In our exploration of 21st century skills to prepare youngsters to be knowledge workers able to do jobs that do not yet exist, we discover that self-knowledge is the hub of the wheel that is prerequisite for critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. These are the 3 spokes required to form a smoothly functioning wheel. But how do we design a curriculum that helps students develop self-knowledge?
The current focus on Social Emotional Intelligence (SEI) is an important first step because it is based on pedagogical traditions, strategies, and a growing body of research. This takes character education beyond the academics of civics and good citizenship to look more deeply into what an individual can learn about his or her own ever evolving nature. Viewed broadly, as we focus on Social Emotional Intelligence, we discover that this kind of learning has evolved from our greatest humanistic traditions that were designed to help people to develop self-knowledge.
To fully evolve such a curriculum, we must ask what principles can and should be taught and practised? What concepts, maps, models and habits of thought and introspection can help people develop their self-awareness?
Perhaps the most recently popular, entry into this area is Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a particular kind of introspection for self-awareness. It might be considered the first step in meditation, which has deep roots in all cultures and in disciplines from spiritual practices to martial arts, dance, and sports.Meditation simply means to be still and pay attention to what's going on within yourself. The goal is simply to be able to observe one's bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings and intuitions. No action or thought is undertaken in response to what emerges in the river of consciousness. It's just a matter of observing what's passing through one's body, mind, heart and gut, and doing so with a minimum of reaction. The only response is attention or focus.
To facilitate this process people are asked to sit still with a straight spine, in a chair, on a pillow or on the floor or ground, and to breathe a bit more deeply and regularly than usual. In this way awareness or the observing consciousness (the executive function) is able to detach from and perceive or contain sensations, thoughts and feelings that might otherwise lead to action or speech. One becomes a quiet container for one's own energy. This containing without reacting helps bring the individual into balance. This builds a person's reflective capacity so we become less reactive and more responsive to what's happening outside and inside of ourselves.
When practising mindfulness we observe that we are judging the content of our awareness just as we may judge others. Non-judgement becomes a key to simply observing. Simply observing means observing without judging, or when we judge, we try to not judge our judging, and when we do, we focus more deeply on our breath, and let the judging pass by identifying with our breath rather than with the judgments. Thus, our goal is to cultivate the habit of non-judgment.
In time we become aware that when we judge ourselves or others we become divided and rigid rather than spacious and relaxed. Either we see ourselves as superior, able to be above and judge, or we are the self-judged, the ashamed or guilty one--for having had a given sensation, thought, or feeling. Therefore, we become the inferior or judged person.
Of course it is the same mind that is now both superior and inferior and this creates a painful, confusing split in the person. So all traditions that use meditation to grow self-awareness teach non-judgment or simply witnessing without judging.
Once we open our eyes and move out into the world, we discover that a great deal of self-awareness is required to be successful in social relationships that are mutual and truthful--two keys to fertile conversation and collaborative problem solving. Democracy, or achieving a deep sense of equality, is perhaps the most basic principle in such relationships--to balance one's own needs with an objective and gracious concern for the needs of others.
Developmentally, the value of democracy and our ability to function in democratic ways appears to be a relatively new arrival in the structure of the psyche that evolved from an authoritarian, mostly patriarchal history--beginning with the family, then tribe, and culminating in a world ruled by kings, sultans, czars, popes and plutocrats.
Democracy, like a healthy family life, is a foundation for self-knowledge because it deflates all tyranny, righteousness, and other traits that come from egocentricity. The primacy of power is replaced by the power of understanding; and to function from understanding requires continual awareness of others and the ability to respect diversity–the truly unique ways of being among individuals.
Interestingly, the infant and young child begin as both powerless and tyrannical. Control becomes security, and it is a huge and largely contemporary challenge in our culture to raise children based on trust, dialogue, mutual understanding, and empathy rather than on the power of size, strength, authority and control.
This is particularly tricky because egocentric youngsters need boundaries, limits, and to know when an older person with more knowledge and judgement needs to be respected for safety, efficiency, or to create a bit of peace and quiet. Even in adult organisations, authority is important because it creates order and efficiency. But if one person is always in charge, both the always in-charge person and those who are always obedient can’t fully develop, and, as a result, the morale and intelligence of the group is stifled.
Thus, when viewing our modern belief in democracy as the best political structure, we should realise that it is also the best structure for focusing the development of mutual awareness, empathy, justice, collaboration, gratitude, and problem solving.
As the saying from cooperative learning goes: None of us is as smart as all of us. So while democracy is perhaps the most mature political structure, it also offers the most power to mature people and create mutual understanding and the continuous growth of individuals, groups, organisations, society and the culture. The principles of democracy underlie the idea of creating and working in learning communities.
Polarity is another key structure within the psyche that should be understood by anyone who wishes to consciously mature themselves and their personality. Polarity within the individual (or the psyche) operates like light and shadow. Every important process in awareness seems to create its opposite. Wherever there is dependence there is some yearning for independence. Dependence fosters a drive for independence. Trust breeds mistrust; autonomy produces shame. Life confronts death; love spins into hate; insecurity or deflation in the personality fosters feelings of superiority and inflation, and on and on.
How people become aware of polarities in their personalities and how we deal with them goes to the heart of self-knowledge. The arts and our night and day dreams are born from the need of the evolving person to express their struggle with polarities. In early stages of art, the love or anger, innocence or disillusionment, beauty or ugliness may not be well balanced or integrated. A poem, picture of sculpture may simply depict a scream, tears, defiance or a sun or rainbow.
The person finding their unbalanced awareness and their new voice to give expression to the many wars between innocence and idealism howls at the moon and forgets about the sun. Their artistic work lacks subtlety and balance. Their dreams will likely be nightmares. The mature artist sees the day in the night and the night in the day. The wild pendulum that causes conflict is slowed until it is refined into the peaceful balancing of wisdom and beauty.
Self-knowledge rooted in balancing polarities goes to the heart of creating a generous and peaceful personality, family, and community. There is no "lasting" balance without openness to being unbalanced, without awareness that continually disintegrates and then bends to integrate new polarities. The experience of disintegration or of symbolic deaths makes room for new levels of integration. In life, yesterday's solid rock is tomorrow's sand, and yesterday's sand is tomorrow's impermanent rock. It is the way of the earth that there is no permanence. and this is a huge lesson that each of us must learn over and over.
If we discover that every state of mind, sensation, or feeling creates or has an opposite and that energy filled moments of elation give way to fatigue, and love becomes boredom or even anger, and that being alive we must face our mortality, then we also discover the transcendent function.
Transcendence defines the capacity that enables us to see both sides of a polarity, so we can integrate these opposites. Transcendence enables us to rise high enough above the conflict so we can integrate or join the two opposites that confront and challenge us. Humour is an expression of the transcendent function as are the arts, and some of our dreams. So transcendence functions to integrate opposites and through the synthesis to create a new, more integrated and spacious perspective.
In our current education reform efforts we are working to develop curriculum and assessment that move away from being almost entirely subject matter focused to one that is balanced by a focus on the learner; this is called personalised learning and recommends portfolio assessment. To date a learner focused curriculum and test focused assessment may not include developing personal awareness, but our current research-based focus on Social Emotional Intelligence indicates that this is an important area. While we have psychological and brain-based models of how a personality matures and how deficits may be remediated or growth facilitated, we are just beginning to apply these insights in terms of developing or extending self-assessment through reflection. We need to use these developmental models to support the process of developing a wisely democratic, integrative, and transcendent personality.
This suggests that in teaching the arts we might move beyond art history and discipline-specific techniques to also include symbol making and introspective reflection to build insight into the tensions (polarities) at the heart of the artistic process and within each of us. This would teach that what matters more than technique is how honestly we are responding to who we are as an individual and what we are working to express--in other words, the energy and truth being expressed should have priority, or at least have an equal footing, with technique and its place in art history.
Other topics that should be added to a curriculum to develop self-knowledge are ways to understand the following: wishful, delusional, and defensive thinking, territoriality, group and gang identification, manic and depressive moods, and symbol making as in the arts and in dreams, and how symbols can influence us and empower our thinking, For young people gaining insight into their relationships with their peers and the symbols that affect and perhaps infect their desires would be very worthwhile.
Of course, what matters in the maturation of each of us is that people take a healthy interest in who each of us is as a person--an emerging, struggling, beautiful, ignorant and insightful individual who is always learning, always growing, and, with proper care, forever grateful and forgiving. As we provide this kind of shelter and light to our students, they will learn to offer the same shelter and light to their peers, teachers, siblings, and parents.