Holistic Humanities
What do these words mean for our kids?
Holism means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each student should be approached as a unique being, journeying with their own specific genius and creative potential.
Humanities refers to the broad mastery of culture, communication, and creativity. Thus, holistic humanities is both academic and humanistic. It is the growth of the self through the mastery of cultural play.
What’s it mean for education?
The Foundation of Learning
We believe that learning should begin with passion and love. We call this intrinsic motivation, and it is far stronger and more durable foundation than force-feeding knowledge or cramming for exams. When a student crams for a standardized exam, they forget it the next day. Furthermore, such arbitrary education turns them off from real and motivated learning. At ETI, be believe in cultivating genuine student engagement and intrinsic motivation as the foundation for knowledge and creative expansion.
Literacy and Oralcy
In order to advance smoothly into further studies, students must first get comfortable and even come to enjoy reading, writing, speaking, and listening/discussing. These skills should never be passive or standardized. They must be developed through real engagement: that is, through deep literacy and discourse. We develop this through curated reading lists based on student interests and personalized projects to build student writing and speech
Student-Centered Education
One of the problems with institutional education is that students are jammed into a curriculum that is often a very poor match for their individual abilities or interests. This delays learning and growth. At ETI, we customize the curriculum to precisely match each student’s growing edge. We identify their specific interests and develop projects and assignments that will grow their ability to creatively engage these interests. The greatest fuel for learning is love of discovery and creation. We harness this fuel to propel human expansion and the rapid growth of knowledge and skills.
Holistic Rigor
Relationships before rigor is a saying often repeated by student-centered educators. By building mentorship and creative learning environments, we inspire students to reach for rigor and develop the habits they will need on their own terms - habits that will then last and serve them all their lives. Discipline is essential for success. Discipline drives the growth of skills and prosperity. But discipline should emerge out of authentic passion and the desire to create.
My Background
I am a fairly unique kind of educator because I bridge the worlds of holistic psychology and advanced academics. I trained for some time as an experiential and somatic psychotherapist before heading to San Francisco to pursue my doctoral studies with California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). This was coming up on a decade ago. The reason I made this shift was because I felt there was a need for a therapeia (as James Hillman put it) for the larger culture, not for individuals. My own deep studies into the humanities, including history and literature, were undertaken with this desire to understand and work with the questions of civilization and culture with the intent of healing.
As I finished my coursework in San Francisco, I ended up “getting the call,” and I sold all my things and got on a plane to India, where I would travel as an itinerant writer for several years while completing my PhD dissertation. My travels eventually extended beyond India, and my activities eventually expanded more and more into teaching, although I had some experience as a university lecturer and private tutor before this. I ended up teaching in various countries including Kazakhstan and Vietnam, as well as working with long term students online as private clients.
All of this has informed the curriculum and approach that I have gradually formed. I have seen both bad and good education in my life - though sadly a lot more of the former than the latter in the systems we call “schools". These experienced have reinforced for me what my instincts told me in the first place, which is the student-led, experiential, project-based, creatively empowering education creates far superior learning outcomes. I see the best educators as primarily mentors who bring inspiration and coaching to the student’s own intrinsic human learning process based in their own natural motivations to expand themselves and master life’s flow.
I have found the humanities to be an ideal foundation for these essential skills. Many students around the world have hired me to help support the mastery of speaking, reasoning, and writing skills in various domains. Most recently, in Vietnam, I was hired as the architect of the national high school debate training and competition hosted by FPT University. Broadly speaking, I believe in cultivating a love of language, literature, and authentic self-expression in each student, and the humanities are full of ancient techniques for developing these arts and the expanded personhood that comes with it.
My Outcomes
I also believe in making a study of where we come from and what the world is. I believe the world is our great and shared mirror, and our partner in our individual processes of growth, development, and self-realization. That is why I have adopted literature and culture on the one hand and world history and global studies on the other. The first of them is an initiation into the human psyche and culture, and the development of our ability to consciously relate to that. The second is the more macro-level study of the events and processes that have shaped our world, where we have come from, where we are now - which gives rise to our grappling with the questions of what next. Through wrestling with these giants, we become strong and mature - we develop into humans with the capacity to be ourselves and to exercise awareness in a changing and often challenging world.
These are the real human and I would argue real educational outcomes of what I would call true liberal arts education. I consider them to be invaluable. I understand, however, that there are also logistical elements that we must consider, including prospects of college admissions. This is part of why we’ve worked the AP component into the curriculum - but I want to be clear that I only accept this because I find the AP exams, at least for these humanities courses, to be actually supportive of high-quality honors education. I say “the AP exams,” and not “AP courses” because I cannot necessarily speak to the way the courses are normally taught. I teach them in a unique fashion rooted fully in inquiry-based and student-centered learning. The reason that I like the exams is because they seek to remain somewhat theoretically agnostic and not based in any set curriculum - theoretically, if you can master the skills and domains involved, you will score highly on the exams. And the skills and domains involved are very real-world skills and domains: actual knowledge of world history, actual capacity to understand and discuss literary themes and characters, actual skill with organizing material, reasoning, writing with grace and clarity. Thus, this is the bridge that I have built through my own work with clients: mastery of this university-level content that supports admissions and grants college credit, but approached in a fully humanistic and holistic manner. In fact, I find that the illusion of external authority granted by the prospect of the exams actually supports our educational outcomes when approached in the right way - because it means that we all are working together as a team toward an external goal, much as a sports team works together. This is an ideal atmosphere for developing empowerment, confidence, and holistic excellence.
Nothing I am doing is “accredited’ - nor would I want it to be, because to “accredit” means to introduce curricular limits that will make the actual education worse, and also means to increase costs for parents substantially. Anyway, my understanding is that for homeschoolers/unschoolers/world schoolers, such “accreditation” is often useless and even a borderline scam. That said, some of the parents I am working with have made quite affordable arrangements to receive such accreditation independently while working with our program with relatively minimal hassle. I would suggest that this is a great approach - to get the accounting through a flexible and hands-off organization that specializes in that paperwork, while pursuing real rigorous education with a program like this one.
With that in mind, I understand that many parents and teens at this age are also oriented toward university preparation and admissions. Regarding preparation, I suggest that a program like the one outlined here is about as good as it gets, since this will cultivate the exact skills that will lead to high levels of success in the self-directed environment of a good university. Regarding admissions, every nontrad family probably needs to approach this uniquely in terms of assembling their "transcripts” and so on, but I am seeking to develop this in a way that will help you succeed. First of all, our project-based curriculum is built to help our students create portfolios of high-level creative projects which they can show directly to admissions teams. Secondly, we have built preparation for two AP exams into the proposed learning journey, which is a widely recognized demonstration of the ability to conduct high-level university work, and which indeed many universities will reimburse with free college credit upon admission. Finally, our emphasis on self-knowledge, personal development, and communication skills is also an ideal preparation for students to demonstrate their self-knowledge in college applications essays and the overall storytelling that is involved in any student but especially a nontrad student presenting themselves to a potential university’s admissions.
When we reach that point in the process, I will of course be happy to provide mentorship and support in this regard, as well as letters of recommendation for my students. If you want to retain me for more in-depth help in preparing those application materials later on in the process, we can set that up individually. But I think this program in itself will provide a major support and boost to our students who choose to pursue this process. It also offers one additional benefit that I can name, which is that I know that many gifted nontrad students are still assessing whether or not they wish to spend a considerable fortune and another 4+ years of their life pursuing college. A program like this may help them form a clearer picture of what higher education is like without making the commitment, and thus might help them decide.
