ABSTRACT
In this final chapter I attend to how we often live in a tension between our reflections on life with children and our actual life with children. The chapter thus asks the pedagogical question: How can we exercise the contemplative practices of philosophy and the humanities in ways that actually have an impact on our souls and help us hear the soul of the children we encounter without simply ending in disembodied theorising or empty metaphysics? As a response to this question the chapter turns to Simone Weil’s notion of attention as an alternative to theoretical forms of pedagogical reflection. As an example of this kind of attention I read Plato’s account of how Socrates has a dream that asks him to begin to compose poetry. The Socratic attention to his dream portrays the form of poetic pedagogy of the soul that this book is meant to advocate.
