Creativity as the impulse of life: Scholarly philosophies and thoughts for education

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the philosophical ideas of David Bohm, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Ilya Prigogine pertaining to a conception of the creative impulse as innate to self-organizing organisms. In outlining their ideas, I discuss how life's creative impulse is stifled in the perception of reality through a habituated need for security, certainty and stability and through a fragmentary sense of order that is particular to an alienated western consciousness. The paper identifies some reasons for what appears to be, at the manifest level, the stultification of the creative impulse in adulthood in relation to that in childhood. Central to the discussion is a focus on attentiveness as distinct from paying attention, on perception as distinct from thought, and on dialogue and listening as distinct from assertive speech. I follow these thinkers in suggesting that through attentive perception, dialogue and listening in the present, it is possible to bring to conscious awareness, and simultaneously dissolve, conditioned fragmentation at the psychological/emotional/somatic levels and therefore also at the pedagogical level, not for once and ever, but as an ongoing and necessary process. The creative impulse is then liberated to help one move to an order beyond alienation and towards a mode of living wherein one recognizes the participatory nature of how one thinks, speaks, feels, and acts. I then focus on education where I outline, drawing on a number of educational analyses, the fragmentary order of perception in North American mainstream pedagogy. The Reggio Emilia approach is noted as an educational system that may be consistent with the understandings of Bohm, Krishnamurti and Prigogine, particularly in the ways it conceives of the creative impulse, the nature of knowledge, the ‘curriculum,’ and the teacher-student relationship.