Education for wholeness in an age of global citizenship: staying with the problem of value(s)

Abstract

Education for wholeness continues to remain a contentious issue within a liberal and progressively democratic culture. McLaughlin's work can help us conceptualise wholeness as it has been understood in traditional and progressive education, what he describes as ‘wholeness as comprehensiveness’ and ‘wholeness as integration’. Yet within more recent educational discourse the language of wholeness appears fraught and ill-fitted to the changing requirements of global citizenship. Exploring how such a significant concept for traditional child-centred education can come under pressure and can even appear ‘false’ in recent critical educational circles, this paper examines the place of education for wholeness in liberal discourse today. It argues that despite some philosophical challenges to wholeness, the concept has not so much lost its relevance but rather has become articulated within a new universalist model of human rights education. By looking at two recent examples of ‘rights focused wholeness’ in educational practice, the paper goes on to argue that while wholeness remains challenging within a culture of diversity and postmodernism, its historical and philosophical relevance for practice and child-centred education, as something rooted in the experiential world of early childhood, remain as important and even more urgent for educators than ever.