| The modern idea of educating the whole child has its roots in Rousseau's Emile (1762). For Rousseau, a "proper" education for a child would be one that involves the "entire" child--physical, emotional, social as well as cognitive self. This view of education became part of the Progressive education movement that began in the late nineteenth century and continues, in part, to the present. Essentially, this movement claims that by educating the whole child, the child would be better prepared as a self-determined individual to contribute to a more just social order consistent with the American democratic ideal. Opposed to an hierarchial, privileged, controlled, other-determined social order, the American democratic ideal is characterized by freedom for each individual to construct their own future within the context of a just commonweal. In this regard, the system of education must not simply claim consistency with these values through its explicit discourse, in this case educating the whole child, but its schooling practices must likewise reflect these claims. This study is a Postmodern inquiry into these claims.;Modern education research is grounded in the notion that human behaviors can ultimately be explained in terms of an objective (transcendental) reality. Postmodern inquiry assumes that meanings never escape discourse; therefore, explanations of human behaviors are always subjective, conditioned by human values. In this regard, Michel Foucault, through his historical analytic studies of institutional practices, demonstrated that power precedes speech as discourse. Jacques Derrida, through his methods of text deconstruction, demonstrates that text/discourses have multiple, alternative meanings. The purpose of this inquiry was threefold; (1) to develop a framework to examine current education discourse whose foundation is rooted in and communicated through a notion of a progressive continuous history; (2) to determine through a Foucauldian historical analysis the nature of any transformations of the notion of whole child from its Rousseauian origin to its use in the current middle school discourse; and (3) if such transformations occurred, then to deconstruct these transformations through Derridian operations of language.;Historical analysis of the transformation of the whole child discourse within three eras revealed the arbitrary nature of linguistic connections used to join the discourses. Deconstruction of both the texts of explicit claims and practices within and between eras revealed transformations in meaning through both the "action" and "process" of supplementarity as addition. At present, whole child schooling practices appear more consistent with the notion of other-determined rather than a self-determined individual. |
