Peter van Olst

25 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I 2. PROPOSAL FOR A HOLISTIC APPROACH If we intend to abide by Prideaux’ choice, made 80 years ago, to define citizenship broadly as ‘the art of living together’, and if we would like to practice this art in schools that fulfil their classical role as workplaces of humanity, cultural fora, halfway houses or mini-societies, we must envision the need for an approach to citizenship education that is comprehensive, integrative, non-reductionistic, connected to the whole of the curriculum, and connected to the whole of the student and society as well. All these qualifications seem to respond to the problem of fragmentation as the isolation of elements from their original sense-giving context. Together, they form what this study intends to develop: a response in the form of a holistic approach. If fragmentation is the problem, it automatically follows that partial answers pertaining to just one, two or some aspects of the problem will be insufficient. They will combat the symptoms, but not the much deeper problem. If society can be characterised as fragmented, and if this problem not only has consequences for interpersonal living but also entails intrapersonal consequences within individual citizens, then it is clear that partial countermeasures will not restore social cohesion and/or improve the art of living together if they do not fit together holistically. The former implies that citizenship formation cannot be just a cognitive enterprise, or just an affective one, or a practical one. It always requires the interaction of the cognitive, the affective and the practical to respond to the problem of fragmentation. It cannot aim solely at the head (representing cognition), the heart (representing emotion) or the hands (representing concrete action); rather, it should simultaneously affect them all. Another aspect is that citizenship formation cannot merely be added as a new and additional subject. Integrative, non-reductive citizenship formation has to be directly tied to everything we do, at least in the field of character or personhood formation. Again, the idea of fragmentation as the breaking of interconnectedness calls for a holistic answer, meaning an answer that provides for a meaningful context in which all the constituent elements fit together in a way that renders the whole more than just the sum of its parts. Although the term holistic has been used frequently above, it is not easy to define what it actually means. Thus, Chapters 2 and 3 will study this issue and, finally, offer a more detailed definition. To accomplish this, Chapter 2 makes use of the insights of a worldwide movement that advocates for WCD. This movement will also prove helpful in a more practical sense during the intended search for core components for teacher training concerning Christian citizenship education. For now, it suffices to observe that, in relation to citizenship education, holistic means that it cannot be just an add-on to

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