The Education of Personhood

In this post, I posed a question about how we measure whether a school is educating its students well if education is really about developing a whole person - when that’s hard to measure.

The answer to that is not as black and white as a bubble test sheet, and most of us know this intuitively. Nothing substitutes for the relationship between teacher and child  and parent and child. 

Don't forget  the distinction between whole person education and skill performance. Skill performance is objective. Can the child read the English language? Can he spell a list of words? Can she work a column of sums?  

These skills can be assessed with ‘tests’ but when education is reduced to just this skill performance, as important as it is as a building block to further education, something crucial is lost. 

When schools are part of a system assessed for success through objective performance measures, and especially when money is tied to these measures, the danger will be to reduce education to largely just what is easily measurable.

If accountability for true education instead rests with parents and teachers who can put relationships and personhood first, how different might schooling become? If every child were taught not just basic literacy but also given the chance to relate to the story of humanity in history, to the physical world through sciences, and to the beauty and the spiritual through arts and music, and if these were not connected to performance on an exam, but instead were guided and nurtured by the teacher and parent, wouldn't each child develop as his or her own self? Shouldn’t this be the aim of education? 

(This is not to say by any means that discipline is not needed. Discipline is part of character development and it is the adults’ role to help kids walk the line between what they want to do and learn and what they should do and learn. In this process, the kids learn to apply themselves, persevere, and be responsible to something beyond their momentary feelings and whims. Guided wisely, they also learn that they are unique, and that the discipline of learning is a part of what will make them responsible and dutiful people. They have a responsibility to show up as themselves with their gifts and strengths, but to package that all up in well-developed character so their self can be delivered to the world in a way others can relate to). 

 It could be that the best teacher training is that which helps the teacher to cultivate the personhood of each child. It could be that the best systems of schooling are structures that support this relational environment and hold accountability directly to parents and kids and not to money and performance. It could be that even  parent’s awareness of  this goal and subsequent  ability to choose which school does this best is intrinsically the best mechanism for accountability.  

If we rethink what education really is and under what conditions schools that pursue it will flourish, and we think not of money or jobs, but of the children, we may find the whole view of the educational  landscape clears up considerably.