Oren Ergas: Reconstructing Education through Mindful Attention: Positioning the Mind at the Center of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Palgrave/McMillan, London, 2017, 343 pp

Excerpt

Oren Ergas is an exciting and original thinker in the field of contemplative education. In his latest thought-provoking book, he outlines a person-centred approach to educational theory, practice and research, in which the mind of the learner, rather than the vision of the educator, is core, and in which the totality of our experience constitutes our education, not just that which we customarily count as educative. Ergas suspends belief in the notions of “education” and “society” in favour of asking apparently naïve and fundamental questions (a process he equates with engaging in basic physics) such as “what experiences are available to the mind?”. As the title of the book suggests, his aim is “reconstructing” the idea and practice of what we mean by education. It is a vision in which, rather than our education coming from “out there” and our minds shaped merely from without, we recognise that what is happening is that we ourselves are actively constructing our own education through our minds and our embodied experience both wittingly and unwittingly. He invites us to engage with the complex dynamics of the construction of the idea of self and experience, a process in which, instead of mindful attention and “inner curriculum” being seen as irrelevant or invisible, the perceptions and reactions of ourselves as learners become the core objects of our contemplative enquiry. …