Education is the process of
learning and knowing. It is a holistic process and continues through our life.
Even the regular happenings and events around us educate us, in one or the other
way. The existence of human beings is fruitless without education. An educated
person has the ability to change the world. Education makes a worthy
contribution to our lives. Education opens our mind and expands our horizon.
When a child is born we do everything we can to protect them, nurture them, love
them. A child’s heart and mind are fragile. As they grow we want to teach them
everything that we know; we send them to school to fill their minds with
wonderful knowledge, to give them the tools they need for life. At school they
get a taste of what things are like in the world outside; there’s friendship,
romance, disappointment, embarrassment, discrimination and bullying. But are the
tools we give them enough to prepare them for this world? We have an enormous
responsibility and an amazing opportunity. If we truly want to prepare them for
the world outside, we must also educate the heart, because to navigate the world
outside with compassion, acceptance and tolerance, we need to teach them
compassion, acceptance and tolerance. This can begin in our schools and it can
start today; it can happen at hockey practice, dance class, at day camps and
music lessons; and it’s already happening around the world with astonishing
results. If we want our children to grow into socially and emotionally capable
young people we must ask for a balanced education that puts importance on
educating both the mind and the heart.
Education of the Heart means the purpose of higher education. 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 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 accept mutuality as the form of the learning environment
* To acknowledge the educability of emotional life and develop its practice
* To encourage openness to the unknown, and humility and courage in its presence
* To promote habits and techniques of collaboration
* To focus assessments of educational quality on citizens' capacities to
function within the requirements of democratic responsibility