Holistic and Moral /Pastoral Education: How Related?

   I have been reading a book by Sally Power called The Pastoral and the Academic (1996) which talks about how different schools in Britain have embraced two sometimes conflicted categories of schooling: one is called "academic", which embraces the traditional subjects of school (reading, geography, etc) while the other is referred to as the "pastoral", and it refers to caring approaches in schools. The latter covers "life skills", moral education, and general education for "goodness" or "virtue". Reading this book has made me reflect on similar experiences I had in grade school and junior high school around the differences between school subjects and so-called "preparation for life", the latter mostly being covered under guidance counselling. Like most students back in the time, I hardly appreciated guidance counselling because there was never a grade attached to it. In addition, there were no particular assignments related to "moral" education or dilemmas in schools, besides the occasional debate in science classes of an ethical nature, or discussion about "family planning" in health class. I sometimes wonder why schools nowadays are reluctant to grade students in these areas, though  also sense that it has to do with school as a place where students work out value neutral 'facts' rather than working out an ethical lifestyle or perspective.
   Holistic and "spiritual" education might be thought of as a North American equivalent to moral and "pastoral" education in the British context. Both areas focus on educating the "whole child" (Powers, p.45-48), which means not pigeonholing children into streamlined subject areas but trying to educate all of a person's capacities for personhood. I think that unlike traditional moral education, however, holistic education does not approach whole child learning from a strictly moral lens. Instead of indoctrinating children with specific moral perspectives, holistic education focuses on the inherent value of children's experiences. I am almost tempted to refer to David Hume's notion of the moral self as something so natural that we can feel in our bones what are the best social arrangements simply through exposure to them. Rather than learning morals through indoctrination, the holistic approach sees children as inherently good and "moral" but in need of the opportunities to discover these qualities through free play and creative endeavors.
    Holistic education is also reluctant to use categories such as "good" and "bad" to relate or understand children's ways of being or experiences. This is because part of what holistic education tries to address and even resist is the tendency to label or constrain children to prejudiced notions of what good and bad are. This isn't necessarily to detour into moral relativism, but it's to say that approaches to living a good life need to be sensitive to the natural discovery and unfolding of a child's abilities and strengths. A child who internalizes the message that they are "bad" for doing certain things does not get a chance to learn what happens inside when they are doing socially inappropriate behavior. Holistic education allows children to reflect on both thinking and feeling sides, thus allowing for a fuller accounting for moral experiences.
   The more I think about it,the more reluctant I am to say that both moral and holistic approaches reach for the same thing (that is, the whole child experience). While both approaches depart from subject area specialization as the sole form of education, each has its own unique point of departure. Even though I see connections between the two strands (moral and holistic), I would be cautious to join them together or conflate the two.

Powers, S. (1996). The Pastoral and the Academic: Conflict and Contradiction in the Curriculum. London: Cassell.