The term “whole person” education has become something of a marketing buzzword in recent years. And it’s understandable why the term resonates—particularly with those responsible for the education of our children. Who wouldn’t want their child to be seen as more than a brain in a desk, more than one whose bodily life is treated as accidental to who they really are?
The truth is that whole person education is inevitable. All education shapes the whole child even if it doesn’t market itself as such. Children are invariably educated as whole people precisely because all they do they do as real body and true soul. As people made in God’s image, we reflect his grace in all aspects of our life on earth.
The question, then, is not whether education concerns the whole person. The whole child is always educated explicitly or implicitly. Rather, the question is to what end the whole child will be trained: for good or for ill? Thus, as C. S. Lewis famously remarked, there are no mere mortals, but “immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” Will the whole child live forever an “immortal horror,” or will they stand before the face of God resplendent with everlasting glory, body and soul, in life and in death?
If Lewis is right—and the likes of Dante, Calvin, and the Apostle Paul with him (2 Cor. 4:17)—all education has an assumed anthropology as its starting point. Yet, a properly ordered pedagogy recognizes that all that a person is has been designed by God as a theater for his glory. Or, as another theologian put it, “the glory of God is man fully alive.”
At Calvin, we believe that all that is good, true, and beautiful is grounded in the character of God. It has been revealed for us to know in the realms of general and special revelation: truth, goodness, and beauty have been made to be known and we have been made to know them. This is why, for instance, the humanities faculty are committed to modeling humility in the discussion of texts, expressing confidence in objective truth, while demonstrating a willingness to pursue growth and learning in front of our students. A well-led discussion of texts should affirm the inherent value of every human individual, respect their need to grow and develop as a whole person, and to encourage a discourse that is marked by honesty and charity with the text and toward their fellow classmates.
This anthropology speaks not merely to the starting point of education, but the whole scope of one’s life: that we, like Christ, might be said to increase in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man (Luk. 2:52), ultimately, for the joy that was set before him (Heb. 12:2). May we, too, guide our children toward that same end: that they, like Christ, may know the joy of being fully alive in the totality of their humanity—in this life and in the next.
by, Isaac Fox, CCS Upper School Humanities
