Shaping an Education of Attention

This chapter considers the contemporary contribution of a holistic paradigm in developing an education for sustainability and support offered through a focus on the influence between self, other, and world underpinned by a spiritual worldview. Current barriers to nature connective experiences in nations such as the UK are framed in terms of a contemporary era of hypermodernity characterized by a process of sensory degradation and loss of sensory skills. There is a suggested need in these conditions for an “education of our attention” (Gibson, 1979) through which we might appreciate perceiving as attending to things and this as a quality to be honed with practice. An ecolinguistic analysis of Froebel’s text, The Education of Man (1837), is drawn upon in considering what holistic discourse attuned to our attentiveness and responsiveness might offer for the recovery of our sensory skills. There is the potential to consider its linguistic features in finding “new stories to live by” (Stibbe, Positive discourse analysis: re-thinking human ecological relationships. In: The Routledge handbook of ecolinguistics. Routledge Press, London, 2017) that place emphasis on qualities we bring to living in relationship and understanding spirituality as the relational dimension of being (De Souza, Belonging, identity and meaning-making – the essence of spirituality. In Miller J et al (eds) The international handbook of holistic education. Routledge, New York, 2018). The contribution of spirituality for sustainability is considered in terms of emphasis not only on what connections we have, but also on how we have those relations, and with attendance to inner life as important foundations from which to weave our connections through nature.