Educative Holism Teaching Philosophy

Sappo School believes that education is the experience of wholeness that leads to openness, intimacy and collaboration.  Our philosophical approach embraces the concept of teaching to the whole person and becomes an alternative to an academics only measure of success. Much has been written on the subject of holistic education over the span of many decades, yet the movement is relatively new.  Holistic education theorists include humanistic proponents such as John Dewey, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Jung, among many other prominent persons.  Despite the vast writings, there still remained a need for a workable definition as it should be applied to the academic community. The philosophical approach named and defined by Sappo describes our program in its truly educative and most practical form.  Sappo uses the term Educative Holism to identify this approach that was left without a definition.  Hence, not only was there a need to identify this purely holistic process by name, but the proper definition begged to be developed.  Hence, Sappo defines the philosophy of Educative Holism as the process that reveals to the educator how the student’s social, emotional, physiological, and academic systems interact to produce learning and social function.

The word holism comes from the Greek word meaning all, whole, or entire, and encompasses the idea that knowing the student as a whole person, determines your understanding of how he performs in the individual tasks or skills performed.  The general principle of holism was summarized by Aristotle’s Metaphysics as "The whole is more than the sum of its parts".  To apply this holistic concept to teaching requires that the teacher know the child comprehensively in order to grasp who he or she is as a whole person, or, in other words, a complete system.  Then the teacher can begin to understand how to teach to the parts of this unique person in a meaningful way.  If we add the systems thinking approach, which is the process of understanding how the parts influence each other, we begin to know how to teach the whole student.  Systems thinking also allows us to problem solve adequately, in order to come up with viable solutions. The problem becomes part of the system, or the student, that needs to be understood by both teacher and student.  Therefore, we can say that educative holism becomes a cyclic approach to learning.  The understanding of who the whole child is, leads us to understand the individual components (social, emotional, physiological, and academic) of, which leads us to more completely teach to the whole child.  Reductionism is often described as the opposite of holism, yet serves to complete the cycle in educative holism since we are reducing the complexities found in the learning nature of the student to the more basic parts.  

Sappo believes in teaching to the whole child and Educative Holism is the approach used to reach our goal.

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