Transpersonal Education: An Educational Approach for the Twenty-First Century?

Abstract

Maslow was instrumental to the development of both humanistic and transpersonal psychology advocating that humanistic psychology should be subsumed by transpersonal psychology [1]. However the transpersonal has remained a lucid term with over-simplified definitions relating to spirituality [2-5], although three encompassing themes have been identified: beyond-ego psychology, integrative psychology and transformative psychology [6]. Although transpersonal psychology has been applied to a number of fields, (e.g. counselling, coaching, psychotherapy), there has been a paucity of research in relation to mainstream education. This paper initially introduces and discusses transpersonal psychology and how it differs to humanistic and positive psychology, before hermeneutically analysing previous research on transpersonal education, to propose a transpersonal education for the twenty-first century.