The great Greek philosopher Plato once described education as seeking to ‘engage and turn the soul’ towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. It is not unlike Ignatius Loyola’s famous dictum from the Spiritual Exercises which claims that ‘it is not an abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul but rather an interior understanding and savouring of things’. Education as engagement, as a process of learning to savour what moves and affects our hearts and minds, is essentially a spiritual journey for us all. The quest to understand and provide a conceptual framework for this inner world of education is the timely focus of Professor Roslyn Arnold’s latest book, Empathic Intelligence: Teaching, Learning, Relating.
For many years Roslyn Arnold has been a leader in English-teaching in Australia, principally in New South Wales and more recently as a professor in the School of Education at the University of Tasmania. Steeped in the Loreto tradition of education, and therefore attuned to the emphasis Ignatius Loyola placed on the whole person—mind, heart, and will—entering the learning experience, Arnold has spent a lifetime helping people to understand that thoughts and feelings are inseparable companions in our development as learners. The genesis of this fine book is, in her own words, ‘as long as my life’, and we readers are the beneficiaries of this lifelong research.
As one interested in the spiritual formation of staff and students, I found this book valuable for the underpinning of research methodology and knowledge it provides for many of the themes which I occasionally teach—enthusiasm, imagination, reflection, empathy, care, respect, and story. Indeed, the author concludes her book by saying that empathic intelligence, as a theory of relatedness integrating thought and feeling, ‘is a poetic theory that works between the lines and in the spaces housing the ineffable’. It was no surprise, therefore, to read that several of the author’s empathic educator colleagues ‘have drawn attention to the understanding and practice of empathy by spiritual writers’. Education as engagement, as ‘turning the soul’, is very much a process of spiritual formation.
The overseas research cited by Arnold in Empathic Intelligence confirms the findings of our own Australian practitioners like Professor Ken Rowe—that the quality of the classroom teacher is the single most influential ingredient in the learning mix. In an era when the role of the teacher has been somewhat demeaned in the wider community, this is an important