Educating Angels

[Tony]

Educating Angels makes a forceful moral and practical case for explicitly and consequently embracing the purpose of empowering students’ pursuit of happiness as each sees it in our schools. It explains the truly profound difference we might make in the lives of our children if we pursued this purpose with insight and commitment. The book offers a blueprint for implementing what amounts to a new, well-developed philosophy of education. Most of the approaches that make up the blueprint have been tried with quite promising results. They include the skills of inner awareness and ongoing inquiry into the nature, sources, and means of happiness that would richly inform students’ pursuit however they conceive it. I show how to integrate the approaches into an overarching pedagogy of clear, singular purpose that would constitute a transformation of education as we know it.

Why “angels”? I argue that if we saw the worth of angels in our children, we would be more inclined to treat them as ends in themselves rather than means to other ends as we do now. Empowering their pursuit of happiness is the practical meaning of treating them as ends.