Contemplative Learning in Higher Education

I started reading Contemplative Practices in Higher Education  by Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush earlier this week, and I've been very impressed so far.  The book has also impressed upon me how important teaching is, and what great responsibility comes with it.  

Even the first paragraph of the the forward is provocative and challenging.  With any university proposal, Parker Palmer say we should ask ourselves, "Does this proposal deepen our capacity to educate students in a way that supports the inseparable causes of truth, love, and justice?"  

He questions the wisdom of a structure of education that sometimes produces graduates who go on to do heroic noble things, but has also produced well-educated leaders involved in malfeasance in industries ranging form health care to business, finance, even education.  

Palmer notes that we have too often created a divide between a subject and the individual, and this creates an ethical gap.  "Contemplative" practices has unfairly been associated with the mystical and therefore deemed unsuitable for an academic realm.

But this was not always the case-  historically, some of the most well respected scholars rooted their scholarly study in contemplative practices.  Consider, for example, the monastic schools of the Middle Ages, or the philosophers of Ancient Greece.  Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."