Children’s spirituality, life and values education: cultural, spiritual and educational perspectives

‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope’. (Romans 15:13, English Standard Version)

‘Sincerity is the way to heaven. To think how to be sincere is the way of man’. (Mengzi 4A:12)¹

The International Journal of Children’s Spirituality (IJCS) being published now is in its 25th volume. Since September 1996, IJCS has been one of the leading, multidisciplinary journals related to spirituality, religion and education. Initiated by and indebted to Clive and Jane Erricker and Cathy Ota as well as under the generous auspices of the International Association of Children’s Spirituality and with enormous support from past and present editorial board members, readers and reviewers of IJCS, I am really honoured to be appointed as the new Editor-in-chief of this important journal indexed by Arts & Humanities Citation Index and other databases and references (https://www.childrenspirituality.org/publications/the-ijcs/; https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cijc20).

I would like to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to former Editors Ruth Wills, Adrian Gellel and Karen-Marie Yust for their outstanding contributions with an ambition of making the journal ‘to be a voice of a global network that may concretely have a positive impact on the everyday lives of children’ (Wills, Gellel, and Yust 2018a, p. 2).

Spirituality is a multidisciplinary field, probably not a discipline, and so its academic and professional inquiry necessitates an interdisciplinary approach with diversified paradigms and methodologies, as well as desirably needs dialogue and collaboration between researchers and practitioners for deepening our holistic understanding and enhancement of spirituality of childhood and young people (Adams, Bull, and Maynes 2016, p. 761; Adams 2017a, p. 1). The spiritual aspect of life is also described as ‘… helps[helping] individuals create frameworks of meaning and provides[providing] individuals with a way of being in the world which influences their decisions and actions. It enables them to interpret their life experiences …’ (Watson 2017, p. 10).

There are various interpretations of spirituality which is closely linked with religion or faith tradition and related to the notion of ‘religiosity’ (e.g., Eaude 2019; Van der Zee and Tirri 2009, p. 1; Robinson 2017, p. 43 & p. 46; Rossiter 2011, p. 59). However, some consider that religious is not equivalent to spiritual, especially for those who do not have faith identification (Adams, Bull, and Maynes 2016, pp. 761–762; Giesenberg 2007; Robinson 2017, p. 47; Selvam 2013).

Cole (2011, p. 5), based on Love’s (2001) and Tisdell’s (2003) research in higher education, defines spirituality to reflect ‘a child’s development of self that includes a search for meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and purpose’. To counteract the traditional cognitive psychology perspective, alternative approaches to understanding the spirituality and spiritual awareness of children which is historically situated and socially constructed covering social, inter-personal and ideological concepts based on post-formalism are promoted (Cole 2011, p. 8; Myers 1997).

While the concept of spirituality tends to be elusive, diverse and sometimes ambiguous, some key themes are frequently found in the literature for spirituality of children (Adams, Bull, and Maynes 2016, p. 768): spirituality as an inherent being; relationality, identity and connectedness (de Souza 2016a, p. 127); creativity; transcendence; spiritual experience; and awe and wonder (Department for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) 2009, p. 49). The lack of agreed-upon definition or multiple conceptions of spirituality and its association with religions could pose problems for academic research, professional dialogue and translation of ideas into practices but offer potentials for celebrating inclusivity of various cultural and religious traditions and embracing richness and depth. This echoes what Best’s (2000, p. 10) analysis of the spiritual being ‘most resistant to operational definition’ (Adams, Bull, and Maynes 2016, p. 762). My predecessor, the former Director of Centre for Religious and Spiritual Education at The Education University of Hong Kong [formerly known as The Hong Kong Institute of Education], Ping-ho Wong (2006) asserts that spiritual education in schools is associated with the cultivation of students’ moral values and virtues. With an educational research training and different sociocultural background myself and with a view of keeping the IJCS with a strong spiritual and religious foci, I try to broaden the scope of the Journal with the inclusion of life and values education as well as religious, philosophical, psychological and sociocultural perspectives and traditions both from and across the East and West. Hence, I have increased and will consider expanding gradually the editorial board membership of IJCS.

In an increasingly challenging, complicated and changing world, the moral, citizenship, spiritual and socio-emotional development of children and youngsters has attracted unprecedented global attention not only because it affects the well-being of individuals (Miller 2015, pp. 3–4) as future citizens and exerts a profound impact on an individual’s whole-person development and late adulthood but it also has a significant influence on societal (re-)construction and nation-building. I personally have experienced deep feelings and reflections over the future of Hong Kong life, religious and values education and our children during the past few months in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China where there were social incidents and also affected by the recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus or COVID-19.

Paradoxically, while there are mounting challenges of children’s well-being and mental health in many economically developed countries with an individualistic and materialistic culture, the spiritual dimension of childhood has not been given adequate attention in schools and universities where performance management and accountability prevail and educators and administrators are overloaded with tasks resulting probably in less personal touch and caring relationships with students (Adams 2017a, p. 1; Hyde, Watson, and Yust 2016).

Findings reveal that religious practices and habits could bring about better well-being and health for adolescents (Harvard Chan school of public health 2018, September 13). While spirituality and religions are to some extent associated and interrelated, the universal innate potentials of every individual with various background for spiritual development and transcendence experiences can be nurtured towards ‘spiritual multi-lingualism’ and harnessed both within and beyond the framework and practices of institutional religions (Miller 2015, pp. 191–193 & pp. 201–202; Collaborative for Spirituality in Education, u.d.).

Schools and schooling are probably one of the key platforms or processes through which young children encounter and engender spiritual and moral development. From the educational perspective, school education has a pivotal role to play in cultivating and facilitating young people to search and quest for the meaning of life as well as their personal recognition and self-actualisation (adapted from Crawford and Rossiter 2006, pp. 14–15). A language of spirituality, according to Crawford and Rossiter (2006, p. 9), is broad and inclusive. It is not only embracing a religious contribution but also incorporating a ‘spiritual dimension to living that covers values, commitments and aesthetic concerns’.

de Souza (2016b, p. 132) remarked that a child is a ‘multi-dimensional being; an individual with a rational mind that thinks, an emotional mind that feels and a spiritual mind that intuits, imagines, wonders and creates’ (de Souza 2016a, p. 123). In addition, developing the innate capabilities and empowering the potentials of children will not only bring a positive impact on the well-being of future communities but also enhance their ‘own sense of self, place and wellbeing’ (de Souza 2016b, p. 134).

In Australia, the National Catholic Education Commission (2018, pp. 16–17) suggested that the Religious Education curriculum could help learners reflect on important questions such as ‘who I am’ and ‘how I am’ and their relations with God, the world and others as well as ‘contribute to the common good’ and other dispositions. This partly resonates the relationality of spirituality which pertains to relationality with self, others, the environment and the transcendent (Robinson 2017, pp. 30–38). This also echoes what Sun (2009, pp. 3–4) in Taiwan raises ‘rensheng sanwen’ three fundamental questions about life as an individual or human being pertaining to the reason we shall life, the meaning of live and the way we could live out (personal communication, May 2020).

From the perspective of educators promoting life education, we could perhaps provide responses on and take actions for stimulating and guiding children and learners: 1. to think about the questions about life, such as ‘where am I coming from and going to?’; 2. to explore the meaning of their life; 3. to become a person with desirable qualities and competencies (e.g., to cultivate morality and virtues, to enhance spiritual and whole-person development, and to achieve unity of knowledge and action).

The connection with the environment may encompass elements of education for sustainability or sustainable education in the twenty-first century (de Souza 2016b; Lee and Efird 2014). All these multifaceted aspects or dimensions of life, spiritual and values education highlight that spirituality entails personal but not totally private experiences; it interacts relationally with and embeds an awareness of responsibility to self, others, the world and our nature (adapted from Cole 2011, p. 6).

There is thus a pressing need for the advocacy of promoting spirituality for young children and youngsters in different levels of education. However, the emphasis of spirituality, moral and values education may differ in different societies and contexts. Life education (Lau 2014; Lee and Kennedy 2019; Wong, Lee, Zhu, Ou et al. 2016) and moral and spirituality education are highlighted in schools, especially in the Greater China region. In Taiwan, there seems to be an emphasis on religious and spiritual practices related to ultimate concerns (Lau 2014, p. 174). There is also an advocacy of life and death education where students engage in experiential learning through field trips to hospices, interviews with relatives, observation of the life cycles of plants and animals in parks and zoos as well as small-group discussions with classmates (Lor 2018). In China, where religions are still under state control and partly because of the influence of Socialist and Maoist ideologies and now under the leadership of President Jinping Xi, there is no discernable religious aspect of spirituality in the curriculum (Lau 2014, p. 174). Instead, there is an emphasis on harmony, ‘shengcun’ (safety) and other core socialist values, some of which are based on Chinese traditional values under the influence of Confucianism (Gow 2017). Taking curriculum of ‘sanshengjiaoyu’ (Life, Live and Living Curriculum) as one of the examples or variants of life education in Mainland China, ‘shengming’ (life) education refers mainly to understanding the processes of life and death and respect of life (Lau 2014, p. 173). There could be ample opportunities for scholarly and professional exchanges between life education and religious education as there are a lot of remarkable programmes and research on children’s perceptions of living and dying, especially based on Christian religious education in the West (Champagne 2008). In Japan where bullying is a serious problem, there has been an attention on teaching school children the importance of ‘Inochi’ (life) as ‘education of the mind’, and in the elementary school curriculum, there is moral education such as perceptions of ‘preciousness of life’ and ‘importance of living things’, while religious education is relatively less explicitly touched upon (Nakayama 2019, pp. 5/12 & 6/12).

In some cases, schools are considered as units of change, and taking the Collaborative for Spirituality in Education (u.d.) as an example, it is proposed that a spiritually supportive school would entail the following characteristics: respect and love; moral development; purpose and meaning; wonder; self-care and inner life; caring relationships; democracy and social justice; compassion and service; joy/whole being; and connection to nature. Teachers are also key agents and role models for life and spiritual education. A research on teachers in elementary schools in 12 countries showed that a majority of respondents (around 76%) perceived spirituality as a way for children to develop their relationships and that the remainder (around 24%) regarded children’s spirituality as an opportunity for transcendence and mysticism. As far as the opinions on values of education and spirituality are concerned, the results seemed to show a diversity ranging from the connections between various spirituality values through conformity of spiritual principles and values education (about 50%) to close association between spirituality and moral education (about 22%) and spirituality as universal core concept (about 27%). The findings also showed that teachers’ views of spirituality for children’s values education might hinge on their own spiritual experiences (Pandya 2017, pp. 36–37, p. 39). Spiritual development in education is easier to be said than done. There have been suggestions on helping children develop an open mind, explore their own way of seeing without social and mental conditioning and encourage personal awareness (Duff 2003, pp. 235–236; Hay and Nye 1998, pp. 155, 163–168).

Such school development including teacher and student development possibly not only calls for spiritual leadership (Tsui et al. 2019) but also necessitates teachers’ continuous professional development in life and spiritual education, their sustained reflection on spiritual practices, valuing spiritual diversity and respect for human rights, other voices and perspectives as well as deep understanding of themselves and their students (Cole 2011, p. 10 & p. 13; Watson 2017, pp. 11–12). To conclude, it is desirable that three-pronged interactive and interdisciplinary approaches may be adopted for enhancing the spirituality area of children. The first approach is to study about children’s spirituality through interdisciplinary research and development. The second approach is to work and learn with/from our children with innate capacities and unique qualities. The third approach is to contribute our research and development endeavours and experiences to the betterment and spiritual development of our children as whole persons. As editorial team colleagues, contributors and readers of IJCS, you are cordially invited and most welcome to continuously engage in academic and professional dialogues in the fields of spirituality, life, values and spiritual education about, with/from and for our whole children.

Acknowledgements

This article reflects the author’s personal views only and does not necessarily represent the views of the UNESCO and The Education University of Hong Kong and does not commit the respective organisations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. W-t, Chan. (1963). Translation of Mengzi 4A:12, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p.74.