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Western-Islamic and Native American Genealogies of Integral Education Gary P. Hampson Through the power of its music, through the dialectic of its juxtapositions, through the pressure of its metaphors, through the variety of its registers the [new] poetry comes to enunciate its meanings. —Abbs, 2003, p. 108 Introduction What apt meanings or identifications can be given to integral education?1 To address this question one might imagine a dimension of semantic possibilities ranging from the contracted to the expansive. The former might involve (i) restriction to integrative notions arising from the lineage of one author such as Aurobindo or Wilber; (ii) restriction to explicit usage of the term integral itself—thus for instance including Bakunin, Maritain (Molz & Hampson, current volume), Soloviev, Sorokin and Kremer (1996) but excluding pre-1997 Wilber and various holistic educators and; or (iii) restriction to a default, loosely pragmatic, cluster of ideas where identification might be made more in relation to, say, the signifier holistic than anarchist, Catholic, or indigenous. Such contracted interpretations could be understood as pertaining to a modern worldview which de facto moves toward prosaic, instrumental closure of the literal and/or conventional (regardless of discursive use of such terms as “integral” or “postconventional”)2 —an economical perspective (in deference at least to Occam’s razor) on what could potentially be usefully true or appropriate. Such interpretations no doubt have validity for certain contexts. However, given the heterogeneity of both the use of the term and also that potentially signified by such uses, explorations involving more expansive accounts would appear to be in order. 17 18 Gary P. Hampson The current chapter (as with the theorizing in this volume of, for instance Gidley and Molz) offers such a narrative, one aptly understood in relation to Boyer’s (1990) “scholarship of integration,” in this instance specifically regarding a postformal approach to integral theorizing (Hampson, 2007) through which a more radically “poetic” invitation toward integral/education is enabled. This invitation can be seen to facilitate a form of “deep dialogue” (Bronson and Gangadean, current volume) regarding integral education theorizing via the algorithmic metaphor “integral as x” (e.g., “integral as synthesis of spirit and reason”), whilst re-prioritising integral’s etymological foundation of “pertaining to a whole”—“an integral x” (e.g., “an integral education”); noting differentiation from the non-specialised usage regarding its sister denotation, “of a whole”—“integral to x” (e.g., “creativity is integral to a good education”). Through the post-Wilberian notion of types of integral,3 and through extending the postformal (metaphoric) template of thinking ecologically (Hampson, 2007), the notion of an ecology of integrals (Hampson, 2007) (or “an integration of integral views”—Gidley, 2007b) can be further elaborated and applied. This allows for both a geographical variety of integral education “noetic ecosystems” across cultures, and also historical depth—or genealogy—for each ecosystem (noting that such evolution may be marked variously by growth, disjunctures, stabilities, complexities). Such a genealogical configuration may be seen as forming a complex relation to that integral theorizing which involves non-complex models of socio-cultural development (such as non-interpenetrating configurations of traditional-modern-postmodern).4 Cross-pollination (among other relationships) may not only be seen within such ecosystems, but also between them, such as the Indian-Western case of Aurobindo. Moreover, the notion of integral itself can be understood as a noetic ecology (integral as involving a particular set of dimensions and their interrelationships), thus the entire picture can be seen as a holarchical one, where holarchy is interpreted by way of Koestler’s (1967) original understanding rather than Wilber’s (1995) less heterogeneous variation. From this theoretical orientation, two case studies (one minor, one major) are explored. The minor elucidation is that of the ecology of Native American (Indigenous American or Amerindian) integral education; the major, a genealogical identification of Western-Islamic integral education up to the early nineteenth century (for later developments, see Molz & Hampson, Molz, and Gidley, current volume). “Western” and “Islamic” are cohered here because Western education has been intimately woven not only from Greek and Roman culture but also through Classical Islam. Regarding the university, for instance, Islam scholar George Makdisi identifies no less than “eighteen substantial affinities between the Islamic and the occidental patterns of the organization of learning and their transmission through institutional arrangements” (Rüegg, 1992, p. 8); in short, “the Muslim university (madrasa) was the archetype for the European university (studium general)” (Hilgendorf...

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