Promoting the spiritual development of sick children

This paper considers whether there are aspects of spiritual pedagogy specific to the education of children who are sick and asks how these concerns are to be addressed. The context of the enquiry is England and Wales where the promotion of the spiritual development of children is a legislative requirement. The focus of the study is on sick children whose treatment requires extended stay in hospital. Such children have hardly been noticed in the continuing debate about spiritual education. Our enquiry has involved analysing literature published in English in the UK and North America. We have supplemented this analysis with primary data from semi-structured interviews with three hospital schoolteachers, two hospital chaplains and the founder of a hospice for children and a ‘respice’ for young people. We argue that what emerges as important in the spiritual education of the sick child has significant implications for the spiritual education of all children.     

'Dancing cannot start too soon': Spiritual education in the thought of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) adopted the pen-name 'Jean Paul' in honour of Jean Jaques Rousseau. His Levana or the doctrine of education (Levana oder Erziehlehre) was once a standard text and required reading in teacher education. Outside Germany the name of Jean Paul is now little known and the seminal educational text for which he was famous is rarely read. This neglect of Jean Paul is undeserved. What Jean Paul owed to Rousseau is apparent, but his work is rich in insight of his own. Three principles undergird Jean Paul's understanding of spiritual education (geistige Erziehung). Jean Paul insisted that spiritual education is essentially counter-cultural, that it is promoted by play and that it is grounded in love. Such education can never be at home in a curriculum which, however lofty are its stated objectives, is ultimately politically controlled. Jean Paul's insistence that play is constitutive of education needs to be heeded in an educational culture in which the playful is always at risk of displacement by what the government of the day deems to be of greater consequence. The heart of Jean Paul's understanding of education can be expressed succinctly, 'We love to teach and we teach to love'.     

Talking of God and Talking of Fairies: Discourses of spiritual development in the works of George MacDonald and in the curriculum

By law schools in England and Wales are required to promote the spiritual development of their pupils and school inspectors must report on how well they do so. This is a very recent local legislative enactment of a timeless and universal concern. A spiritual dimension to human life, however resistant to definition or measurement, has been recognized for as long as men and women have consciously reflected on their condition. The determination to seek the spiritual well-being of the young antedates the trial of Socrates and the writing of the book of Proverbs. Obvious as it is, this point does need to be made. It could be supposed from much of the discussion in educational circles that interest in spiritual development was unknown before the 1944 Education Act. That said, there are questions to be asked about the education of the spirit which, if not new, acquire an immediacy from the social and cultural conditions specific to our time and from the requirements of current educational legislation. To one question in particular today's debate about spiritual development as a curricular requirement continually returns. It is whether a coherent spirituality requires the support of a religious tradition. Students in our schools come from a diversity of religious backgrounds. At the same time--and often at the same school--many come from homes which long ago took leave of God. What is to be the relationship in such schools between the spiritual development which they are statutorily obliged to promote and traditional religious world-views whether these are still devoutly followed or long abandoned? Do notions of spirituality and spiritual development have any coherence without secure anchorage in a religious tradition with it specific truth-claims? In this article I shall argue that, while clearly spiritual education can be based on the claims of a religious tradition, such a confessional framework is not necessary for the concept of spiritual education to be coherent and for its implementation within the curriculum to be possible. There is, in a word, a spirituality without religion. In developing this argument I shall appeal to a Victorian writer of fairy tales, George MacDonald, whom we shall meet a little later.     

The poet’s school and the parrot’s cage: the educational spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel laureate, was a man of myriad gifts, but he sought to articulate a single global vision. He believed that for our flourishing we must strive towards ‘the other and the beyond’. In so doing we discover that, as we seek, we are ourselves being sought. Tagore believed that we find our meaning and fulfilment relationally; in our relationships one with another, to be sure, but fundamentally in our kinship with all that is. We must be liberated, Tagore believed, from the bounds of our separateness and so discover a wholeness larger than our individual well‐being. That wholeness is ultimately realised in our union with the eternal Divine Spirit. In the establishment of his ‘poet’s school’ at Shantiniketan Tagore sought to make his ideals come true. This paper will focus on Tagore’s understanding of childhood and on the pattern of education by which, he believed, the spirit of the child may be nurtured. It will also enter a plea that we return to someone whose neglect in the West has been much to its loss.     

Effects of hypertension on attention, memory, and executive function in older adults.

Hypertension is associated with impairments in cognitive function in older adults, but the nature and extent of these deficits are unclear. Brief cognitive measures lack sensitivity, whereas comprehensive assessments produce numerous variables that are difficult to interpret. The authors performed a principal-components analysis using a computerized cognitive assessment battery and neuropsychological measures of executive function in 506 hypertensive and normotensive older participants. Composite factor scores were used to reanalyze data from 223 untreated participants without vascular complications. The hypertensive group had deficits in Speed of Cognition, Episodic and Working Memory, and Executive Function but not Continuity of Attention. Using composite scores simplified data interpretation and suggested differential effects of hypertension on cognitive performance not clearly evident in individual test results.