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Education, support and the development of the whole person

different: the impact of fathers (present or absent) on the young person’s attitude and adjustment to schooling (Geddes); sexual orientation and the role which teachers and counsellors can play in the quest for a personal and public identity (Cooper); schools’ support for children coping with death and loss (Holland); the concept of emotional well-being and how it may be promoted in schools (McLaughlin); the task of the school in developing resilience in young people (Johnson); and the supreme importance of relationship in everything that a school does to promote personal, social and emotional development (Harris). This collection does not, of course, claim to cover all the challenges facing education, but it does typify the kinds of issues which teachers, counsellors and others in support roles in education find themselves dealing with, and they do remind us of the British tradition of schools (and their staff) being in loco parentis, and therefore concerned with the all-round well-being of their students. But as Harris points out, such a concept of education is one head of a monster which, at the other end, pressures schools to produce outcomes which have little to do with what it is to be a person. My purpose here is to say something about this ‘monster’, to identify some current trends and challenges, and thus provide a context for the papers which follow. Teaching the student: supporting the person The contrast is vivid indeed between the concept of the person entailed in the idea of education as promoting personhood, of facilitating learning experiences which will lead to human flourishing, and of initiation into intrinsically worthwhile activities, and the restricted and highly selective notion of the student or pupil which is in most people’s minds when they think of their experience at school or college. The former conceives the person as a whole which is more than the sum of its parts, but whose parts are manifold including the intellectual, social, emotional, moral, political, bodily and sexual selves, and (we may add) the self as a learner (Watkins, 1985,