If you Google “whole child,” you will get more than 185 million (yes, million) links directing you to sites as varied as franchise opportunities for enrichment programs, help with anger management for adolescents, and a book on integrating conventional and alternative medicine. Clearly, lots of people have their own definitions of “whole child.”
We each bring our own unique vision of the whole child. Sometimes we even personalize that vision to reflect a specific young person or our own experience. I'm not recommending you abandon that very personal vision. In fact, we all need one before we can act collectively to craft a communal vision. If we can't see the whole child—if we can't see how our institutions and communities nurture and support that vision—we won't be able to make the vision real for others.
I am reminded of John Dewey's admonition: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his or her own child, that must the community want, for all of its children. Any other idea is narrow and unlovely.” Each of us must care about everyone else's children. We must come to see that the well-being of our own children is intimately linked to the well-being of all other people's children. The good life for our own children can only be secured if it is also secured for all other people's children.
So, is it possible to create a new definition, a new road map toward the destination of the whole child? If we are walking where 185 million people think they have gone before, can we leave a distinct footprint on ground already so well trodden? I believe we can and we must. We have an opportunity to bring coherence to our concern and put language to our map. Think about that for a moment. We can reshape the conversation around learning by clearly articulating the desired end state and by marking the path to reach that end state.
“Children are born whole. It is endemic of our current fragmented map and landscape of learning and schooling that we are using the word ‘whole’ to modify children,” stated educator Stephanie Pace Marshall recently. “Sadly, under our current schooling structures, we do need to advocate for whole children. The challenge to raise test scores, for instance, may cause us to focus too narrowly on core academic subjects at the expense of developing the whole child” (Marshall, 2006). Too often, schools and colleges lag far behind our society in the skills and knowledge they offer to support productive, engaged lives; the depth and breadth of their curricula; the diversity and skills of their faculty and the nature of their instructional techniques; how they are funded and how those resources are used; and the research questions they are asking (Levine, 2005).
We are stuck in the inertia of an old paradigm. Our challenge is to move away from a mechanistic paradigm to one that is organic and interdependent.
The prevailing question before us is not about what children need to succeed. The research is clear. They need supportive environments that nurture their social, emotional, physical, moral, civic, and cognitive development. Instead, the question becomes, who bears responsibility for creating this environment?
Educating the whole child requires the whole community. As Martin Blank and Amy Berg (2006) state, “This means bringing the community into the school and having the school see the community as a resource. Educators cannot operate on the assumption that the school has all the expertise necessary to improve student learning. Instead, they must collaborate with partners who demonstrate that they are committed to results that are important to the school and to the community. Schools are then transformed into much more than just a portfolio of programs and services. They become a powerful agent for change in the lives of their students and their families” (p. 10).
Ultimately, the culture of the institution and its success as an educational system depend on the strength of the relationships among its community members. An institution that supports the whole child must be populated, therefore, by whole adults who are committed to building supremely humane, challenging, and nurturing relationships, not only with students and their parents but also with one another.
In the end, we might expect our educational system and communities to generate whole children only if we act, not talk; only if we act in fundamentally different, not marginally different, ways; and only if we act as whole schools, whole communities, and whole nations to ensure a deservedly brighter future for our children—who are at once both the hope and the prospect for humankind.