Transforming Education to Nurture the Spirit
Transforming Education to Nurture the Spirit

Summary/Abstract: No matter how much excellence humans demonstrate through progress and modernization, thereby indicating that they are crowning creatures among creation, in some future, they become a witness to the falsehood of their connection with the world in which they live, as well as the creations that have arisen from that connection. Contemporary educational theories contain a ‘pedagogical addition’ that imprints partial provisions into the general field of education. However, the goal is for the general educational process to shape what is common to every person. The famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) explained the purpose of education through a dichotomy: educated individuals succeed in everything they do (others do not) and do not show their partialities. At the same time, the uneducated are characterized by their behavior not being governed by the general properties of things. No matter how justified the demands for ‘versatile knowledge’ may seem, behind these demands are long-established schemas that rely on the Platonic understanding of the three dimensions of the human soul: rational (logos), spirited (thymos), and appetitive (eros), which correspond to an education with logical, ethical, and aesthetic aspects. Thus, we arrive at the question of the role of logic, ethics, and aesthetics, the claim that these three disciplines determine the content of human education, and that what should be educated in a person is the soul, but in such a way that their spirit (heart) is properly nurtured. Education is primarily tied to human behavior and how one interacts in the human community, and it has an intersubjective character. Education is tied to the level of knowledge and possession of knowledge about the world, in which each subject is immersed through its being. Due to its complexity and the richness of phenomena it manifests in recent times, education is the subject of a special science—pedagogy. Its role boils down to creating functional procedures that can be used in any system of socialization and upbringing, and it appears as an instrumental, pragmatically oriented ideology.

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