Kelsey (1993), in his work ‘Between Athens and Berlin’, draws our attention back to the classic educational deliberation of ‘student’ or ‘teacher’ centred educational approaches. His pedagogic debate is perhaps more reminiscent of a continuum between ancient Greek Paideia –holistic education aimed at the creation of good citizenry and that of Germanic Wissenschaft -technical expertise, whereby modern educational practices might be conceivably mapped somewhere between one extreme and the other. The burden of this paper is to explore the space along this continuum to locate an optimal position whereby instructional best practice might flourish through the balance of what may be described as a combination of excellence in a discipline (systematic education) or a cultivation of the soul.