The Education of the Whole Person: An East-West Dialogical Critique
1st Meeting
Note: This day-meeting takes Paul Standish’s “Postmodernism and the Education of the Whole Person” (1995) as a starting-point for discussion and criticism. The paper can be found here.
Programme
9:30-9:40 Welcome and introduction. . . Naoko Saito
9:40-11:00 Session I – Chair: Paul Standish
Naoko Saito (Kyoto University) Rethinking the Idea of the Whole Person in Education
Emma Williams (Warwick University) Title to be confirmed
Discussion
11:00-11:20 Break
11:20-12:55 Session II – Chair: Rebecca Mace
Pip Bennett (IOE UCL) Relational Selves, Whole People, and Education
Qasir Shah (IOE UCL) Educating The Person: A Confucian Perspective
Adrian Skilbeck (University of Winchester) Title to be confirmed
Discussion
13:00-14:20 Lunch break
14:20-15:30 Session III – Chair: Emma Williams
Baptiste Cornardeau (Paris 1st University) Unsettling Perfection: The Whole Person as an End in View
Alexis Gibbs (University of Winchester) Educating the Un-Whole Person: The Case of Henry Adams
Discussion
15:30-16:10 Session IV – Chair: Qasir Shah
Paul Standish (UCL IOE) Postmodernism and the Idea of the Whole Person
Discussion
16:10-16:30 Coffee break
16:30-17:00 Session V – Chair: Alexis Gibbs
Yoonji Kang (University of Warwick) Re-placing Knowledge in the Education of the Whole Person
Rebecca Mace (IOE UCL) Title to be confirmed
17:00-17:30 General discussion – Chair: Naoko Saito
17:30 Close
This project will organize a seminar series on the education of the whole person in a manner that exploits the benefits of East-West dialogue. Against the tide of performativity, objective measurement, explicit accounting and evidence in outcome-based education, our aim is to present an alternative vision of education that is in service to holistic growth and healthy perfectionism. Such needs are urgent in view of the worldwide implications of the crisis of the war in Ukraine, COVID-19 and environmental problems – in the situation where each of us needs to reconsider the meaning of the good life. The main research question for the project is: How the idea of the whole can be constructively pursued without its being assimilated into assumptions of a complete whole? In response, beyond the existing discourse on the whole person, which tends to fixate and romanticize the idea of the whole, this project will present a philosophical line of thinking in terms of anti-foundationalist perfectionism – to be found in the intersection of American transcendentalism, pragmatism, Stanley Cavell, the later Wittgenstein and the “clinical pedagogy” that is associated with the Kyoto School of philosophy (Nishida et al.). We shall explore the implications in theory and practice of the idea of the education of grownups, seeking, that is, an alternative vision of lifelong and continuing education.
In this first gathering, we shall take Paul Standish’s article, “Postmodernism and the Education of the Whole Person” (1995), as a starting point for discussion and criticism. Standish’s criticism of the idea of the whole person in education provides us a helpful lens through which to find a way beyond the limits of the education of the whole person. Showing some sympathy for the idea of the whole person in education as a form of resistance to instrumentalism, and to narrowness, one-sidedness, or false dualisms in the prevailing discourse, Standish nevertheless cautions against concern with the quest for wholeness and completeness in education. He explores a third way beyond modernism and postmodernism along the lines of Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian Moral Perfectionism.
Our speakers will present ideas of the whole person in education beginning with the issues Standish raises. Standish will then respond.