Part Two.
A Curriculum for the Ross School from Kindergarten through Grade Twelve.
Preface

The curriculum that I am proposing for the Ross School does not think in terms of nation-states and economies, or in terms of simplistic splits between culture and nature; rather, it envisions cultural-ecologies that unfold as complex dynamical systems in which the traditional divisions of knowledge are inadequate. The curriculum I propose is not a line from the past to the present, but a spiral that returns to earlier experiences to raise them up to a new level of appreciation and understanding. Like Jean Gebsers Bewusstwerdungs Prozess, a process of becoming in consciousnessthis spiral of cultural history is one in which we move through the structures of Archaic, Magical, Mythical, Mental, and Integral. As I tried to show in my essay on Rapunzel in Imaginary Landscape, the fairy tale listened to in rapture in kindergarten can become the subject for a doctoral dissertation in graduate school. Because growth does not unfold in simple linear and accretive sequences, the overall curriculum is broken up into pulses of growth in three-year sequences. Each year, in turn, breaks down into a sequence of formative, dominant, and climactic. A formative movement introduces a new element of consciousness; a dominant movement establishes it, and the climactic movement consolidates and finishes it. One can think of this dynamic as a simple botanical one of sprouting up, rooting down, and flowering. In Rudolf Steiners Waldorf philosophy of education, my pattern of formative, dominant, and climactic corresponds to his triad of will, feeling, and thinking. A formative movement establishes the will, a dominant movement stabilizes it through feeling, and a climactic movement consolidates it through thinking and understanding. The overall structure for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve would thus look like this:

Kindergarten: formative= The Creation, Vast Elemental Forces.

Grade One: dominant = Patterns of Manifestation in Nature and Art.

Grade Two: climactic = Coherent World Systems.

Grade Three: formative = Archaic Human Forms: the Human Body and the Hunting Band. 2,000,000 to 10,000 BCE.

Grade Four: dominant = Early Neolithic Social Systems. 10,000 to 3500 BCE.

Grade Five: climactic = The Rise of the Riverine Civilizations; the Shift from Matristic Societies to Patriarchal Civilizations. 3500BCE to1450 BCE.

Grade Six: formative = Prophecy & Cultural Transformation. 1450 BCE to 350BCE.

Grade Seven: dominant = Universal Religions and Universalizing Empires. 350 BCE to 800 CE.

Grade Eight: climactic = The Climax of Medieval Civilizations. 800 CE to 1453 CE.

Grade Nine: formative = Modernism and the Shift from World Religions to a World Economy. 1453 to 1688.

Grade Ten: dominant = Revolution and the Rise of the Individual. The philosopher, the scientist and the artist as the new avatars of culture; the Enlightenment and the Romantic Reaction; masculine technology vs. the sacred feminine once again. 1688 to1851.

Grade Eleven: climactic= Global Economic Consolidation and Visionary Revolts. Global communications and collective consciousness, planetary culture as expressed in science fact and fiction, and global religious and artistic movements. 1851 to 2000.

Grade Twelve, First Semester : Senior Thesis and/or project of independent research and creative expression. Senior Seminar.

Grade Twelve, Second Semester: The Spiral of Cultural History and the Evolution of Consciousness. A recapitulation of the spiral and an examination not of the events of history but of the quantum steps of cultural transformation from the hominization of the primates to the planetization of humanity, from 2,000,000 BCE to visions of the future.

Because mathematics and natural history are subsets of cultural history, I suggest that we overcome C.P. Snows split between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities by putting mathematics and science back into the cultural context that gave birth to them. Thus arithmetic and number theory should be studied in the context of the rise of the ancient civilizations. Geometry should be studied in the context of the classical civilizations; algebra should be studied in the context of the medieval civilizations, and calculus, chemistry, and physics should be learned in the context of modernization in a historical appreciation of the works of Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, and Boyle. Relativity and Cubism should be studied together in a joint consideration of Einstein and Picasso, something that the seniors can do when the spiral turns out so widely that one can see all the themes of the curriculum coming together in the hypersphere of the planetization of individual consciousness in the twentieth centurya time in which, in the final decade of this century, the study of consciousness itself becomes the focus of cultural attention in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science.

To insure that teachers and students have both a diachronic sense of the spiral as well as a synchronic sense of the space of global culture, I recommend that The Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World be used as a common textbook for students from grades five through eight.