Part 1 by David Marshak

Maria Montessori opened her first school in 1907. Rudolf Steiner opened the first Waldorf school in 1919. Both of these forms of holistic education date from early in the 20th century, and both are thriving and expanding throughout the world today.

A more recent form of holistic education is called Enki Education, named for Enki, "the Sumerian god...of wisdom and water who flows into every corner and crevice, changing his shape to explore every detail and provide whatever is needed." As Beth Sutton, the primary developer and director of Enki Education, writes, "The nature of the Sumerian god, Enki, is very much what our teachers strive for... Like Enki, in both classroom and homeschool programs, the teacher is challenged to continually perceive, nurture and celebrate the brilliance and possibility in all her students and in all subjects she teaches. Her challenge is to meet everything fully, whatever it may be."

Before developing the Enki Education model, Beth Sutton taught in several schools, including Waldorf schools, and directed schools and camps. She is certified both as a Waldorf teacher and by several states. In 1989, Sutton, working with colleagues in Halifax, Nova Scotia and later in several New England states, began to develop Enki Education both as a teacher education program and as an elementary school and home school curriculum. The Enki Teacher Training Program is now entering its 14th year, and it has educated teachers from the United States and Canada as well as some participants from European and Asian nations. Much of the program is conducted through distance learning formats. In addition to its teacher preparation program, Enki Education offers homeschooling workshops and conferences, homeschool and classroom teaching guides, grade level resource libraries, and various multimedia tools.

Enki Education grows from the premise "that educational excellence is fostered through the integration of body, heart, and mind ... the key to cultivating competence, confidence, and a sense of belonging." Thus, as with Waldorf and Montessori, Enki is explicitly defined as an education of the whole person.

Multicultural education is central to the Enki approach. Enki unfolds from the insight that "all people of all cultures, religions, races, and times have and always have had an indestructible core of wisdom, compassion, and vitality. We see this core as our human birthright—the nature of who we are. To bring this into the children’s direct experience, regardless of what culture they are from, it is critical that they experience this core wisdom in its different manifestations from around the world." In Enki, children experience multiple cultures rather than just learn about them.

The system is built on a Developmental Immersion / Mastery approach to education. Developmental means that, as with Waldorf and Montessori, Enki recognizes that each child unfolds through a progression of common stages as she/he grows up and that learning must be tied intimately to the character and qualities of the child’s current stage. Content is chosen according to the child's developmental needs and interests.

Immersion means that children are immersed in experience focused upon whatever they are studying, drawing not only on the intellect but also on the body, the heart, the senses, the whole person. Thus, Enki includes much in the way of "storytelling, visual arts, movement, music, manipulatives, activities, and projects" in its daily activities.

In Enki, Sutton explains, "experiential learning has a very specific meaning. It means that all learning goes through a three-fold process: open intake; digestion/exploration; and understanding or skill mastery. This works in exactly the same way as nourishing ourselves physically: we must first just take in the food; then we must digest and assimilate it; finally, we can make use of it as energy...The same is true in learning. In order to really learn something new, we must suspend the world we know and just receive or take in the new, in its own right."

Mastery means that children are encouraged to "bring what they have absorbed to mastery through intellectual exploration, discussion, exercises, practice, and concrete application. This process allows the children to absorb, engage with, and retain what they have learned. Neither the immersion in the living nature of the subject, nor the technical mastery is seen as more important. Each is one part of the whole."

Like Waldorf, Enki has a curriculum template for each grade level from kindergarten through 12th grade. The Enki school model provides two teachers for each elementary school class, with both teachers staying with their class for 5 years. Then the child would move into a middle school structure, with multiple teachers. The high school experience would feature an apprenticeship each year—nature/farming in 9th grade; a social service institution in 10th grade such as a hospital, school, or community center; a business in 11th grade; and an apprenticeship chosen by the student in 12th grade. Each apprenticeship would be accompanied by related academic studies.

The Enki curriculum integrates the arts, a strong focus on multicultural education, a conscious articulation of the school as a community, festivals for each season, and a respect for the traditional academic subjects integrated with the richness of active learning, including crafts and projects, movement arts, sensory integration, and brain gym. Another quality of the Enki curriculum is its cyclical or recursive structure. Concepts or skills first explored in one grade level are explored again when the child is older, with ever increasing complexity. For example, "the stories, manipulatives, and mechanics of place value (units, tens, hundreds) introduced in second grade, become the ground for the exploration of numeric base systems of other cultures and times in fifth grade. This, in turn, becomes the foundation for the eighth graders' introduction to the history, structure, and function of the binary-based computer, and finally develops into the eleventh graders' introduction to computer programming."

Sutton highlights the Enki approach as weaving together many elements, with the four following ones as key:

a. The multicultural focus of the United Nations International School,
b.the integrated arts approach of Waldorf schools
c.the skill building techniques of traditional Western education, and
d. the independent project learning of theme studies programs.

While the Waldorf model was certainly one of Beth Sutton’s influences when she was developing the Enki Education, Enki is not in any sense a sort of "Waldorf-lite" or Waldorf without its religious elements. The Enki model had other profound influences, including a commitment to a style of multiculturalism that has only begun to manifest in the past several decades, influenced by Sutton’s own childhood and adolescent experience in the United Nations School. Enki is also an explicitly secular approach to education, albeit one that honors the whole child and the value of all human cultures. In the most profound way, Enki Education is a new expression of holistic education, one that has been created in our own times.

Beth Sutton and her Enki colleagues and supporters have started two schools, one in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the other in New Hampshire. Unfortunately, "due to the current economic climate," both of the independent Enki elementary schools have had to close or substantially restructure.

But many teachers have learned to use the Enki education model in part or whole in their classrooms. And perhaps even more significantly, Enki has begun to catch on with homeschooling parents. Enki Education is particularly attractive to parents who want to homeschool their child(ren) and who want to use a whole person, holistic approach but still have the direction and support provided by an articulated curriculum and pedagogy.

To homeschool, Sutton encourages parents to fit the Enki curriculum to the qualities of their child/ren, "modifying, enriching, and adapting it to the needs of the children and the practical, earthy realities of the situation." She asks parents to consider two central questions in this personalization: 1)What are the specific blessings of home life we wish to preserve? 2) What are the challenges inherent in educating in this environment?

Enki Education then provides Grade Level Curriculum Packages for kindergarten through Grade Two. Each Curriculum Package includes a pertinent Teaching Guide, which explains child development at this age, the need for neurological / sensory integration, and the role of rhythm in learning. "The homeschool resources then describe the specific ways this view unfolds into teaching through the arts on a day-to-day basis. This gives parents and teachers a deep understanding of the Enki homeschool curriculum, and of how to adapt or develop this curriculum to most fully meet their own goals." Each curriculum package also includes its own resource library, "an extensive collection of stories, songs, and activities for teaching a given subject through the arts, movement, and storytelling." For Grades Three through Six, Enki at this time offers only the Teaching Guides.

Enki Education has created a Yahoo group through which homeschooling parents can converse with each other about their experiences, the curriculum materials and resources, and their questions. The group allows curious newcomers to find more veteran parents, both in cyberspace and those who live nearby. The group, little more than a year old, has more than 500 members. The Yahoo group also allows parents to pose queries to Beth Sutton and provides her with a context in which she can explain and expand upon the Enki model in real-time.

Maria Montessori first came to the US in 1913. Her visit provoked much interest in her educational approach, and for several subsequent years a number of Montessori schools were opened in North America. Yet after 1920 almost all of them disappeared. Only in the late 1950s did Montessori education once again become available in the US and Canada. Since then, the Montessori movement has grown dramatically.

The first Waldorf school in North America opened in 1928, the second in 1942. By 1959 there were only seven Waldorf school on the continent. Only four more opened in the 1960s, but in the 1970s Waldorf education took off, with 25 new schools in that decade and 58 new schools in the 1980s. Now there are 142 Waldorf schools in the US and Canada.

In contrast Enki Education is in its infancy. Will it speak to people in the ways that Montessori and Waldorf do? Will Enki gain a critical mass of homeschooling parents and become a new kind of movement? Might it begin to be a curricular and pedagogical model that is used in a significant number of 21st century schools? There’s no way to know at this point. But what is evident from a careful examination of the Enki Education materials is that there is now a third well-developed, holistic education model available to parents and teachers that embodies its very own nature and character.

You can learn more about Enki Education at: www.enkieducation.org

David Marshak has taught people of all ages, led schools and school districts, and studied education and schooling for several decades, most recently at Seattle University. He is the author of The Common Vision: Parenting and Education for Wholeness. For more of this work: thefutureofeducation.org