Children will not thrive psychologically until they learn to dedicate themselves to purposes that go beyond their own egoistic desires. They will not thrive unless they have acquired a living sense of what some religious traditions have called transcendence: a faith in, and devotion to, concerns that are considered larger than the self. In a child’s world, the clearest example of this is a sense of service to others. But it also may include beliefs about profound matters such as the meaning and purpose of life.
A sense of transcendence, an orientation of service to others, an intimation of life’s deeper meaning are all elements of the capacities that I refer to when I write of children’s need for spirituality. The notion of spiritual needs has not been a fashionable one in scientific or professional circles, in part because of its connections with religiosity. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 81]
The low esteem in which teachers have been traditionally held in the United States continues today, and low esteem is usually accompanied by low pay. It is further suggested that the reason for the disdain of teachers is the detachment of American education from the “sacred”, i.e. the lack of any deeply felt social consciousness of the aims of education. [Jules Henry, Jules Henry on Education, Vintage / Random House, 1972, p. 120]
When one considers in its length and in its breadth the importance of this question of the education of a nation’s young, the broken lives, the defeated hopes, the national failures, which result from the frivolous inertia with which it is treated, it is difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage. …
We can be content with no less than the old summary of educational ideal which has been current at any time from the dawn of our civilization. The essence of education is that it be religious.
Pray, what is religious education?
A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. [Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Williams and Norgate, 1955, pp. 22-23]
Those who use the term “religious” without any supernatural or doctrinal connotations, like John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead in some of their writings, do not call for the introduction of religion as a specific subject of instruction in the curriculum. To them a truly religious education has an entirely different meaning. It is found wherever knowledge is so taught that it heightens the sense of human responsibility for the inescapable decisions which men must make. “Religious” here is synonymous with “moral” in its broadest sense. It is a pervasive feeling and attitude nurtured by the whole educational enterprise when, freed from superstition, it devotes itself to truth in the service of man. It is a form of natural piety not merely towards existence but to the ideal possibilities of a better existence. [Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man: A New Perspective, 1963, Wipf and Stock, 2019, pp. 159-160]
[There are] three incredibly important things that give meaning to life, each of which that has been more or less trashed by our current civilization.
The first is our relationship with society, our being bound to one another … the business of sharing one’s life with people who share your values, whom you can trust, whom you can confide in, whom you can eat with, play with, and generally share a culture … [with] common rituals that we all understand. That is one thing, and it is extremely difficult to find any such coherence in modern society. …
The second is our relationship with the natural world, in all its complexity and beauty. For most people, until very recently, it was almost impossible for their lives not to be enmeshed with the surrounding natural world. Only in the last, perhaps, 150 years or so have we become isolated from nature. And this is a really important divorce. …
And the third is a relationship to something beyond this … it is the transcendent realm, or the realm of the spiritual or the sacred. A lot of people now they’ve been trained to think that this is a rather negligible issue, that it really is a kind of vestige of something that hangs over from a primitive time when people weren’t properly educated and they invented superstitions to try and explain life. That is such a terrible diminution and travesty. [Ian McGilchrist, “The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis,” YouTube, uploaded by Dr. Iain McGilchrist, 19 Dec. 2023, 1:03:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA5GV-XmwtM]
In a literal sense, the most dispiriting result of our myths about children is that we withhold spiritual messages from them. Our reticence springs from the myth of childhood incompetence. … We do not trust the child’s intelligence or attention span enough to engage the child in serious consideration of transcendent values. We refrain from communicating other people’s high ideals to them—or when we do, feel almost apologetic about it. In fact, children are fascinated by the timeless enigmas of life and death, are not at all threatened by talk of them, and are eager to be drawn into discussion about them. … [C]hildren are openly receptive to spiritual ideas and long for transcendent truths that can nourish their sense of purpose and provide them with a moral mission in life. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 25]
[College students] might say, “Well I’m doing this practically, because I need a degree to get a job.” Which … is perfectly reasonable. … [I]t’s a good fragmentary ambition. But their core is dying for something deeper than that. And they’re coming to university the way that you enter a cathedral properly—if you enter it properly—they come prayerfully. They’re hoping—but they won’t talk to anyone about it—they’re hoping: “God, I hope that what I need is here.” And if you provide that, then they’re just overwhelmed by it. And then they’re motivated to work and to move and to put themselves together. [Jordan B. Peterson, “Higher Ed and Our Cultural Inflection Point,” YouTube, uploaded by Jordan B. Peterson, 21 Feb. 2019, 1:21:05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlgG8C1GydA]
The cultural technique of deep attention emerged precisely out of ritual and religious practices. It is no accident that “religion” is derived from relegere: to take note. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is a place of the highest degree of attention. According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul does not pray. [Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, translated by Danial Steuer, 2019, Polity Press, 2020, pp. 5-7]
Attention is the most profound source of meaning that we can have. … The granularity, the particularity, the pleasure of the world depends on slowing down and looking harder. [Richard Powers, “Meet Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stanford Professor,” YouTube, uploaded by David Perell, 9 Oct. 2024, 1:14:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUDlpMN-f5w]
The goal of education, according to Nietzsche, is “noble culture.” … that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention, casting a long and slow gaze. [This] represents the “first preliminary schooling for spirituality.” One must learn “not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts.” By the same token, “every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus”—the inability to set a no in opposition. … [The contemplative life] offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli. Instead of surrendering the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion. [Byun-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, translated by Erik Butler, 2010, Stanford UP, 2015, p. 21]
[F]ocus is not some peripheral aspect of life, nor is it simply a tool to become more productive at work. It is part of the lens through which the whole of reality is interpreted. To lose the ability to focus is to limit the ways in which we can experience the world. … [Focus] is an overarching skill that enhances almost every aspect of our existence … [W]hen we come to teach the next generation about what makes a fulfilling life, we [should] include focus among its most central pillars.
The word “focus” originally comes from the Latin term for a hearth or a fireplace. And maybe this best sums up what I would like for a new conception of focus: Something at the heart of the dwelling of life, that brings light and warmth when aflame, and when lying unlit and untended, leaves us cold, dims our illumination, and will not revive itself until we actively decide to spark it again. Something that requires fuel and care, and can grow from a small flicker to a glorious roaring blaze, if we decide to make it a focal point of our value system. [Joe Folley, “How Distraction Will Destroy Your Life,” YouTube, uploaded by Unsolicited Advice, 19 Apr. 2025, 1:09:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxJkj-C4vjs]
Ritual and ceremony are now often said to be necessary for the family, and they are now lacking. The family, however, has to be a sacred unity believing in the permanence of what it teaches, if its ritual and ceremony are to express and transmit the wonder of the moral law, which it alone is capable of transmitting and which makes it special in a world devoted to the humanly, all too humanly, useful. [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon & Schuster, 1987, pp. 57-58]
Ritual can be defined as the structured repetition of important concepts, made resonant through the help of formal pageantry and ceremony. Ritual takes thoughts that are known but unattended and renders them active and vivid once more in our distracted minds. Unlike standard modern education, ritual doesn’t aim to teach us anything new; it wants to lend compelling form to what we believe we already know. It wants to turn our theoretical allegiances into habits. …
[T]he best rituals don’t so much impose upon us ideas that we are opposed to but take us back to ideas that we are in deep agreement with yet have allowed to lapse: They are an externally mandated route to inner authenticity.
In the course of secularizing our societies, we may have been too hasty in doing away with rituals. An education system alive to the wisdom of religions would perceive the role of structured lessons that constantly repeat what we know full well already, and yet so arduously and grievously forget. A good “school” shouldn’t tell us only things we’ve never heard of before; it should be deeply interested in rehearsing all that is theoretically known yet practically forgotten. [Alain de Botton et al., The School of Life: An Emotional Education, The School of Life, 2019, pp. 14-15]
We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. …
Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, [rituals] stabilize life. … Relentless consumption surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life. Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways …
[In the modern world,] perception is never at rest: it has lost the capacity to linger. …
Rituals are characterized by repetition. …
Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition. [Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, translated by Danial Steuer, 2019, Polity Press, 2020, pp. 2-8]
The cause of this decay of the family’s traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth. … In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and—as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible—provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon & Schuster, 1987, p. 58]
The moral education that is today supposed to be the great responsibility of the family cannot exist if it cannot present to the imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonists in the drama of moral choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such choice, and the despair that results when the world is “disenchanted.” Otherwise, education becomes the vain attempt to give children “values.” [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon & Schuster, 1987, pp. 60-61]
The curse that has been laid on humanity, in fable and in fact, is, that by the sweat of its brow shall it live. But reason and moral intuition have seen in this curse the foundation for advance. The early Benedictine monks rejoiced in their labours because they conceived themselves as thereby made fellow-workers with Christ.
Stripped of its theological trappings, the essential idea remains, that work should be transfused with intellectual and moral vision and thereby turned into a joy, triumphing over its weariness and its pain. Each of us will re-state this abstract formulation in a more concrete shape in accordance with his private outlook. … However you phrase it, it remains the sole real hope of toiling humanity; and it is in the hands of technical teachers, and of those who control their spheres of activity, so to mould the nation that daily it may pass to its labours in the spirit of the monks of old. [Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Williams and Norgate, 1955, pp. 67-68]
The task for education, and the meaning of freedom in the new society, should now be even more clear. Education would teach the individual how “the world-life would miss his deed.” Nothing less. …
We must also answer the question … “How do I develop my own personal and unique powers to their fullest?” …
How better to awaken the interests of broad masses of students than by making their own life and freedom the stake of their education? Their own lives become their “intellectual positions,” to expand and defend, to sally out from in search of richer and richer nourishment. How better to expand the base of “scholarship” and “expertise” than by making life itself the problem frame of knowledge, by giving to each the task of throwing light on his own liberation, of weighing and choosing from accumulated wisdom for the purposes of his own soul? [Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy, George Braziller, 1967, pp. 216-219, 233-234]
[A]n education which intensifies awareness … is what an Existentialist would strive for. …
Intensity of awareness is not to be thought of as a kind of abstract, general principle. It is always personal. … It refers to [a person’s] awareness of himself and of the necessity for him to decide how he wants to live his own life, his awareness of the need to decide which values he wants to live by. In practical terms, it refers to his awareness of his own precarious role as a baseless chooser who cannot escape choosing, and therefore creating, his own personal answer to all normative and moral questions that come up in his classroom or in his experience outside of school.
A youngster who becomes fully aware of himself as the shaper of his own life, aware of the fact that he must take charge of that life and make it his own statement of what a human being ought to be—this is the individual who has been brought beyond mere intellectual discipline, beyond mere subject matter, beyond mere enculturation … [Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education: What it Means, 1966, Waveland, 1990, p. 111]
Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn the liberating influence of beauty for your own personal joy and for the profit of the community to which your later work will belong. [Albert Einstein, The Expanded Quotable Einstein, edited by Alice Calaprice, Princeton UP, 2000, p. 68]
Fidelity, [Erik Erikson] defines as “the strength of disciplined devotion. It is gained in the involvement of youth in such experiences as reveal the essence of the era they are to join—as the beneficiaries of its tradition, as the practitioners and innovators of its technology, as renewers of its ethical strength, as rebels bent on the destruction of the outlived, and as deviants with deviant commitments.” [“Youth: Fidelity and Diversity,” 1960] [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America: Growth and Acquiescence, Vintage / Random House, 1965, pp. 10-11]
Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our main conclusion. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but very decidedly of selection—and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must be orthodox. … Out of all this throng of theories it must somehow select a theory; out of all these thundering voices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all this awful and aching battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it must manage somehow to trace and to track a star. [G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1927, pp. 275-276, https://archive.org/details/whatswrongwithwo00ches/mode/2up]
Related:
– Why is cultivating gratitude in education important?
– What do we teach via our character and the environments we create?