The Cultivation of Personhood as the Soil of the Erotic Soul

• In Event: The Erotic Reconstitution of Democratic Life: From Socrates to Today

Abstract

In 1968 the late Philip W. Jackson coined the phrase “the hidden curriculum” to describe the implicit socialization process – the often dehumanizing “daily grind” – lying behind most explicit curricular goals. Yet the last part of his career was spent investigating a different kind of “hidden curriculum”: the curriculum of personal care in the implicit “moral life of schools.”

Our third presenter will shine a light on that hidden curriculum in ways that have clear Socratically revolutionary political implications.

The speaker will first a range of studies that pivot around what can be called the cultivation of soulful personhood. This term reflects a long tradition of educational thought from Plato, through John Dewey, and through a community of contemporary scholars who focus on deep interpersonal teaching and learning. These scholars examine themes such as teachers’ tact (Garcia & Lewis, 2014; van Manen, 1991, 2015), ‘presence’ (Rodgers, 2021), contemplative vision (Buchman, 1989), practical wisdom (Furman & Traugh, 2021; Phelan, 2005), courage (Palmer, 1998), and more. Such topics point to the gathering term ‘soulful personhood’. The term echoes Plato’s pioneering conception of education as involving an erotic “turning of the soul” toward beauty, truth, and goodness. And it mirrors Dewey’s repeated focus in his educational writing on what he dubs the teacher’s “soul-action,” “whole-souled” conduct, and cultivation of “soul-life” in the classroom, and what he dubbed, in A Common Faith, the essential “religious” element in democratic life that is distinct from all historic religions and churches (1934).

In light of this critical tradition of thought, the speaker will touch on three undertakings that focus on teaching and the lives of teachers: the idea of teaching as an erotic call; the ways in which teachers can organically foster a cosmopolitan outlook of potential world wholeness in their classrooms, and why the concept ‘bearing witness’ can shed valuable light on the centrality of the person in the roles of teacher and student in the both personal and common quest for the good.

The speaker will conclude by suggesting that the cultivation of soulful personhood becomes central to what the symposium organizer summarizes as “a new birth of freedom” “for . . . people” as people. Freedom requires institutional support. But institutions cannot take root and be sustained without an underlying soil of thoughtful, erotically agentive, and, thus, soulful persons. Dedicated teachers and students, working across academic subjects and the many experiences of being together in classrooms, can cultivate personhood as the soil in which soulful humanness can take the deep root it needs to blossom fully and anew, as the next two presentations will more concretely portray.

Author

• David T. Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University