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The Constitution of the Human Being

The World Core Curriculum Journal, Vol. I, asserts that, "Implicit in the miracle of individual human life, is the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual constitution of each human being. This constitution is progressively developed and integrated through the education process, encouraging physical coordination, emotional orientation, mental direction, and spiritual alignment. Effective curriculum responds to physical needs, enhances emotional well-being, stimulates whole-brain intelligence, and embraces the spiritual aspect--the soul of the individual."

The World Core Curriculum emphasizes that each of us is a multidimensional being. The goal of true education is not to simply stuff our children's brains without nurturing their hearts and souls. Unless our children are receiving a synergy of stimulation on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, they are being cheated out of their potential.

For overall physical and psychological health, each child needs to feel curiosity, enthusiasm, interest, joy, a sense of wonder, amazement, and love. For the sake of healthy organ development in his physical body, the child requires a daily psychological diet of emotional receptivity to, and mental engagement with, new knowledge .

It is anathema to bore him in order to meet the soulless criteria of some anonymous committee that has decided he must learn certain facts at a particular time. There is no place for coercion in the teach/learning process. Rather, our duty and privilege is to go to where the child is--to design curricula and offer environments that render given areas of study intensely attractive.

Rather than imposing on the child boring two dimensional, linear academics, we nurture the seed of the spirit to encourage geometric expansions from the core. In response to nature's codes, these unfold with mathematical precision into a full flowering of the petals of knowledge and wisdom. Positive emotions in response to imaginative excursions, challenging problems, intriguing puzzles, and compelling frontiers trigger this synergistic progression.

1. Spiritual - There are two aspects of this level. For our purposes, we define spirituality as a dynamic rather than static state of being. It has little to do with dogma, being instead a state of conscious, deliberate growth in compassion, a sense of responsibility for surrounding life, and the capacity to benefit the whole. Striving to grow and living ethics are both an integral part of the spiritual dimension.

2. Mental - This includes the development of memory and an increase in knowledge, but it is much, much more. It calls for the maturation of keen powers of observation; the capacity to ponder cause and effect relationships; the ability to formulate questions; the process of arriving at abstraction from concrete experience; the power to synthesize knowledge; and the determination to precipitate new possibilities through the use of the creative imagination. Whole-brain intelligence is being crushed under the heel of linear intellect as civilization is explores inner and outer space with barely a glimmer of multidimensional intelligence. It is urgent that we expand our perception of intelligence and guide our centers of learning to more holistic methods and goals.

3. Emotional - Children's emotional intensities are closely intertwined with their physical needs. Of no less importance than their physical need for comfort and nourishment is their psychological need to connect in loving, positive ways with their immediate environment and the people close to them. Our society's tenacious traditional curriculum design has almost completely overlooked our responsibility to attend to the child's physical and psychological comfort. Instead, we have focused on the most animal and degrading means of behavior modification to control the undesirable behaviors that unnatural schooling provokes. Rather than relating to the children in our care with understanding, we have judged their resistance to our imposed curriculums to be evidence of their laziness and irresponsibility. As a result, elders have all too rarely explored their ability as dynamic leaders and models to evoke a responsive chord of joy and enthusiasm.

4. Physical - Environments of silent, immobile children are crippling to the development of true intelligence. Children require not only a rhythm to their day, but rhythmic movement itself. They need hands-on, multisensory experience, whole body involvement, and freedom to move about and converse throughout the day.

It can be a tremendous boon to humanity for teachers in World Core Curriculum Schools to develop lessons that simultaneously stimulate all four levels-physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. In other words, it is possible in any lesson to engage the child through movement, elicit feelings of joy, convey information, inculcate wisdom, and encourage a life of constant growth and expansion.