Against (the use of the term) ‘spiritual education’

Abstract

The paper argues that the term ‘spiritual education’ is completely otiose. It tries to show that its application in both religious and secular contexts is deeply problematic. If there is any such form of knowledge or understanding, it is difficult to see how children are to be initiated into it without being indoctrinated. The paper focuses on a number of recent philosophical attempts to defend the use of the term within religious and non‐religious contexts, and attempts to highlight the respects in which these cannot possibly succeed unless and until the concept is shown to possess features by reference to which we might distinguish it from other forms of knowledge and understanding with a rightful place on the curriculum. Until it can be demonstrated that there is any such thing as spiritual knowledge, with its own subject matter and conceptual apparatus, providing some sort of basis on which spiritual education might proceed, we have reason to be sceptical about the coherence of the whole enterprise of attending to children’s spiritual education and their so‐called spiritual development.

Keywords:

• Spiritual education
• Spiritual development

Notes

1. See Marples, R. (2005).

2. My reasons for scepticism are more fully developed in my article ‘Is religious education possible?’ (Marples, 1978). Michael Hand is one of many writers on this matter with whom I would part company. He is, I believe, too sanguine about the possibility of spiritual education (by which he means an ‘education in the activities of prayer, worship and contemplation’) taking place without a presupposition of religious belief on the part of the learner, in that he provides no justification for his claim that children can learn what prayer, worship and religious contemplation ‘are all about [as well as] different kinds of prayer and different kinds of answers to prayer’, nor for his assertion that they can ‘come to an empathetic understanding of the intense religious feelings that give rise to spontaneous worship, and of the quieter sense of holiness to which ritual worship gives rise, [as well as being able to] experiment with those contemplative techniques by which the mystic silences the noise of the world in effort to hear the voice of God.’ (Hand, 2003, pp. 398–399; emphasis added.) I do not know if he believes that all of this should be provided in common schools, but Carr is at one with McLaughlin in the appropriateness of providing it in faith schools ‘for the offspring of parents who explicitly desire such initiation for their children’ (1996, p. 176). For an excellent discussion of some of the confusion surrounding the problems associated with RE from a secular standpoint, see Winch (1998, Chapter 13).

3. Hemming, J. (1970) Individual morality (London, Panther), and Hutcheson, P. (1994) ‘A humanist perspective on spirituality’, in Humanist in Canada, Spring.

4. As if this were not confusing enough, Rodger cites Clive Beck’s list of key spiritual characteristics by reference to which we may be said to identify ‘spiritual people’ which are supposedly ‘independent of their embededness and expression within any particular religion or way of life …’(Rodger, 1996, p. 48). These include: ‘awareness’, ‘breadth of outlook’, ‘a holistic outlook’, ‘integration’, ‘wonder’, ‘gratitude’, ‘hope’, ‘courage’, ‘energy’, ‘detachment’, ‘acceptance’, ‘love’, and ‘gentleness’. If this is not an arbitrary hotchpotch then what is?

5. Although he himself admits, ‘when educational theorists talk about "spiritual development" they are usually either struggling to take a last dip in the shallows of the ebbing tide of faith, or engaged in the practice of aggrandising the ordinary, or else doing both at once. The appreciation of art and music and the cultivation of a concern for the feelings of others are worthwhile educational activities, but their point and value is made less and not more clear by describing them as parts of “spiritual development”.’ (Haldane, 2003, p. 12).

6. Haldane says: ‘the content of the metaphysical belief must condition the character of the resulting demeanour. The Christian will move towards familiar religious practices, and the reductive physicalist whose metaphysics is not so different from the Old Stoics may’, he continues somewhat mysteriously, ‘wish to explore their spirituality’ (Haldane, 2003, p. 23).

7. Hand is swift to remind us that elsewhere Carr denies that spiritual truths such as those mentioned are reducible to neither moral truths nor to religious truths. (See Carr, 1995, p. 91.)

8. On some of the complexities involved in the whole notion of forgiveness and its educational implications see Patricia White’s excellent discussion (White, 2002).

9. See, for example, the National Curriculum Council’s 1993 discussion paper, where the ‘spiritual’ is characterised as ‘having to do with the universal search for individual identity …’ (p. 2). In addition to the capacity to experience awe and wonder and to be moved by beauty and injustice, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority in 1996 identified ‘self‐knowledge as having something to do with spiritual development.

10. See, for example Charles Taylor (1989) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1968).