Spirituality and Schooling

The spiritual lives of children and adults are considered of utmost importance in education in many cultures. Psychiatrist Robert Coles noted in his travels that children throughout the world often expressed concern about matters spiritual. Yet when it comes to public schooling in countries such as the United States, spirituality is seldom discussed in official discourse. Public schools and universities (and many private educational institutions) are expected to focus on what is directly important to the purposes of the secular aspects of life. In mass societies, the religious aspects of education are often left to the family and religious communities, rather than to the common schools, which are required to emphasize those aspects of living that are considered essential to all youth, regardless of sectarian religious preferences; in multicultural societies, emphasis on matters related to religion can be highly divisive.

Nevertheless, the spiritual lives of youth and adults have been the major focus of many educators throughout time. An example is the legacy of educator-philosopher Rudolph Steiner, who designed a school for the workers of the Waldorf Cigarette Company. Waldorf schools have spread to many parts of the world, and in addition, retreats, such as ashrams and monasteries, some founded in ancient times, continue to serve the spiritual needs of devotees of a religious tradition; the spiritual is an important part of cultural transmission in the survival of cultures. John Dewey, who has greatly influenced world thinking about formal schooling and its relationship to democracy, recognized that all human beings have a religious component to experience, but questioned the claims often made about how matters spiritual are specifically linked to the doctrinal truths claimed by particular religious sects or institutions, including the existence of the supernatural. Matters spiritual were relevant only when they were part of the pragmatic and continuing project of furthering the well-being of mankind, which was possible to sciences based on experience, he thought. His naturalistic secular humanism has met with criticism from many religious leaders.

Spiritual matters are often associated with religious creeds, which vary from one group to another; even within a particular doctrine, there may be sectarian differences. Yet spirituality common to all faiths is based in a mystical sense of a [Page 750]personal relationship to an entity larger than one's self. Because this ontological sense is based in the universe of relations, it is not material and often thus difficult to prove through a science based on substance and matter. One of the best modern statements of the fundamental relational basis of spirituality comes from Martin Buber, whose book I and Thou emphasized the fundamental, existential relation that arises from the ontology of being; the awareness of being itself awakens persons to the dialogic relation to other beings that include not only persons, but also other individual organisms.

The awareness of the holistic presence of other beings also extends to the mysterious and “eternal thou,” which is defined as “God” in the religions that historically emerged from Judaism—including Islam and Christianity, and in other religious traditions that include Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and the many forms of indigenous religions. Relations are difficult to describe because description tends to favor the tendency to convert relations into things, into what Buber calls the relation of I-It.

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