In Defence of the Human in Education

The title incorporates the assumption that the ‘human’ in education is being threatened by certain processes. The guiding questions are: What are these processes and what constitutes the ‘human’ in education? Which activities characteristically performed by human beings are so central that they seem definitive of a life that is truly human and which changes or transitions in educational thinking are compatible with the continued existence of a being as a member of human kind and which are not? It is argued that the present debate on education is still dominated by the language of performance and global economic comparison. Educational practice must and will have to help the individual through a confluence of insights in his/her journey through life to form independent judgement.

Isolde Woolley, Mag. Dr., teaches English Language and Literature at the Kirchliche Padagogische Hochschule – Edith Stein (KPH-ES) and the Meinhardinum in Stams (Austria). She worked and studied for fourteen years in England and still shares her time between England and Austria.