Articles

Community Based Holistic Education
How Its Developers See It Evolving

The Kalikalos project claims to be about bringing something called holistic education to a summer holiday setting. So what *IS* holistic education? Here is what some of those who are actively developing it answer.

Wikipedia: Holistic education is a philosophy of education based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to spiritual values such as compassion and peace. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning. This is the definition given by Ron Miller, founder of the journal Holistic Education Review (now entitled Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice). The term holistic education is often used to refer to the more democratic and humanistic types of alternative education. Robin Ann Martin (2003) describes this further by stating, “At its most general level, what distinguishes holistic education from other forms of education are its goals, its attention to experiential learning, and the significance that it places on relationships and primary human values within the learning environment.” (Paths of Learning)

Education in the Findhorn community is experimental and transformative, a journey of self-discovery that changes people's lives and is helping to create a sustainable peaceful world. Living education is an integral part of the community's work. Recognising the interdependence of all life is at the heart of education here. Taking time for inner reflection, building relationships with others, and co-creating with nature are essential to the fabric of community life. This kind of experiential living, and transformative education becomes increasingly important as humanity comes to terms with global conflict, depletion of the world's resources, changes in our climate, and asks questions about the purpose of our lives and the values we live by. (From the www.findhorn.org website, 2007).

In and through [authentic] community lies the salvation of the world — M. Scott Peck, A Different Drum, 1987.
One of the first changes in the new age...is that education will cease to be related to a specific time of life or to a specific kind of experience, such as sitting in a classroom for five hours a day and being the receptor of information or skills. We will see instead that everything we partake in is education in some form or another. Education has come to mean something entirely different from its original meaning. The word stems from a root which means “to lead out”...but education has [unfortunately] come to mean “putting in” — David Spangler, Explorations, 1980, p.14.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has — Margaret Mead

Education is a natural community function and occurs inevitably — Paul Goodman, Community of Scholars, 1962.

There are a lot of organisations that operate by what they think is consensus, but it really is not consensus at all...to meet the definition’s requirements, you essentially have to have what we call true community. Many institutions that try to get to consensus fail because they are not yet true communities. They aren’t ready yet to get to consensus, because they need to work on themselves before they start to make decisions. — M. Scott Peck

Much of the energy of the eco-village movement is focused on the development and use of “green” technologies such as renewable energy and energy efficient housing. These are very important for creating a sustainable society, but, in our view, the dominant issues are human ones. After all, the best technologies in the world are ultimately useless if we cannot learn to live and work together in harmony. The most important thing for the future of humanity and the planet is personal transformation. Aggressive, angry, competitive and alienated people cannot build a society that is peaceful, cooperative, sustainable and just. — Sustainable Communities, Malcolm Hollick, 1998,

Holistic Holiday Centres

Why Would You Want to Go To One?

Jane Rogers is a coach, writer and inspirationalist. She runs RichThinkers, a coaching and educational company and facilitated Making Friends with Money September 2008 at Kalikalos. See http://richthinkers.co.uk for a free download of her "Seven Steps to Thinking Rich."

Well, let’s start with warm sunshine, sand and sea — that alone is enough for many! But if you like learning while away from home, then a holistic holiday centre will provide you with an opportunity to try out a course from the very broad mind-body-spirit spectrum. The really interesting thing about many of these holistic holiday centres though, is not the exploration of whatever topic motivated you to book. Instead it’s the opportunity to participate, for a short time, in an intentional community.

Intentional communities are exactly that — a group of people joining up to practice living together, sharing not only mealtimes and conversation, but also some of the work of the community. Although these two words, ‘work’ and ‘holiday’ aren’t normally used together, the benefits of holistic holidays are just immense. Many, many people who have never before experienced this concept leave amazed at the closeness and intimacy that has sprung up simply through doing shared tasks together. There’s nothing like taking part in some kind of joint venture, working alongside each other, to create bonds and fulfilling relationships. Of course, there’s always one or two rebels, who don’t want to join in, but, in my experience, they’re the ones that miss out.

When I say work, I mean not much more than maybe an hour or so a day. In one place I stayed in New Zealand, for that hour, the whole community was engaged in whichever task they had chosen, bringing their particular humour, joy and skill to the team. Helping prepare veg for lunch is often a popular choice; others might be helping out in the gardens, or sweeping floors. In another venue, someone with a guitar chose to move around between the different working groups, serenading us all. It was great fun!

If you fancy the sound of this, or even if you’re someone who definitely thinks those words ‘work’ and ‘holiday’ don’t go together, put that aside and give yourself a treat - try out one of these holistic holiday centres. You might well find you’re one of the many who return home having had a life changing experience.

6 April 2008

An Interview with M. Scott Peck
by Alan Atkisson

Abbreviated from IN CONTEXT #29, Summer 1991

In modern times, the idea of "community" has increasingly been expanded to include not just the place where one lives, but the web of relationships into which one is embedded. Work, school, voluntary associations, computer networks - all are communities, even though the members live quite far apart.
  But according to psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck, for any group to achieve community in the truest sense, it must undertake a journey that involves four stages: "pseudocommunity," where niceness reigns; "chaos," when the emotional skeletons crawl out of the closet; "emptiness," a time of quiet and transition; and finally, true community, marked both by deep honesty and deep caring.
  Peck's thinking on this subject is detailed in his 1987 book, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (Simon and Schuster). He is the author of several other books, including the phenomenally popular The Road Less Traveled.
  Peck - "Scotty" to all who know him - is also the co-founder of the Foundation for Community Encouragement, created to support community-building work, and he and other Foundation staff have since conducted over 275 community building workshops. Here he reflects on that experience and the challenges - and joys - of working together to be in community.

Alan: In the first sentence of The Different Drum you say, "In and through community lies the salvation of the world." You've done five years of community-building work since writing those words. Do they still hold true for you?

Scotty: Very much so. I had very little experience with community building when I finished the book in 1986. But I now have a great deal of experience, having worked with organizations and groups throughout North America and in the United Kingdom through the Foundation for Community Encouragement. I'm more convinced than ever of the truth of those opening sentences.

Community can be one of those words - like God, or love, or death, or consciousness - that's too large to submit to any single, brief definition. At the Foundation we consider community to be a group of people that have made a commitment to learn how to communicate with each other at an ever more deep and authentic level. One of the characteristics of true community is that the group secrets, whatever they are, become known - they come out to where they can be dealt with.

By other definitions, a community is a group that deals with its own issues - its own shadow - and the shadow can contain any kind of issue. We have tried unsuccessfully at the Foundation to come up with a sort of slogan, but one of the phrases that kept coming up was from the gospels: "And the hidden shall become known."

Alan: Many groups and organizations in recent years have been experimenting with community building and consensus process. For some it works beautifully - but for others, seeking consensus seems to become a morass that sucks energy out of their efforts. What's the difference between groups for whom consensus works, and those who never quite seem to get there?

Scotty: Many institutions that try to get to consensus fail because they are not yet true communities. They aren't ready yet to get to consensus, because they need to work on themselves before they start to make decisions.

Alan: Assuming a group does make it to true community and consensus, how does it stay there? What, for example, [does a group need] to do to maintain themselves as a community?

Scotty: It takes a significant amount of effort to build community, but it takes even more effort - ongoing effort - to maintain it. The biggest problem with community maintenance, as with community start-up, is the problem of organizations simply being willing to pay the price - which is, primarily, a price of time.

Alan: What sustains a community in the long term?

Scotty: I'm not sure how sustainable community is unless it has a pretty clearly defined task. Healthy organizations have a mission statement, often along with a philosophy and a vision statement, which they continually update and revise. I suspect that there are a lot of intentional communities, for example, that either don't have a mission statement or haven't looked at it for years and years.

Alan: So communities of all kinds need to say, "This is what we are going to do together."

Scotty: And "This is our purpose for being together." And that statement has to be reexamined, ritualistically, every couple of years. Doing this requires that the organization's cultural values be explicit.

These values include openness, being willing to be challenged, to re-look at norms, being willing to change. There has to be love and respect, of course - but there also has to be a kind of tension between caring and a terrible dedication to reality.

A critical part of the art of sustaining community is integration of task and process. Task is working on your mission, and process is working on yourselves as a community. This art requires an enormous amount of practice.

Alan: Often it seems to have been the business, management, and structure issues that have proven to be the Achilles' heel for many intentional communities.

Scotty: Structure and community are not incompatible. To the contrary, they mutually thrive on one another. If a task-oriented business group that is not well-structured builds itself into community, it will discover, I think, that their very next task is to define roles. Invariably, those roles are going to be in some sort of hierarchy.

The purpose of community is not to get rid of hierarchy. Again, part of the art of all this is for an organization to learn how to function in a hierarchical and highly structured task-oriented mode, and learn how [and when] to function in a community mode. [So] it needs to learn the technology of switching back and forth. The more clearly defined the roles are, the more structured the organization actually is, the easier this switching back and forth becomes. The more blurred the structure, the harder it becomes.

Alan: In The Different Drum you write, "An organization is able to nurture a measure of community within itself only to the extent that it is willing to risk or tolerate a certain lack of structure." Is what you're saying now a modification of that earlier view?

Scotty: An elaboration of it. The only obstacle to building and maintaining community within an organization is not structural. It's political. If you get somebody at the top who is not willing to relinquish the structure, even temporarily, or who has to dominate everything, there's no way you can have community in that organization. So the people in the organization, particularly at the top, have to be willing to temporarily lay aside their role and their rank.

[When they do that and] people see that you can attain community consistently - that there are rules and principles you can follow to get there - that fosters real hope.

Alan: So "the salvation of the world," as you refer to it in your writing, is attainable.

Scotty: Very much so. Let me read you part of the Foundation's Philosophy Statement, which captures some of the essence of this vision: "There is a yearning in the heart for peace. Because of the wounds, the rejections, we have received in past relationships, we are frightened by the risks. In our fear we discount the dream of authentic community as merely visionary. But there are rules by which people can come back together, by which the old wounds are healed. It is the mission of the Foundation for Community Encouragement to teach these rules, to make hope real again, to make the vision actually manifest in a world which has almost forgotten the glory of what it means to be human."

Being in community in an organization isn't a panacea. Reality still exists. And as is characteristic of a healthy individual life, there's actually more pain in community than outside of it. But there's also more joy. To me, what characterizes a true community is not that it's less painful, but that it's more alive.

A Test Bed for Community Living

Dr. Ian Tenant June 2010

The Pilion region of Greece seemed like a satisfyingly appropriate location for a week-long experiential therapy course - as according to Greek legend, this area was home to Chiron Centaur, the wounded healer, who established one of the world’s earliest healing schools. It's easy to understand why the Pilion mountains would be chosen for this purpose - compared to other parts of Greece it is delightfully verdant: magnificent ancient trees form rainforest-like canopies across entire mountain ranges. Walking along former goat paths (some of which have been made into roads) I continuously heard fresh mountain water gushing down steep slopes - cooling ever so slightly, the warm air which was saturated with the fragrance of seasonal herbs and flowers. In fact, as I was to find out, the entire week’s stay was to prove a healing experience for all involved.

I was staying at an eco-retreat and community centre called Kalikalos at one of its two campuses located in Kissos. The architecture in Kissos town in combination with grand trees, gives a feeling of the Alps rather than Greece, even though, minutes away, can be found some of the most unspoilt Greek beaches and coves I've ever seen.

A robust sense of community is the homespun thread that runs through all activities at Kalikalos. Some people come to the community as workers to help maintain the gardens and grounds, other as participants in the programme of holistic workshops that run throughout the summer, and some visit as guests. Yet, everyone is expected to help with cooking, cleaning and tidying. Founder of the centre, Jock Millenson - lives by the philosophy that 'Work is love in action' - a concept made famous by the Findhorn Community in Scotland where Jock lived for some years. Kalikalos shares several of the lifestyle themes found in other intentional communities around the world such as communal meals, voluntary simplicity and interpersonal growth.

For idealists who've fantasised about the joys and security of community living - Kaliakos is the perfect test bed. Each year a new small-scale community is seeded and allowed to grow. The transient nature of the community at each campus serves as a prototype for life in larger-scale eco-villages. New friendships feel intimate and allow each person to find their natural role.

Kay, who had been there almost one month explained to me that this has made her appreciate previously unrecognised qualities and skills that she has been using for years in other group situations, “Small things like making living spaces look presentable and welcoming have always come naturally to me – although these may not be essential to survival they make life more pleasant”.

Kay now knows that it’s everyone’s responsibility to form a sense of community: “When the small group of us arrived here at the start of the season I thought, ‘Where’s the community?’ Then I realised, ‘Oh, it's us!’ and we built it from scratch.”

Itseems that one of the biggest challenges to the smooth running of community living is finding ways to get jobs done without personality clashes or creating a sense of dictatorship, domination or oppression. In other words, making sure the ‘ego’ doesn’t get in the way. To avoid this, at Kalikalos, groups of people who have agreed to help with a particular task ‘attune’ to the job before beginning - whether it be preparing dinner, washing dishes or digging new pathways. This involves standing in a circle with one person who becomes the ‘focaliser’ (similar to a chairperson at a meeting) for that task invoking positive qualities which help the group work together harmoniously or remind each other of the energy which connects them all - so that they can enjoy their work and feel free to really be themselves.

This does, however, still rely on everyone to notice when things need doing even when they haven’t been ‘focalised’ on a particular task. Just knowing that we are all expected to muck in with a ‘whistle while you work’ fashion was enough to make me more sensitive to other’s stress levels and compel me to lend a hand when they were struggling.

By the end of the week it became clear to me why these ‘attunement’ tools are required in community settings. The ritual creates a kind of temporary glue that bonds even the boundlessness of ‘free spirits’ – and community living certainly attracts its fair share of these.

Having said that, I also learnt from some fascinating discussions with some of the guests about experiences here and in other communities that a magic formula for communal living remains a holy grail. “It takes more than just a full set of practical skills and knowledge to make community work,” explained Bradley who was taking a break at Kalikalos from another eco-community where he lives most of the year, “There are people here with degrees in sustainable construction or agriculture. But I’ve come to realise that interpersonal sensitivity and emotional intelligence are what really determines whether a group will gel or not.”

Bradley had been involved in a love affair at his community. The drama rocked the whole village. However, rather than being ostracised from his friends and family he and his lover were encouraged to work through all the issues that arose with the very people they affected. Dayna his now partner, explained to me how much she learnt from the whole experience, “It was tough going but has made me realise how much my decisions affect other people and has given me the skills to handle similar crises in the future”. We all laughed and agreed that community living is anything but dull. Real life can certainly be more interesting than television.

Even though this community disperses at the end of each season, there are several things put in place to allow the core principles to be reignited each year. Firstly, the 75yr-old founder of the centre, Jock Millensen, remains at the helm of the organisation. After a decade of working here he still pays attention to the detail and nitty-gritty of everyday community building. Secondly, there is a means for logging procedures and protocols and any agreed changes as the community evolves and improves. The balance between being highly organised and maintaining enough freedom is a delicate one. Wherever the equilibrium ends up it will never suit everyone. I was told about a young lad who left one week into his month-long stay. He felt frustrated by having to adhere to routines such as diluting breakfast fruits and nuts with just the right amount of sesame seed and was slightly freaked-out by the emotional frankness of those seeking personal development.

Kalikalos attracts all types of people. Sitting in the shade of kiwi vines I absorbed the contrast of visitors working together. A barefoot, sarong-clad teenage girl unceasingly digging pathways with a pickaxe whilst a retired business man who now leads workshops tidied-up behind her. It certainly isn’t a case of all work and no play though. There’s plenty of time in each daily schedule for sharing stories and laughter, trips to the beach or just resting in the paradisiacal gardens – which whilst I was there were in full bloom with hydrangeas: making the campus feel like a giant bouquet.

After just a few days into the stay I found myself laughing, joking, hugging and sharing personal experiences with previously unknown people as though we were long-lost friends. I conclude that coming together in this way to work with people whilst purposefully building community not only helps break the ice more than a bog-standard holiday but also helps to form new moulds.

A week at Kalikalos challenged my preconceptions about eco-community living. Flaky, stereotypical hippies sitting around in drum circles wearing rose-tinted glasses were not to be seen – instead you can expect to see and experience a full spectrum of emotions from people who know what it’s like to live in the real world. Most of the people I met at Kalikalos were seeking to evolve spiritually in some way. They all had something to offer to the community, and just like Chiron Centaur, had their own wounds to heal. But, just like the holistic therapist, Fran who used her time to recover from her divorce 3 months earlier, after discovering that her husband of 27 years had been having an affair for the last 7 of them – Kalikalos allows each person’s path to be cleared in a light-hearted and supportive way so that they can focus on what’s important for their own future, whatever community that may be in.