The Heart of Learning

The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education
ed. by Steven Glazer
New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1999
265 pages
ISBN - 0-87477-955-3

The essays that form the text of "The Heart of Learning" come from talks given at the Spirituality in Education Conference at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado during the summer of 1997. The collection has been deftly edited by Steven Glazer to fall into four large categories or topics for consideration. The four areas into which the essays were grouped are, "Sacredness: The Ground of Learning," "Identity," "Relationship and Community," and "Tradition and Innovation." Each area has a short, excellent introductory essay by Mr. Glazer which lays out the basic concerns and questions of each section, and the whole collection is followed by an extensive bibliography.

Parker Palmer's essay, "The Grace of Great Things: Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning,"is the lead essay in the first section of the collection. Here, Mr. Palmer, like so many others, struggles to articulate clearly what the term spirituality means in terms of education. There are several important points that Mr. Palmer makes. First, he warns us away from a romantic notion of spirituality and reminds us that before we become misty eyed to remember that the historical connections between spirituality and education have not always been a good ones. The he approaches the question of spirituality and education by asking what would it look like to reclaim the sacredness at the heart of learning. Mr. Palmer answers by outlining a series of qualities that would apply to teachers and students and to learning and teaching. He first talks about respect, loving relationship, and a "precious otherness." It seems to me that these qualities are all deeply interrelated. These qualities would apply to our attitudes towards our students and to our task of helping them to develop these qualities towards each other and towards the worlds of study around them. Implicit in all these original characteristics are corollaries of "precious inwardness," a sense of community or hidden wholeness, and humility and wonder.

The essay from the second series that caught my attention was bell hooks' "Embracing Freedom: Spirituality and Liberation." Ms Hooks works with the notion that teaching is an avocation, and at its' heart, a spiritual avocation. She playfully, yet directly explicates multiple notions of calling and their relationship to teaching. She wants us to be constantly aware of the opportunities to become more honest, heartful, and direct that come naturally from working with adolescents. Two notions that I found particularly intriguing were the notions that we bear witness to the truth of the educational imperative through our body, and that if teaching is in fact a spiritual avocation, then spiritual practice is the sustainer and nourishment of that avocation.

Joan Halifax's "Learning as Initiation: Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Healing," was the highlight of the next series of essays. Her thesis is simple, the modern world's ignorance of and lack of ritual access to initiation has had an enormous cultural and spiritual impact on us all. From her study of and time spent with peoples who still practice initiation Halifax thinks that initiation is the natural and necessary compliment to education. She sees in initiation the experiential and embodied necessity that transforms information into wisdom. As she so astutely notes, "While a teacher can give us information, a teacher cannot give us wisdom (177)."

Using the highly ritualized three stages or procedures of the initiation process as her intellectual framework Halifax shows us how crucial not knowing, ambiguity, direct experience, self knowledge, and service are to an integrated education.

Finally, in the best tradition of African-American Protestant Christianity, Vincent Harding in the last section of the collection integrates the best notions of the conference into an inspirational exhortation to give, to grow, to love, to risk and to get involved directly in making the changes that are going to bring the soul or spirit back to the educational process. While unable to give final answers and leaving many questions unanswered, "The Heart of Learning," raises many of the questions we should be thinking and talking about.

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