Thanks for sharing this insightful, at times moving, and certainly thought-provoking interview. It is always edifying to hear what others are trying to do in order to come to more effective terms with this ol’ world of ours.
What I think the interview shows – or, perhaps better, reminds us – is that (a) all current attempts at “reform” (change?) are by necessity local, and (b) even then, they are highly constrained by nature by the historical/social/cultural/political context in which they are attempted. This is not to say that they are consequently doomed to failure. I don’t believe at all. I think we need to try to whatever we can wherever and whenever it’s even remotely conceivable. At the present time, however, we need to examine all such “projects” Goethically and critically to see if what can be gleaned for the projects we know about or are involved in or simply what might be relevant for the situation in any educational context in which we find ourselves.
But the interview raises our awareness of a further point, one that Bortoft took great pains to make in introducing us to Goethe’s approach, namely the centrality of the organizing idea. We shouldn’t underestimate how powerful(ly important) this notion can be. For Maya Shakti and “their learning community” it is Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga (or more likely his entire religio-philosophic approach). (By a similar token, we should remember that one of the fundamental drivers of “home schooling” in the United States was evangelical Christianity’s desire to avoid Darwinism … that one by-product of this is that it opened up the field or other, perhaps more productive, organizing ideas.) To my mind, whatever we think needs to be done, including how we believe it needs to be done, will be influenced to a significant extent, if not actually determined, by such an organizing idea. What, then, are the organizing ideas driving our own beliefs, feelings, and thoughts about Bildung’s/education’s future?
What this idea is, what it consists of, and how it manifests will not be the product of just one person’s effort (even if there is perhaps an individual spokesperson (eventually) representing it), rather it is will more likely be the result of a more widespread shift in consciousness, which many of us suspect (or hope) may be on the horizon but which none of us can clearly characterize just at the moment. The local initiatives mentioned above, I believe, are most often “driven” by organizing ideas that may be resonances with this impending shift (e.g., Maya Shakti’s TLC, Marco’s free progress education; although some, like fundamentalism, may be reactions to it and impulses toward, to put it in Gebser’s terms, previous consciousness structures). This shift, of course, is at least part of the backdrop to the historical/social/cultural/political context I mentioned as well.
In other words, we are dealing with a highly complex, delicately interwoven phenomenon that demands our intensified awareness when engaging it. At least that is the feel for how it appears to me that our conversation is unfolding.
