12: “Sickness Is Now ‘Out There’” (2012)

In these passages from James Hillman’s “Anima Mundi: Returning of Soul to The World,” I believe there is a cluster of insights that are key to the well-being of education itself and which give clear voice to what seems, sometimes, to be a systemic blindness in our profession. If we leave “our very idea of world” fragmented, degraded, and brutalized, knowledge of that world becomes fragmented, degraded, and brutalized. If this happens, our understanding of the disciplines of knowledge themselves become fragmented, degraded, and brutalized. And thus the world into which we are educating new teachers and into which they, in turn, are educating their students, will be degraded, retarded, and brutal. In one last awful turn, if I become educated in such a world, I, too, must become degraded, retarded, and brutal in order to live and survive in such a world. Either that or I must retract and retreat into subjective realities more sensitive and beautiful than the world that surrounds me. In such sadly understandable retraction and retreat, the well-being of the world is abandoned, its degradation thus deepens which, in turn, deepens our cause for retreat.