Keith Tudor
Keynote Speech
“The Person, Education, and Politics in Person-Centred Psychology”
Description
This keynote speech will aim to strike some key notes on the theme of the conference, that is, person, paideia (education), and politeia (politics). Taking inspiration from Pericles’s funeral oration that we need to start by acknowledging the ancestors, and the Māori whakataukī (proverb) ka mua ka muri which suggests that we need to walk backwards into the future, this speech draws on a critical appreciation of our person-centred heritage to assure the future.
Despite the centrality of the person to person-centred psychology, the concept of the person is under-theorised. Expanding on Schmid’s identification of two strands in Rogers’ thinking about the person (the individualistic and the relational), I will explore the contextual person, that is a person who is inevitably embedded in a number of contexts, not least their culture.
Rogers was one of the very few founders of an approach to psychology to articulate his approach to education, yet many person-centred educators appear unaware of this or the personal, psychological, and political implications of promoting the freedom to learn. I will revisit the radicalism of Rogers’ ideas about education, including that of educating or training therapists, and compare this to the operational evidence of training manifested in neo-liberal institutions of education.