27 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I reference openness, scale, stratification, complexity, systematic pressures and human purpose. Moreover, learning processes are better understood from an open systems perspective than on the basis of ‘the naively positive developmental models of change’ that are commonly used (Wrigley, 2019, p.157). The underlying reason is that they are fundamentally holistic. At this point, Wrigley (2019) introduced the triad of head, heart and hands to further explicate what he meant by holism (15). Teaching should simultaneously aim at the cognitive, the affective and the practical. ‘If you ignore this, you end up with medium- and long-term damage to personal development’ (Wrigley, 2019, p. 157). Comparable pleas for holistic education can be noted from Christian thinkers. Among them are leading contemporary thinkers regarding Christian education such as J.K.A. Smith and D.I. Smith, both active at Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan. J.K.A. Smith (2009, 2016) tried to correct the cognitive emphasis he encountered among (Christian) teachers with his proposal for an affective pedagogy, which is based on a holistic anthropology. ‘Many Christian schools, colleges, and universities—particularly in the Protestant tradition’, he stated, ‘have taken on board a picture of the human person that owes more to Modernity and the Enlightenment than it does to the holistic, Biblical vision of human persons’ (J.K.A. Smith, 2009, p. 31). Faroe (2013) argued that Smith, in his affective pedagogy, focused too much on affections when compared with cognition, although he embraced Smith’s underlying holistic anthropology. He called for a pedagogy based on this anthropology that ‘honours the rich interrelatedness of the cognitive and the affective’ (Faroe, 2013, p. 4). The challenge is, according to Faroe (2013), to ‘develop a truly holistic Christian pedagogy that wisely integrates the realities, cognitive and affective, of human personhood’ (p. 11). Such a holistic Christian pedagogy cannot be reductionistic. Reductionism, as I will argue more thoroughly in Chapter 2, implies a sharp focus on separate elements. Holism is meant as a healing correction to the too-far-flung attention paid to separate elements, a correction resulting from a renewed focus on the interconnectedness of what is been studied. For citizenship education—as the art of creating social cohesion—this means that the approach should aim at the interconnection between the intrapersonal and the interpersonal levels; at the latter including its interdependency with the community and the society. Important notions for the creation of social cohesion by inviting students to connect to each other, the community, society and the world—and to flourish personally within these connections—are the notions of subjectification and 15 This triad (head, heart and hands) will prove highly valuable during the course of this study.
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