A Symbolic Analysis of the Dimensions of Holiness in American Culture and Curriculum

This study is being republished; as the saying goes, "it's sitting on musty university book shelves." Hence, its message is minimally read due to its inaccessibility to others. In fact, its content has been the impetus of my philosophy, world-view, and professional life by providing effective theoretical approaches to counseling, teaching, and ministry. The title suggests a two-fold approach involving an analysis and synthesis of culture. Through Levi-Straus' structuralism and that of Mary Douglas through the Book of Leviticus, the implicit domain of American culture and education is deduced. Demonstrated are the hierarchical value and belief structures driving culture and curriculum through the dialectic of purity and impurity as danger. This heart of Mosaic Law which Douglas saw working in her cultures of study is applied with Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant Ethos. In turn, this is applied to Puritan colonial America and its emergent education and curricular culture. The inversion of this model via industrial secularism resulted in the breaking down of culture and education into specializations and disciplines reflected in classroom, graded, and curricular structure. Resultantly, the identity of the person was lost in a cultural values conflict of aspects of mind and body, self, and being with the emergent non-self ever seeking identity external to self and person. This essential analysis divulges the pyramid with its many antithetical levels of purity and impurity energized by hierarchical levels of dominant and subordinate power demonstrated among them. Conversely, the synthesis posits this pyramidal resolution through the indigenous circle. Geometrically, implicit to the pyramid is the circle and the pyramid the circle. Suggested are the spinning circles of the uroboros and the Native American medicine wheel. The spinning nature of the circle as wheel brings opposites into harmony and synchronization.