To whom it may concern,

As a teacher, I endeavor to join Thomas Moore in "Redefining Education: Cultivating the Soul" (below). He offers the following comparison in his informal article with that title:

…we imagine education [as] filling our minds with stuff. The Greeks of old had a different idea that they called paideia. This was education conceived as creating a cultured person who would be a mature citizen and leader. Imagine if our focus in education was on the person rather than the things studied. We'd be concerned that a student grow up and learn how to deal with life and help others deal with it as well. This education has two purposes: self-ripening and leadership.

This enculturation is clearly not an enshrinement of individualism. Rather, it is a co-creative approach to culture-making—in which not only the student but also the learning community is built to be sustainable (self-ripening) and to help society mature (leadership). Admittedly, the concept of Paideia is problematic, as contemporary persons inherit classism, sexism, racism, and the Greek (and earlier) narrative that perfection and divinity are linked and that both may be grasped at as "excellence". But the patriarchal obsession with pre-eminence needn't continue to be interpreted literally, leading to domination and empire as arête did for the Greeks. To “learn how to deal with life and help others deal with it as well” is more and more obviously a survival necessity in a world imagined singly by its inhabitants, and must become synonymous with egalitarian and humane social policy in a time of growing military-industrial complexity. Archetypal re-definition of excellence in compassionate terms is the challenge of our time, and a myth of peace is the narrative that can help us to flourish.

My activism, research, facilitation, and teaching are primarily focused on Community as the narrative through which life-long learners problematize, process, publicize, and prevent the predations of contemporary authoritarian mythologies such as “technopoly”, fundamentalism (literalism), and globalization. A teaching philosophy alive in this context is concerned with creating an environment in which loving wisdom and learning the wisdom of love is practiced as an ongoing process which assumes the existence of difference and tension between ideas and people, defining this as creative opportunity rather than as evidence of betrayal or a fallen human condition. In this way, education has to do with learning to do conflict well, inviting difference by practicing styles of interpretation, and thereby entertaining ideas as guests rather than choosing simply what to believe or reject.

With gratitude for your time and consideration,

Brandon D. WilliamsCraig