Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. -Aristotle.
For education, the
sense of heart which we have been considering primarily implies the importance
of a holistic approach. We have seen that heart encompasses feeling, knowing,
loving, and is our access to one another. It is also the deep well of our full
human meaning -- of whoever we may be at last. An educated heart would be
educated in the practice of self-knowledge. An educated heart would be educated
about affections, and the ways of interaction. It would also have to understand
the requirements of participation and the necessity, for that possibility to be
realized, of democratic association. It would understand the anatomy of courage
and be responsive to its call. The heart of education is the well-being of
community. For the educated heart, the need of a functioning community is the
concrete impetus for using and evaluating the ways of knowing and creating we
have inherited, as well as the challenge to invent new intellectual and
aesthetic vehicles of its justice. An educated heart, as the place in ourselves
and in others where we must especially allow hearing room, would respect
transcendence at the horizon of our own self-meaning
A guide to educational practice generated
by sensitivity to the education of the heart might include aims like these:
* To encourage habits of critical
self-awareness
* To valorize openness to interiority
* To accept the equal right of all
individuals to the autonomy of their emotional lives
* To encourage the development of
individual voice; and, as the practical condition of its possibility, develop
the capacity for hearing the voice of the other
* To learn what and how the other wants
(the real justification of multi-culturalism is equality of access to one's own
emotional life; simple empathy for each other is not enough)
* To accept mutuality as the form of the
learning environment
* To acknowledge the educability of
emotional life and develop its practice
* To acknowledge the limits of
conceptualizable vision
* To encourage openness to the unknown, and
humility and courage in its presence
* To develop appropriate tolerance for
ambiguity to fully integrate expressive creation into the educational
mainstream to study the requirements of democratic responsibility
* To promote habits and techniques of
collaboration
* To focus assessments of educational quality
on citizens' capacities to function within the requirements of democratic
responsibility
