2: The heart

Abstract

This entry reconstructs the history of the heart and its significance for education in the Christian-Western tradition. It begins with Augustine's conception of the heart as a text inscribed by God and to be read by humans, and continues with humanism and the confessional reactions in which (auto-)educational ideas were developed in opposition to the notion of an alienated and desperate heart. With the seventeenth century, the heart disappears from philosophy, but is invoked in Catholic and Pietist piety movements, only to move to the center of patriotism and education after 1750 in Swiss Reform Protestantism, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi. The entry ends with the paradox of modern education, which, although it invokes the authority of the two Swiss thinkers and draws on them, ignores their focus on the heart and instead places the soul, and thus also psychology, at the center of its reflection, research, and theory formation.