Challenges to education today are part of a wider cultural context. Dewey, Heidegger, and certain Russian thinkers have remarkably similar diagnoses of our post-Cartesian reductive condition. In education this complex appears as "educational materialism." In contrast, a "sophic education" would be similar to Bulgakov's "sophic economy." The discovery of Chauvet Cave shows an original human situation where the practical and the spiritual were integrated and "sophic." For Americans, Plymouth Colony's commitment to "the general good" and Roger Williams's advocacy of democracy and freedom of conscience were also nonreductive and suggest a direction for an integrative, sophic education.