Reconstructing 'Education' Through Mindful Attention: Positioning The Mind at The Center of Curriculum and Pedagogy by Oren Ergas (review)

This innovative and refreshing book undertakes the project of convincing us of the importance of reorienting the very basis of education to address the blind spots developed over centuries of excessive objectification of knowledge. Historically, society has unduly dictated not only the content of our educational curriculum, but the very means by which knowledge is acquired, which has blunted its power and relevance for our everyday lives. Ergas speaks of our educational system as "pruning" our minds, shaping them in a way that limits our curiosity, empowerment, and passion for learning. He observes that many know there is a problem with our educational systems, but because educational reform focuses on superficial adjustments of pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and evaluation, we have missed the opportunity to understand the profound potential of the educational endeavor. His book advances two arguments: In a deconstructive endeavor, he systematically critiques current educational systems as expressions of social engineering geared toward the creation of a "We" that becomes alienated from the vast potential of the "unpruned" mind. Then constructively, he provides what he calls "the other half" of the curriculum, the inner curriculum of the mind, built on a return to the "contemplative I" that makes education more personal. In doing so, he makes a case for mindful attention and contemplative inquiry as missing elements in higher education.

Oren Ergas, an Israeli scholar and senior lecturer at Beit Berl Academic College and at Hebrew University, has published regularly in the field of contemplative education and is active in the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, based in Amherst, Massachusetts. In this his most extensive work to date, Ergas draws upon his reading of William James and his own contemplative practices, especially of tai chi chuan and mindfulness meditation. He argues that it is time to place the mind at the center of our understanding of education, highlighting the importance of first-person inquiry developed through mindful attention. When first- and third-person inquiry are joined together in dialogical exchange, he writes, the very best of education is realized.

In the burgeoning field of contemplative education, William James is often quoted as the inspiration for mindfulness in the classroom: "And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. … And education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence."¹ While Ergas includes this quote quite late, throughout the book he draws liberally from James's work on the importance of training attention as the basis of education. Building upon the statement from The Principles of Psychology, "For the moment what we attend to is reality,"² Ergas draws our attention to the moment-to-moment experience of our senses, emotions, thoughts, and consciousness as the empirical basis of knowledge in our experience. He calls this quote a "mantra" that redirects the mind to the "in here" experience that is counterpoint to our habitual "out there" focus characteristic of third-person inquiry. He suggests that excessive reliance on what is occurring "out there" in another time and place "prunes" our knowledge and allows it to be shaped by the forces of society that do not have our own best interests at heart. It is no wonder that educational institutions have become less relevant to our actual everyday experience.

One of the strongest contributions of Ergas's book is his phenomenology of what first-person inquiry looks like, how it is cultivated with mindful attention, and how it differs from mere opinion, reaction, and first impressions. This is built upon his experience with mindfulness practice, providing a clear expression of what he means by "inner curriculum." He begins with attention, using James' definition: "the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought."^3...