Reconceptualizing Liberatory Education Through a Buddhist Lens: Thinking Beyond Freire

Over the past twenty-five years, education in North America has taken a "contemplative turn," incorporating numerous initiatives based in eastern traditions like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism.One manifestation is the widespread use of mindfulness practices in classrooms, through which teachers and students learn self-awareness techniques that elicit calm and self-regulation. 1 Mindfulness exercises without the philosophical tradition behind them, however, risk being instrumentalized as a way to secure compliance within schooling environments that demand regulation even in the face of dehumanizing experiences. 2That can happen with any piecemeal adoption of another culture, and one antidote is to invite the full philosophical insight of the tradition along with the technique or skill from which it comes. 3cording to Heesoon Bai and colleagues, incorporating eastern traditions into western education is best achieved through an intercultural philosophy of education, an approach that makes philosophers "cultural and intercultural workers" who engage with diverse cultural resources. 4The authors argue that this offers a rich philosophical perspective, with several benefits beyond encouraging a more holistic engagement with eastern-inspired initiatives like mindfulness.An intercultural philosophy challenges the ontological and epistemological perspectives that drive educational agendas focused on efficiency and measurement, which cause schools to narrow their focus to only what can be most easily measured, creating educational environments that fail to support the whole of human experience.In this article, we show how intercultural philosophy can be applied to the concept of liberatory education by bringing Buddhist philosophy into conversation with Paulo Freire.Central to both Freire and Buddhism is liberation, and while the concept is distinctly defined, liberation in both challenges the notion that education's primary goal is the success of systems by focusing