Ken Wilber argues Western education teaches only analytical thinking and ignores a second mode of knowing that reveals spiritual dimensions. He calls for integral education that develops body, mind, soul, and spirit together, not just the rational mind.
Chapters
Foreign. I was always writing from the viewpoint that there is a second mode of knowing and there are at least two truths. And we want to get really serious, scholastic academic serious about the second mode of knowing. Because although 95% of the world's greatest thinkers, and this is according to author Lovejoy, in his extraordinary book, the Great Chain of Being, that this is a worldview, he said that the greater number of subtler minds east and west have maintained throughout history that there really is a matter, body, mind, soul, spirit. There really is this dimensionality to reality and these dimensions of mind, body, mind, of matter, body, mind, soul, spirit can be found within you by just a certain practice of the second mode of knowing, of this ultimate mode of knowing. And the first mode of knowing is symbolic, analytic, representational works with stories, ideas, narratives. The second type of knowing. Oh, and in the first type of knowing there's a subject, object, split second type of knowing, subject and object are one. It's a non dual unification type of knowledge where what you want to know you actually are one with. And it's that oneness that opens up the ultimate truth of that particular knowing situation. And so this is an extraordinarily important type of knowing. And we don't have that in universities. It has been tossed out, it has been denigrated, it's been debunked. And that, at the very least, is the farthest thing away from integral education you can imagine. Integral education would be to take all of the major faculties of men and women and educate them, bring out that potential, let them be real and show their place in the world. Not take a human being with all these dimensions and put them through a process that squishes them down into a flattened out nothingness, in a sense, with only one mode of knowing. And that's kind of a scientific, materialist mode of understanding the world. It's probably the worst thing that you could call education. And yet it has slowly over the centuries, crept into what western education is all about.
