By Bonnie Ann Burgard-Ross (Gifted Children co-ordinator)
A Holistic educator understands the traditional system, develops new philosophies and possibilities, imagines a better way, and then plans the transition from one to another. Our society aims its education to the "average," and at times even dumbs down to shuffle students through this averaged-out system.
However, every person has a unique learning style. A holistic educational approach takes those individual styles into account, meeting and learning with others of like interests and abilities, and integrating the body, mind, heart, and soul into the learning process.
All people, both children and adults, have unique gifts to share. We are all gifted in various ways, but these gifts are often pounded out of us by the very system of education itself and by social systems dominated by the need to conform to the "average", which tend to hinder overachievers.
Creativity remains the basis of every human activity, and is not exclusively the property of "special" or "talented" people. The development of one’s individual creativity is a matter of discovery and maturing through praxis: it occurs through expression and realization.
Recognizing giftedness can be difficult: it isn’t always the exceptional student. It can be hidden in the troublemaker; the slow to learn; the child who cannot seem to concentrate on the task at hand; the one labeled as attention deficit disordered or even disturbed. These children are often rejected by the current system of education,, which, curiously, gives them an opportunity for heuristic learning -- to learn on their own and go beyond the system. At the same time, they remain disadvantaged in a society which values standard measurements for knowledge and ability.
Measuring giftedness is another dilemma. How do you measure original thought or creativity? We often hinder the exact measurement of these talents by the very attempt to measure it in the first place.
We do indeed have children who, for whatever reason, have developed certain abilities into the "gifted" range, and need to be further encouraged to continue to excel. We must nurture intelligence and creativity in these gifted children. Learning to encourage and foster them helps us develop all children and ourselves as adults. Most of us never really fully develop our own potential, and as we become more aware of this we will become more willing to recreate the present learning systems. The holistic educational view realizes that we all have something to learn from each other.