The Bureaucratization of Spirituality[1]

This paper examines some of the critical contexts within which spiritual, moral, social and cultural education is to be realized. First, I examine the nature of school as a modernist bureaucratic institution. I argue that schools are bound in a self‐referential reality and barely connect with the late modem world. I then discuss the cultural sources of education policy and particularly the employment of nostalgia as a legitimation for neo‐conservative policy and practice. I then discuss school knowledge and in particular the end of liberalism and its replacement with rationalism. I next turn to spiritual, moral and social education and critically discuss its cultural and political formation. Finally, I argue that school is unable to accommodate the spiritual dimension and that critical to its successful inclusion is the re‐establishment of teachers as knowledgeable professionals with their practice grounded in the contemporary world and the real conditions of pupils' lives.