Give them a Holistic Education

Textbooks. They sure make teaching easy, don’t they?

What’s hard is not teaching from a textbook and doing life.

But you can’t really do life in a classroom. Isn’t that ironic?

I’ve noticed a parallelism between how we approach health and how we approach education:

We separate the body into systems.

We separate learning into subjects.

We learn all the separate body systems, their jobs. Then we are told to go to a specialist and find out what is going on. But that specialist doesn’t usually know much about the other systems of the body, or at least may not choose to speak to it. It is more likely that you will be referred to a specialist in that field of study.

There is a similar method with the educational system. We separate knowledge into subjects. Then we buy a curriculum that teaches you all about that topic. We get all the textbooks. 

Math. Science. Art. Music. We send kids off to different classrooms for each subject. 

But the reality is that in the real world all of these subjects are combined. 

A kitchen is a real life laboratory.

If I am cooking a meal, I am using multiple subjects. There is math for measuring. There is science (food science) and chemistry. There may be some cultural education there. There is reading and comprehension. 

Humpback whales in Antarctic waters = nature (science) + Math (fibonacci) + art

Trumpet player plays towards flames = music + science (physics) + art

So many examples of Nature + Math + Art (picture from Sacred Geometry) 

Credit: Sacred Geometry

“The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics” Galileo

Stem/Steam classes are recognizing the benefits of combining subjects for a more purposeful education. 

A holistic approach to education would consider the whole experience.

Children will learn best when we teach holistically because this is how the world is perceived in its entirety.

So, go ahead! Appreciate the themes in nature, art, mathematics, science, literature, and culture and allow your kids to observe and experience them together.