A WHOLISTIC APPROACH TO EDUCATION: INTEGRATING THE SECULAR AND THE SACRED (EPISTEMOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY, INTERDISCIPLINARY, ALTERNATIVES, PROBLEMS)

This project attempts to define a basis upon which educators from the church and the wider society can develop comprehensive curricula. It rests on two assumptions: first, that all life, and thus all education, has a religious dimension; second, that a new incarnational spirituality is emerging which integrates religious and secular concerns and prompts society towards a more wholistic approach to education.;While recognizing that religious concerns impinge on all subjects, the project's focus is on defining the scope of religious education. It suggests that religious knowledge rests on the human ability to abstractly derive meaning within each of the five modes of knowing. Religion, thus, is not a single academic discipline but the intermeshing of five disciplines. The project defines these disciplines and explains how they can be integrated with secular disciplines such that the focus in religious education is shifted to liturgy, Heilsgeschichte, stewardship, and community.;The final section is a call for religious institutions to rethink their commitment to parallel education via state schools and church schools. It traces the history of how an educational system that was started by the church has become divorced from religion. It notes various problems with the Sunday School, state schools, parochial and private day schools arising from the secular-sacred split. It suggests a structural alternative to present schooling practices based on a pluralist concept of society. Such an alternative, it is argued, would allow for much greater choice in education and holds great potential for religious education.;Epistemologically, it posits that there are five general modes of knowing to which education must attend: the relational, the conceptual, the rational, the chronological, and the scriptural. It further posits that incarnational spirituality allows for the integration of these modes of knowing such that disciplines which have traditionally been viewed as strictly secular or strictly religious, are merged.