An Intelligent Person's Guide to Education by Tony Little

Author:Tony Little [Little, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781472913128
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-06-16T06:00:00+00:00

8

Spirituality

It is a gloomy weekday morning. Gloom hangs above the heads of the black-coated rows of boys in chapel; disconnected minds roam somewhere, anywhere other than where they are. Suddenly there is a break in the clouds and sunlight casts sharp splashes of colour on the stone wall. Everyone raises their heads as one, the light dances. For a moment we are beyond ourselves, taken out of the here and now together.

There are scientific explanations for the effect of sunlight on stained glass, as there are for spectacular cloud formations or the threatening intimacy of the sea, yet there is some part of us that responds in a way beyond reason, aware of our smallness and perhaps seeing some higher purpose. Young children react spontaneously and with an open mind to different and unusual situations. A child kneels unprompted just because a place feels special, or asks if a disembodied voice in a cavernous space is the voice of God, or gives personalities to features of the natural world. Children respond intuitively to what they experience; they feel and freely express wonder.

The word ‘spirituality’ suggests some kind of transforming experience. The word itself has undergone several transformations, wrenched from its religious heritage to become a loose hold-all for any activity that might seem meaningful. For me the defining quality of spiritual life is wonder. It is the capacity to experience, accept and take joy in things beyond our understanding. In an instinctive way children are open to wonder. Through the teenage years we do our best to teach wonder out of them.

A glance at the guidelines for inspection of schools is revealing. Unlike inspection regimes in other parts of the world, in the UK there has been an attempt to embrace the spiritual, moral, social and cultural dimension of growing up. It is a difficult area to assess, however, and given the propensity to measure as much of school life as possible, these dimensions of school life often feel like a postscript to the real business of identifying a school’s quality. In times past words like ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ have appeared in the inspection rubric, but they seem quietly to have been shelved as though too difficult and flaky a concept. And in any event, if the results are good, the stats spot on, who is going to quibble about the quality of spiritual life, whatever that is?

As if in recognition of the difficulty, the four dimensions of spiritual, moral, social and cultural life have been lumped together, creating a superstore of soft values reduced to the acronym SMSC. Each dimension can have an impact on the others, but they are not interchangeable.

The language of the SMSC monolith has a strong civic tone. Schools should ‘suitably prepare students for life’; all pupils ‘should grow and flourish, become confident individuals and appreciate their own worth and that of others’. That is a sound basis for citizenship; indeed, a true sense of self-worth is the necessary condition to become a good citizen.

Yet the rubric about spiritual development seems to be an extension of the same idea.

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