94 Chapter 2 (Nederveen Pieterse, 1997, p. 1). He also brought in the Tao, pleading for a ‘Tao of development’. The Tao is a metaphysical concept from Eastern philosophy (Confucianism) that binds human reasoning to what is eternal and cannot be put into words. The Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1944) made use of it in his well-known work The Abolition of Man to correct the strictly linear approach of rationalistic thinking and scientific positivism. Nederveen Pieterse (1997) connected it to the merging of fact and value, science and art, Buddhism and governance, Qabalah and Judaism, Christian mysticism and Christendom, Sufism and Islam. It all boils down to correcting pure analytical reason by paying more attention to the dynamics of bigger wholes. For critical holism in the social sciences, this means that ‘identifying with the whole means that development can no longer be simply geared to material aims and achievements but includes nonmaterial dimensions, as in cultural development’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 1997, p. 27). In a plea for holistic individualism—meaning a synthesis between modern liberalism with its attention for individual freedom and community values— Gracia Calandín (2010, p. 205) counted the French philosopher Alexís de Toqueville, due to his criticism of individualism and the atomic society of Hobbes and Locke, among the thinkers who promoted the value of greater wholes. He also referenced the German philosopher and theologian Johan Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) due to his romantic individualism and his critique of secular reason, as suggested by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2007). It was from Taylor’s work that Gracia Calandín borrowed the term holistic individualism. In the field of education, holism was often associated with the work of the broad range of Reform pedagogues (Montessori, Dewey, Steiner, etc.) and their concentration on action-oriented principles, humanistic view of learners and children, and integrative teaching approach (Finkbeiner, 2013). 2.3 WCE AS AN EDUCATIONAL REACTION TO REDUCTIONISM This section studies WCE as a recent proposal for a more holistic approach to the student in basic education, including a vision for whole teacher education as a holistic approach to trainee teachers who must learn to work according to a WCE vision. The first problem to solve is that WCE lacks a clear definition and can only be studied as a phenomenon based on the growing consensus
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