Abstract
Few books offer such a broad scope of transdisciplinary scholarship, nor attempt to defend an education which takes aim at ‘planet-sized’ problems. Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures is such a book. Jennifer M Gidley creates a tapestry for ‘radical change’ in education with threads woven from Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and many others including Husserl, Whitehead, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Biesta across enormous themes; the evolution of culture, consciousness and the future of education. Gidley tackles the silo of developmental psychology drawing conceptual bridges across traditional disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate how highly creative pedagogies can emerge. It is not an easy text, nor a linear one, and due to its sweeping features sometimes the detail of arguments is left wanting. The book is propelled by an urgent and passionate need to address the problem of human meaning-making and thinking that Gidley sees as underlying the large-scale issues facing humanity in environmental, psychological, socio-cultural and politico-economic terms.
The book is organised in three parts, which appear deceptively straightforward: Part One considers evolution as an approach to education; Part Two generates a dialogue between postformal psychology and education; and Part Three outlines an ‘evolving postformal education philosophy’. The book’s chapter organisation, however, is far more complex with textual, graphical, pictorial and linear representations of ideas linked, clustered, reiterated and compared across disciplines. Sub-section headers appear every half page or so briefly summarising concepts such as Piaget’s stages, or the epochs of human history, or the concepts of phylogeny and ontogeny, each embedded with step-staged arguments towards Gidley’s overarching view. The overarching position – her philosophy of education – is that global education must now turn towards the values of love, life, wisdom and voice with practical virtues such as empowered imagination, critical reverence, a wide-awakeness to multiple points of view, and an ability to communicate one’s authentic presence.
Part One, Chapter 2 draws from a cultural approach to human evolution to depict possibilities for imaginary thought inherent in early humans through distinct epochs towards the current ‘Age of Integration’. She introduces and contrasts the core theorists from which she draws (Steiner, Gebser and Wilbur) to outline structures of consciousness and begin the development of what she terms ‘megatrends of the mind’ (p. 38).
Chapter 3 offers an analysis of Piaget’s development theory which argues for its incompleteness in relation to ‘breaking through’ formal operations. This is a form of thought hamstrung with binaries and dualisms rather than integrations. It is here that she details shifts in thinking that can be collected under the broad banner of postformal thinking both in terms of discipline-specific research approaches and patterns of scholarly enactment. Gidley presents a historically comprehensive attack on mass formal education and the marketization of the knowledge economy in Chapter 4, having provided evidence for the harm it causes to the wellbeing of young people in Chapter 3, and claims optimistically that globalising movements indicate a ‘flourishing democratisation of education’ (p. 90). It is an urgent task, though, because what is at stake is the very future of the planet and our children’s capacity to ‘appreciate, respect and value life on earth’ (p. 222).
Chapter 5 is the beginning of Part Two where Gidley describes in some detail what postformal thinking looks like in adult developmental psychology and presents her ‘delicate theorising’ of the twelve qualities constituting postformal reasoning. This incorporates qualities indicated in individual reasoning as well as ‘socio-cultural scanning of megatrends of the mind’ which draw from her arguments for an epistemological paradigm shift towards relativism/pluralism and growing planetary awareness of higher purpose. In Chapter 6 readers find a survey of approaches to postformal pedagogies in educational theory, with particular attention paid to the work of Kincheloe and Steinberg. She maps relationships between the four themes of the evolution of consciousness: conscious, compassionate spiritual development; mobile, life-enhancing thinking; complexification of thinking and culture; and linguistic and paradigmatic boundary-crossing; with pedagogies which align (either explicitly or implicitly) with postformal thinking qualities (see: p. 148 for diagram).
Inevitably in a book of this breadth and magnitude there will be positions taken and assumptions made which support the large-picture view of the author, but for which little argument is provided. Having said this, the book is an extension on Gidley’s numerous previous works in integral studies and global futures education. This includes her early empirical research suggesting that Australian Steiner-educated students demonstrate greater capacities for imagining and acting on positive preferred futures than mainstream-educated youth do, whilst experiencing similar fears about the future and identifying similar global problems such as social injustice and ecological destruction (Gidley, 1998a, 1998b, cited on p. 214). Thus, the text ought to be read in conjunction with Gidley’s numerous previous works and arguments, as she states it is both drawn from and a necessary extension of those works (p. 270).
One such position, presumably fundamental to the author’s core argument regarding the possibility of the evolving human consciousness, is the rejection of materialism, or rather, the latent assumption of the dualistic nature of matter/substance and mind/spirit. This rejection of materialism comes early on in the book as a brief note regarding the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness as coined by renowned philosopher of mind David Chalmers and coupled with a footnote rejecting epi-phenomenalism. The problem of consciousness is barely touched upon, but the argument of its evolution covers pre-historic humanity via the discipline of palaeoart to the ancients; towards well-trodden ground against the current knowledge economy. The subsequent assumption of matter and non-matter flows under the course of the entire text whereby the evolution of human consciousness seen via its ‘megatrends’ can be raised to the higher, post-formal levels. This is through the lens of ‘extended science’ and the growing acceptance and fostering of a relativistic stance to knowledge such that the ‘fore-knowledge’ or ‘vision-logic’ epitomised by the future predictions of Steiner and Gerber might be developed. Those familiar with Steiner, for example, will recognise his anthroposophical views which Gidley says she has ‘internalised’ (p. 5). These spiritual mindsets, she claims, are reaching critical mass and are no longer only found in the exceptional outliers. The metaphysical dualism becomes explicit in Part Three where postformal thinking generates qualities of higher purpose: ‘there is more to existence than matter and more to life than egocentric desires’ (p. 191).
The conception of a higher stage of reasoning arises from Piaget’s developmentalism, and is embodied in exceptional thinkers such as Einstein and others, whose use of ‘creativity, complexity, paradox, imagination and intuition’ (p. 64) hints at ‘greater’ human cognitive capacity; as if, perhaps, humanity is evolving towards something that could be considered ‘higher’. Gidley makes the controversial claim that stage theory is still relevant; requiring reconstruction towards the postformal stage and that this stage of thinking is already evident across multiple disciplines. She demonstrates that it is beginning to be theorised in research, drawing both inside and outside integral studies. Her ‘philosophical interest in this book is to think these threads together as faces of the one emerging consciousness movement’ (p. 62). In doing so, she brings into question the telos of education, encouraging educators to become consciously and courageously involved in the creative endeavour of making the future.
The strength of Gidley’s grounded process approach is most evident in Chapter 7 where she presents a series of transdisciplinary dialogues opening with the application of a defunct biological theory – recapitulation – to the notion of cultural evolution to enable an integrated mapping of individual development against forms of cultural evolution. Her purpose is to integrate ‘spiritual models of the layered human being, process-oriented postmodern philosophies, socio-cultural evolution models and developmental psychological models’ (p. 166). She then argues why neither empirical nor critical postformality are adequate but proposes an epistemically- and philosophically-oriented approach to postformalism that maps the shape of the next phase of human consciousness evolution she has argued is already apparent. It is here that her four core values emerge and the crucial dimensions of her philosophy are drawn together. The final part of the book is lively, inspiring and highly creative; engaging a multiplicity of theorists to weave the tapestry.
Education, she argues, must be brought back to life; its core orientation shifted to new foundations that re-humanise dead thinking. In Part Three, Gidley details a range of practical strategies, interventions, self-awareness modes and theoretical reorientations for educators to utilise in order to revitalise education towards a thinking evolved with an integrated ‘head, hands and heart’. Chapter 8 focuses on the ‘evolutionary force’ of love; Chapter 9 focuses on the ‘sustaining force’ of life; Chapter 10 focuses on the ‘creative force’ of wisdom; and finally, Chapter 11 looks at the ‘empowering force’ of pedagogical voice. Each facet of this philosophy’s ‘dynamic centre’ presents with practical and creative teaching examples, many reflecting Gidley’s own teaching experiences.
Reading Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures cannot be rushed. It is difficult to interact with each part, each chapter and section in a linear way and a reader will inevitably bring one’s own biases and preferences to bear on its content. As a reader, I found myself at first reading from the beginning, only to pause and skip to the middle and then back again; looping back and forth, until a coherent understanding for purpose, scope and process had built, sufficient for the last part to be tackled with due appreciation. I therefore wish to acknowledge the author’s inherent vulnerability as well as the warm dedications that Gidley openly makes to those colleagues who inspired and supported her writing journey.
Jennifer M Gidley’s book is an important provocation; a demonstration of the flourishing pluralism in alternative education, and a calculated disruption on behalf of young people so they ‘can be better equipped for complex futures’ (p. 91). Finally, this text represents a timely wake up call for universities and university scholars to consider what these orthodox institutions could learn from risking engagement with the peripheries.