Educating for Transformation: The Spiritual Task

Abstract

I must be honest from the start and confess the summary of my six years of teaching undergrads and five years of graduate students: being a “creative teacher” of spirituality in a system of education that is destructive both of spirituality and creativity is impossible. Education, like religion itself, cannot afford to succumb to privatization as if a “loneranger” teacher in spirituality could endure or carry on without a structure and a program that is based in sound theory and practice that itself sustains creativity and spirituality.A recent graduate of our Institute in Creation-Centered Spirituality is now pursuing doctoral studies in theology, and his comment after his first semester at a renowned university was: “There is no spirituality in upper academia.” What he was experiencing was the absence of sensitivity to both right and left brains as sources for learning; the absence of sensitivity to making connections and therefore to the artist in self and society; the absence of synthesis or interdependence on the part of curriculum or faculty. What he was also undergoing was a deep experience of the malaise that education finds itself in today in the West—a crisis that, if attended to, also reveals an opportunity of staggering dimensions.