David Hawkins

David Hawkins led a long and respected career as an educator and as a scholar of how we learn. In the early 1960s, he (with Jerrold Zacharias and Philip Morrison) helped organize the Elementary Science Study (ESS) in Newton, MA. He served as its director until 1964. Later, he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Director of the University’s Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, a teacher education center which he founded in 1970. Hawkins authored three books in addition to this one, and published more than 50 papers in a variety of periodicals. In 1974 he delivered the annual invitational lecture before the John Dewey Society, speaking on “The Science and Ethics of Equality.” He described the unifying thread in his career as “a passion I contracted when I was 21 to understand what used to be called the human soul – the thing we learned about from Aristotle to Augustine, from Spinoza to Hegel to Dewey.”