‘건강한 신체에 건전한 정신이 깃든다’: 교육사상사적 고찰

Abstract

The motto ‘A sound mind in a sound body’exercises its authority and influence in the history of Western education for more than two thousand years. This maxim is a sentence in which the essence of life is contained and expresses the educational ideal of human beings in a compact form. Also, its worth has not faded and is still on everybody’s lips even today. But the meaning of this motto has implicated various contents according to historical situations and social conditions. In the result of that it has had diverse education meanings. This expression has formally twice appeared on the documents in the Western history. The poet of the Roman empire, Juvenalis mentions in his Satire 10 what mankind should pray for is“ a sound mind in a sound body”as he examines the ambitions of mankind and shows that they all lead to disappointment or danger. John Locke begins his Some Thoughts Concerning Education with this sentence. Locke says, it is“ a short, but full description of a happy state in this world.” But if we go back to the origin of the thinking in this motto, we meet the ideal of life for which the ancient Greek searched. The perfect development and the harmonious combination of body and mind(kalokagathia) is none other than the core of the Greek culture and the educational ideal at the same time. They imposed the task of developing the body on gymnastike and of developing the mind on the mousike. That means gymnastike and mousik are a epitome of the Greek education. This study aims to show that this motto implicates various educational meanings in each period. More particularly, the main purposes of this study are to explain the meaning of‘ sound body’and‘ sound mind’, the desirable relationship between both.