Transforming History

Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution

Education is now the major concern of many Americans. Education, however, is about more than teaching children how to function in life. It is a means of transmitting both a culture and a heritage. In this dynamic and far-reaching work, William Irwin Thompson, one of today’s most innovative interdisciplinary thinkers, talks about how to transform a cultural legacy in the course of transmitting it. In the process of discussing this issue with the purpose of providing a home-schooling curriculum in the culture and history of humanity and the West, Thompson gives us a mind-rattling tour of our potential as human beings. He describes four “cultural ecologies” using a broad-based intellectual vista that takes in an expanse ranging from the Gilgamesh epic of 2000 B.C. to Disney, U2, and Ronald Reagan.

The author’s visionary approach takes education far beyond the bland, watered-down curricula forced upon so many students today. He not only presents a far-reaching system of knowledge, but suggests how we may stimulate the best and healthiest patterns of development in children and teenagers.

About the Author

William Irwin Thompson became nationally known through his best-selling book on contemporary affairs, At the Edge of History, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1972. As a cultural historian and philosopher of culture, he is most widely known for The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture; Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science; and Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. In 1972 he founded the Lindisfarne Association, a fellowship of artists, scientists, and contemplatives, and was its director for twenty-five years. Thompson now serves as the curriculum designer and faculty consultant to the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, and divides his year between New York and Switzerland.