The human condition has changed radically in the past 100 years. Educational institutions, formal and informal, have not kept pace with technological innovations, the lengthening life span, or the need for ongoing reeducation to reinvigorate lives. The authors distinguish between learning and education and, more significantly, between transformative learning and transformative education. They then introduce the path of transformative education following a Navaho healing ritual that illuminates the mega-myth of death and rebirth as a model on which to organize ideas of adult transformative education across an extended life span. The purpose is to highlight the need for a fourth level of education suitable to 21st-century society, and to engage a global, cross-disciplinary dialogue to inform transformative educational practice across its personal, productive, instrumental, emancipatory, and holistic goals.
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