Educating The Whole Person

The dominant approaches to education are narrow, instrumental, and fragmented. Thinking is separated from doing/making and then reduced to a narrow set of skills. Aspects of our humanity beyond the intellectual are trivialized if not entirely ignored. Study is driven not by the felt need to understand self and world, but simply in order to climb the credentialing ladder. To challenge this attenuated vision of education, we will turn to texts that offer a more capacious vision of self-cultivation and restore questions of meaning and value to the center of the educational conversation. Topics include: moral and civic education, aesthetic and spiritual awakening, education for understanding and self-knowledge, and formative education as the search for meaning and purpose.