258 Chapter 8 develop a deeper understanding of the relation between its own main topics: knowledge, ability and character. These keywords start, in Dutch, all with a ‘k’: kennis, kunde and karakter. In an underlying exploratory document, de Regt and van Lenning (2017) tied this triad to approach ‘the complete beinghuman’ to the Roman Catholic priest and founder of what would later become Tilburg University. This approach warns against seeing the student just as a ‘homo economicus’, on the one hand, or just a ‘scientist who absolutes his professional studies’, on the other hand (de Regt & van Lenning, 2017, p. 25). Where Tilburg University (2022) tied ‘kennis’ to expert knowledge, ‘kunde’ to academic skills and ‘karakter’ to intellectual independency and public responsibility, the conversational community saw, according to the minutes of its 15th meeting, clear coherences between ‘kennis’ and ‘epistemological formation’, ‘kunde’ and ‘subjectifying education’, and ‘karakter’ and ‘attitude formation’. In each case, the accent assigned by the conversational community was placed on the question of how it could be achieved during the teacher training process—that is, how students could learn to practice subjectifying education from a Christian perspective, how they should be formed epistemologically from the same perspective and how a basic attitude could be formed in them that would be helpful in supporting and fostering both subjectifying education and epistemological formation. At that point, in the 14th meeting, a member of the outsider group observed the following, which a member of the insider group and others responded to: P1 recognises in the three distinguished pillars the triad of head, heart and hands. She connects character to the heart, skills to the hands and knowledge to the head. P2 thinks this is a beautiful thought and points to Church Father Augustine’s statement that the heart precedes the head and the hands. P1 indicates that education does still primarily focus on the head. However, P3 says that it is carried by desire. P4 refers to what she thinks are golden moments in education. This is when the task-oriented nature falls away for a moment and there is real attention paid to each other and things that really demand attention.
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