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After founding the journal Holistic Education Review in 1988, Miller
became involved in national and international efforts to build a holistic education
movement. During the 1990s he wrote various articles and essays in order to
clarify the issues and challenges facing this emerging perspective. Caring
for New Life contains his most important writings from this period. It
is Miller’s most complete definition of holistic education.
In these essays, Miller addresses the standardization and narrowing of learning
in this age of global corporate power. While political and economic forces
have defined education as a process of fashioning consumers, workers and managers
for a competitive marketplace, holistic education seeks to reclaim the fullness
of our humanity--the moral, aesthetic, emotional, psychological and spiritual
dimensions of human existence that make us more than mere processors of information
or consumers of material goods. Miller sees human experience as an expression
of the ongoing evolution of life in a meaningful cosmos, and from this perspective,
education ought not be so concerned with preserving imperfect social institutions
as with enabling each new generation to express the creative energies that
surge from within the human spirit.
Miller takes a critical look at educational strategies--even more or less "holistic" approaches--that
become hardened into ideologies or authoritative traditions. He argues that
holistic education is the practice of freedom; it is essentially an open-ended,
open-hearted responsiveness to life situations as they arise.
Caring for New Life includes the following essays:
- Holism and Meaning: Foundations for a Coherent Holistic Theory (1991)
- Holistic Education in the United States (1993)
- Spirituality in a Disenchanted Culture (1994)
- A Holistic Philosophy of Educational Freedom (1995)
- Partial Vision in Alternative Education (1997)
- Education and the Evolution of the Cosmos (1998)
- Education for Personal and Cultural Transformation (1998)
- Making Connections to the World (1999)
- Blind Spots in Educational Theory (1999)
- Non-Standardized Education (2000).
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