The Position of Life in Education

According to A. N. Whitehead, the self and the object are unified in the natural world, and this is accompanied by the interest of the self that perceives this unity. And he defined life as the emotional enjoyment of the self, and also said that life is composed of three concepts: creativity, absolute self-enjoyment, and purpose. These three components are the activity of life that controls the intensity of emotions. Whitehead discovered the organic relation between the self and the natural world in Wordsworth's poetry. On the other hand, John Stuart Mill, who read Wordsworth's poem, fostered moral emotions, and argued that these emotions determined his character (motivation) and that character influenced his will and behavior. However, Mill's argument ignores Whitehead's concept of life, the feeling of self. One of the purposes of this study is to discuss Whitehead's concept of life in relation to moral education and art education, and the other is to explain that Whitehead's moral education of self-enjoyment is differentiated from Mill's moral education as a character education. For this purpose, the two thinkers were compared based on Wordsworth's poetry, but the advantages and disadvantages of character education and self-enjoyment education were not compared or discussed. Therefore, the conclusion summarized and presented Whitehead's life education in several ways, and finally, a suggestion about what life implies in education was provided.