Every educational philosophy necessarily relies on a pre-existing view of the human person. Anthropology informs pedagogy. Many of the problems that classical Christian educators have identified in conventional education have their roots in a false or insufficient view of human beings. The factory model of education, for instance, underrates certain aspects of human development and purpose (see articles on the problems of Technicism or Scientism for example).
This is why it has been so crucial for classical Christian educators to return to foundational questions. The average parent or teacher in our movement may tire of such stargazing, but it is necessary. The means that we use to educate young human beings must be consistent with the end or purpose of education.
But the purpose of education itself and the means we use to educate must also be consistent with our answer to the even larger question of what a human being is. Most of our practical disagreements in how to educate children have these fundamental worldview questions hovering in the background, like a ghost that will continually haunt us if we do not acknowledge its presence.
To picture worldview commitments as star-gazing or a set of higher level propositions, at the top of a chain of deductions written out on a whiteboard somewhere, tricks us into thinking that we can assume them and get on with application. But this is untrue. The soul of education must enliven our work with children and be embodied in our curriculum, pedagogy and classroom leadership moment by moment, otherwise we will repeat the errors of competing worldviews and beliefs, half-truths and downright falsehoods.
The soul of education is therefore found in our view of the soul. Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education is a notable example of this recognition. She grounded her educational ideas on the fundamental claim that children were persons. “I believe that the first article of a valid educational creed–’Children are born persons’–is of a revolutionary character; for what is a revolution but a complete reversal of attitude?” (The Parents’ Review 22; June 1911, 419-437). Our attitude toward children will inevitably shape our work as educators in ways that are beyond our immediate awareness. Classical Christian educators advocate a similar reversal of attitude or revolution in education.
We may not think of the word ‘person’ as carrying the same theological or philosophical weight as the word ‘soul’. But Charlotte Mason draws our attention to our modern assumptions about the nature of human beings through this word. Today even as classical Christian educators, we are stymied by a mishmash of terms for the nature of human beings: from traditional and religious terms like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, to the language of modern psychology and neuroscience. How do we make sense of it all? And how are these terms and our half-formed understanding of them implicitly shaping our attitude toward the children we educate?
I have heard one of the leaders in our movement meaningfully claim that in education we are “nourishing souls,” rather than any number of alternatives. At the time there was a collective sigh in the room as we felt at a visceral level the weight of this re-imagination of education. But why? What does the word ‘soul’ even mean? And how can it be more than the ghost of our traditional imagination in a world where human beings are conceived in terms of their amygdala, frontal lobes, and dopaminergic system?
As Christians committed to the language of scripture regarding our flesh, soul, mind and spirit, how can we sift through the varying conceptions of the human person for the fundamental insights that can create a Christian revolution of attitude and methods in our educational endeavors?
In this series of short articles on the soul of education, I propose to evaluate ancient and modern theories of the soul, from Plato and Aristotle to modern psychology and neuroscience, in order to glean important and revolutionary insights for our day-to-day educational practices. The ghost of these various conceptions of the soul are haunting our schools and classrooms. Like the Stoic Athenodorus we have to keep our heads about us, follow the ghost out into the courtyard of ideas, and learn its story by digging in the spot where it left, if we would no longer be haunted (see Pliny the Younger’s Letter to Sura). In our next article we will begin this process with Plato’s tripartite soul and its implications for education.
I hope you enjoy this series of short articles as I take a break from my series of articles on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. The Soul of Education is tangentially related to that extended exploration and will provide me with some needed time to wrap up book editing and writing projects, as well as research for the next series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of intuition or understanding (nous). Share a comment or thought on how you think any of the competing theories of the soul might be affecting our attitude and methods in education!
