Embodied Wisdom: Meditations on Memoir and Education, by Alison Pryer

North American education has long been defined by the pursuit of knowledge, the practice of reason and objectivity, the cultivation of virtuous character, and the establishment of an autonomous, independent subjectivity.While such emphasis has not been without merit, educators are increasingly recognizing how the cultivation of our full dimensionality as human beings has been devalued.Attention to body, emotion, soul, and spirit has been given short shrift in instrumental schooling practices, as has an embrace of our inherent interdependence with others and the environment.This insight stands at the heart of Alison Pryer's Embodied Wisdom: Meditations on Memoir and Education.Suffusing her text is an integral longing to bring into affirming light those rich but to-date institutionally disavowed, silenced, neglected, projected, or repressively managed qualities of abundant humanness and relation.Pryer attributes the largely demystified, disembodied character of current North American educational and social life to our mainstream Western traditions.She observes how these traditions have promulgated a dualistic mindset in which one concept, identity, or value is privileged over another.For example, reason has classically been esteemed over emotion, light over dark, and self over other.The "lesser" of the pair then has been systematically ignored, oppressed, disciplined, or exiled.This mindset has saturated Western culture so thoroughly that large bodies of experience and relation have become lost to us: the intuitive, the mysterious, the passionate, the enchanting, the chaotic, the creaturely, and so on.Pryer emphasizes how the devaluing of these qualities has resulted in our diminished integral access to a sustaining, sensuous wisdom, a deeply empowering resource that helps us learn and realize our potential in the world, alone and with others.Her longing for the personal and social reclamation of sensuous wisdom reminds me of the writing of David Abram (1996), who similarly attends to Western society's slow forgetting of "the spell of the sensuous."Abram more fully ascribes this forgetting to the achievements of Western literacy, documenting how the vowels given to the Greek alphabet have, over time, rendered mute a previously active, interpretative, and sacred relationship with nature (p.252).The term "psyche," once intimately bound with the sensuous world, over time became an abstract and rational phenomenon "now enclosed within the physical body like a prison" (p.253).For Abram, this new modern dualistic self is alienated from the "unseen depth between things" (p.258).Pryer asserts that our challenge as educators is to bring the vast mysteries of experience and life out from their pathologically veiled shadows and invite engagements with a sensual "nondualistic pedagogy" (p. 7).In so doing, she asserts, education participates in a deeply ethical practice (p.6).

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