See Fowler, op. cit.), the stage attained
only through grace, in which there is a complete
sacrifice of stability.
128
129
See note 80.
The science based on that sense of the mysterious is,
of course, a sacred science, or scientia sacra, “a
science which lies at the very center of man’s being as
well as at the heart of all authentic religions and which
is attainable by the intellect, that supernaturally
mental faculty” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, The Need for a
Sacred Science. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993, p.
2).
130
See note 97 for a discussion of the higher faculty of
Imagination as a “mirror of Intellect”.
131
80