Abstract
This concluding chapter turns to locate the ideas proposed in this book within current discourses. The chapter offers a brief overview of the ‘contemplative turn in education’ and positions this book’s specifically in relation to mindfulness-based curriculum ‘interventions’. I briefly point to wisdom traditions as a robust domain that lurked constantly behind this book’s ideas and explain the choice not to engage in it fully as a means by which to establish the authority and agency of the reader’s mind in the reconstruction of ‘education’. The book ends with a statement about the idea of the reconstruction of ‘education’, and ‘education’ as a path toward the unpruned mind.
The mind is not only a means for ‘education’. It is also ‘education’s’ end.
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Notes
- 1.
To be sure, attention is by no means a uniform phenomenon. Scientists usually divide attention into different functions such as alerting, orienting, and conflict monitoring, or sustained versus selective attention (Petersen and Posner 2012). As Tang and colleague’s (2015) meta-analysis reports, the improvements of active attention that I describe apply diversely to these different aspects of attention, and differ in relation to the kind of practice applied. The neural mechanisms involved are not fully clear and scholars are working to refine methods that will enable their further study (2015, p. 217).
- 2.
Another experiment found that three months of intensive mindfulness meditation improves our attentiveness to stimuli that are presented in a stream, reducing the effects of what is called ‘attentional blink’ (Slagter et al. 2011).
- 3.
See Roeser and Peck (2009) for a compelling specific discussion of the relation between agency and contemplative education.
- 4.
Furthermore, some raise questions about the possibility of adverse effects of meditational practice (see Willouby Britton’s (Brown University) work).
- 5.
Monotheistic religions (e.g. Christianity, Judaism) may tend to do so more than core teachings of Buddhism, given their conceptions of God, and life after death.
- 6.
I am not a Buddhism expert, but I think this would be a reasonable description of the Buddha’s approach to diagnosing the problems of existence.
- 7.
I do believe that the integrative theories that have been developing in recent years, are moving us substantially forward in this direction. There are numerous examples but to mention a few: Daniel Siegel’s (2012) interpersonal neurobilogy, Richard Davidson’s (2012) emotional styles of the brain, Varela et al’s. (1991) integration of phenomenology, cognition, and first-person methods of inquiry, Roth’s (2006) conception of contemplative studies, McGilchrist’s (2009) analysis of brain and culture, Austin’s (1998) analysis of Zen and the brain. Most of the above mentioned, are unsurprisingly, theories that were developed by scholars who have invested themselves in a rigorous study of their scientific discipline but no less of their own minds, based on contemplative practices.
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Ergas, O. (2017). Conclusion: The Reconstruction of ‘Education’ and the ‘Contemplative Turn’. In: Reconstructing 'Education' through Mindful Attention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58782-4_10
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