I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has already asked this, so please forgive me if this is redundant:
It seems to me that most of the development of humanity along the levels of spiral dynamics have been accomplished through natural evolution/progression as we become more self aware. Has anyone created a curriculum to teach and assist people in moving from blue → orange → green → yellow, for example? Clearly, the knowledge is out there but it seems to me that if one were starting from scratch, the amount you would have to read/consume would be enormous before really understanding (unless you were really lucky).
Has anyone created any kind of guide that says, “Well, if you want to move from orange to green, these are the resources and skills you want to pursue. These will help you pursue your path.” And then the same for green to yellow.
I realize this is a pretty simplistic ask for a very complicated problem, but this has to be possible, with caveats, of course. As an example, if we want to teach a high school course on this, how would go about it? I’m not talking about teaching integral theory or spiral dynamics, I’m talking about teaching people the things they need to move from one level to another. How can we promote growth somewhat artificially by providing a direct link to the most important/helpful resources? What would be those resources/skills/perspectives be?
Is this even possible? Can we get social groups together and actually teach them self development en masse? It’s up to them to pursue the development, but couldn’t they be directly given the tools to do so?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts and thank you for your time…
I’m glad you are asking this! It seems to me also that anything worth learning should be teachable.
As far as taking levels prior to orange up to orange, that’s what typical education has been doing for several centuries now. Just go to normal school, major in almost anything in STEM of business, it’s orange. There is a lot green ideation in humanities programs in education nowadays, but the question of actual green practice is trickier. It seems to work better in small groups or communities. At larger institutional levels, green doctrines on race, gender or environment often come off as very dogmatic, which contradicts what green practice is supposed to be. Green opinions do not equate to a green developmental level, in my view.
The trickiest question of all is getting to second tier. (This has been discussed in previous threads). My view on this is that second tier should have access to everything at the first tier, and the biggest obstacle to second tier understandings is trying to skip over various developmental understandings found at first tier levels. In my example above, people with strong green values but weak orange practices tend to implement things in a traditional dogmatic way. “Post” modern does not mean “instead of” modern, it means “after” modern… To transcend a stage, one needs to understand it first.
This is where I and others stress the utmost importance of “cleaning up”.
When we learn another level its pretty important that we learn a healthy vs unhealthy at that level.
For example, healthy vs unhealthy anger at red, productive vs unproductive regulations at Orange, spirituality vs spiritual bypassing at Green.
What I hear a lot in Integral discussions is judging a level by the unhealthy expressions of it and some degree of cluelessnes about how to clean the level up rather than judge the level.
One common thing I hear is the “Mean Green Meme” as judgements against Green, but it is a choice or lack of knowing to only consider the Unhealthy Green. Likewise there is a jugement against Anger and violence and often a belief that peaceful pacifist and nonconfrontational options are just better and failing to recognize that violence is not only necessary but also a beautiful expression of the cycle of life. Lions on the Sarengetti are no less beautiful than the gazelles, for example. Flowers and thorns have equal value.