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International Journal of Children's Spirituality

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Embodied Spirituality: The place of culture and tradition in contemporary educational discourse on spirituality
Andrew Wright

To cite this Article Wright, Andrew(1997) 'Embodied Spirituality: The place of culture and tradition in contemporary

educational discourse on spirituality', International Journal of Children's Spirituality, 1: 2, 8 20 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/1364436970010203 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1364436970010203

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Embodied Spirituality: The place of culture and tradition in contemporary educational discourse on spirituality by Andrew Wright Abstract
The paper explores the cultural context of contemporary educational discourse on spirituality in Great Britain by defending the following theses: spiritual education seeks a universal perspective that transcends any specific cultural context and tradition; it disengages itself from the culture of modernity, which it perceives as a spiritual desert; it finds in the tradition of late 18th and early 19th Century romanticism resources to support the recovery of a lost dimension of spirituality; however the integrity of spiritual education is threatened by the colonisation of romanticism by the tradition of post-modernity; indeed aspects of spiritual education already embody a post-modern perspective; an authentic spiritual education requires contextualisation in a plurality of spiritual traditions.

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Introduction
Religious education in England and Wales learnt - directly from the hermeneutical methodology of Phenomenology, and indirectly from the modernist legacy of the Enlightenment - that objectivity and the achievement of critical distance from the object of interpretation constitutes a necessary preliminary to authentic understanding. Tradition, context and culture represent parochial perspectives that must be stripped away if universal insight is to be achieved. Though contemporary spiritual education has reacted against this modernist heritage it still retains a strong tendency to de-contextualise the language of spirituality, to idealise it into a universal domain emancipated from the 'contamination1 of specific traditions. On the assumption that 'objectivity' and 'neutrality' themselves embody specific values and commitments, and that there is no possibility of value-free discourse, this paper attempts to deconstruct the working neutrality of spiritual education and unpack its prior commitments by identifying and exploring the cultural contexts and traditions with which it engages.

Spiritual education seeks a universal perspective that transcends any specific cultural context and tradition
The 1988 Education Reform Act stipulates that pupils are to be provided with a balanced and broadly based curriculum as a means of facilitating their spiritual development. It thus approaches spirituality from the perspective of the fundamental aims of education, rather than of the material content of the curriculum(HMSO, 1988). This contrasts with the earlier proposal of HMI - one that effectively brought the issue of spirituality to the forefront of educational debate that children be introduced to the spiritual realm of knowledge and experience (HMI, 1977a, 1977b). HMI's thinking was grounded in Hirst's advocacy of a liberal education "based fairly and squarely on the nature of knowledge itself (Hirst, 1965 p.11, Hirst & Peters, 1970). Their proposal suggested the possibility of an education concerned with providing pupils with critical insight into the ambiguity, diversity and complexity of human spirituality. However, the legislative shift of focus from curriculum content to educational aims curtailed this option. If spiritual development was to be a core outcome of a unified and coherent education system it was clearly The International Journal of Children's Spirituality Volume 1 No. 2 February 1997
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necessary for teachers to adopt a common understanding of the nature of the spiritual dimension. Spirituality that is to be nurtured rather than taught demands then any critical investigation of contrasting spiritual traditions be eclipsed by the need to immerse children into a single perspective. As a result, the need to achieve a universal consensus regarding the nature of spirituality took centre stage. By definition, this needed to be independent of any specific spiritual or religious tradition. HMI had originally offered two working definitions of spirituality, one narrowly and specifically theological in scope, the other adopting a broad generalised anthropological perspective (HMI, 1977b). The latter, marked by abstract terminology, quickly became the standard working definition in educational debate. It saw spirituality as an area of human awareness, experience and inner feeling that illuminates the purpose and meaning of life, offers a glimpse of transcendence, reflects the human longing for perfection, and deals with matters at heart and root of existence. The NCC drew heavily on the work of HMI in its approach to spirituality: the spiritual dimension is fundamental to the human condition, transcends ordinary everyday experience, and is concerned with the search for identity and meaning in response to death, suffering, beauty and evil (NCC, 1993, reprinted as SCAA, 1995). These broad generalisations were unpacked further by identifying eight dimensions of spirituality: beliefs; the sense of awe, wonder and mystery; feelings of transcendence; the search for meaning and purpose; self-knowledge; relationships; creativity; feelings and emotions. In presenting these in the form of abstract anthropological categories the question of their material substance is bypassed. What is the nature of the reality to which such 'feelings of transcendence' respond? What constitutes authentic 'self-knowledge'? Any material answer to such questions would immediately locate the discourse within a specific tradition, resulting in objections from adherents of alternative belief systems. By employing such inclusive language the emergent consensus was able to avoid reducing spirituality to, or identifying it with, any specific cultural tradition. This effectively dislocated the discourse of spirituality from any material content. Indeed the literature reveals a fundamental suspicion of any contextualised notion of spirituality. Thus HMI's alternative theological definition - despite employing generic religious categories that are not distinctive of any specific faith tradition - is rejected on the grounds that it contains "such extensive baggage, such a weight of historical and theological meaning" (Webster, 1993 p.130). The literature is consistent in refusing to equate spirituality with religion, and in insisting that spirituality is a broader and more universal concept (Grimmitt, 1987 pp.167-193). 'The notion of 'spiritual' continues to be meaningful to more people than does the term 'religious'" (Priestley, 1985 p.114). Spirituality, we learn, must be hauled out of its traditional ecclesiastical setting, out of its grottoes and ghettos, into the contemporary world. Lealman's question, "can people who approach education from different philosophical / theological viewpoints find a common working definition?", must be answered in the affirmative (Lealman, 1986 p.67). The task is achieved by developing an abstract, universalised definition dislocated from any specific tradition.

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Spiritual education disengages itself from the culture of modernity, which it perceives as a spiritual desert Alongside the desire to achieve a consensus definition of spirituality abstracted from any specific tradition, the literature also embraces a negative relationship with the The International Journal of Children's Spirituality Volume 1 No. 2 February 1997

culture of modernity. The perception that the legacy of the Enlightenment - with its stress on rationality, fact, utility, individualism, bureaucracy and materialism, at the expense of imagination, value, organic community and sensibility - constitutes a spiritual vacuum is a well developed theme in philosophical and theological literature (Adorno & Horkheimer 1972, Gunton 1985, Habermas 1987, Newbigin 1986). The educational discourse of spirituality taps into this critique of modernity: only by emancipating itself from the constraints of modern culture can spiritual education hope to achieve its allotted task. Phenix (1982) offers a classic example of this process. He suggests that the reemergence of traditional subject-centred education reflects a fundamental imbalance between personal and conceptual knowledge. The latter, understood as academic, discursive and cerebral learning objectifies knowledge, in the process alienating and impoverishing the student. In our modern literate culture "it is commonly assumed that conceptual knowledge is the best kind, the only kind worthy of being called knowledge" (p.12). As a result pupils are "expected to live in a world of ideas that is out of touch with their own personal existence" (p.14). Phenix advocates the turn to forms of personal knowledge that involve the whole person, are grounded in an immediate grasp of reality unmediated by conceptual structures, are organic and holistic in form, and capable of stimulating the imagination. In similar vein Slee (1992, p.40) attacks the "excessive objectification of religious education (which) fails to recognise the centrality of pupil's own inwardness in the learning process". Such a rationalistic approach to knowledge is embodied in educational systems and structures that serve to reinforce this spiritual sterility. Hill (1989 p.174) sees the 1988 Education Reform Act as a piece of reactionary legislation that "bids fair to reinforce narrowly discipline based approaches and instrumental economy-driven objectives". The spiritual dimension of the curriculum is eclipsed by a concern for social utility, vocational value and wealth creation. An education that focuses "on the satisfaction of material needs without sufficient regard for the spiritual nature and needs of human beings can lead to people becoming trapped in consumerism, naive about the political forces which manipulate them, and exploitative in human relationships"(lbid.). This theme, of the colonisation of education by the culture of modernity, is picked up by Grimmitt (1987 p. 120), for whom the "traditional cultures of spirituality are marginalised and silenced by the contemporary combination of bureaucracy, industry and the consciousness creating media". Hay has argued consistently that the spiritual decadence of modern culture requires a pro-active response. He sets out the case for direct confrontation with modern secular censorship and its hermeneutic of suspicion directed towards spiritual experience (Hay 1982, 1985, Hay & Nye 1996, Hay, Nye & Murphy 1996). Education must counter the modernist belief that experience of the sacred represents a pathological illusion, since it leads only to an inauthentic suppression of the spiritual dimension. Hay is here supported by King (1985), who argues for the recovery of the spiritual dimension buried by the wastelands of modernity. She finds clear "signs today that the heritage of an empirical and positivist approach to knowledge and experience is faltering and that a new religious sense, atrophied for so long, is being born" (p.139).

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Hence, alongside the general de-contextualisation of spirituality driven by the search for consensus, stands an specific and aggressive dislocation from the spiritually arid culture of modernity.

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Spiritual education finds in the tradition of late 18th and early 19th Century romanticism resources to support the recovery of spiritual authenticity Despite this tendency towards disengagement from any specific cultural context, aspects of the tradition of spiritual education do acknowledge a debt to the late 18th and early 19th Century romantic critique of post-Enlightenment culture. Romanticism was a broad ranging cultural and intellectual movement whose attempts to counter the limitations of modernity embraced art, literature, music, theology and philosophy. Its key contributors included Beethoven, Byron, Coleridge, Diderot, Goethe, Herder, Kant, Lessing, Novalis, Rousseau, A.W.Schlegel, F. von Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Shelly and Wordsworth. The new age promised by the Enlightenment was seen to have deteriorated into a rationality that stifles the human spirit. Romanticism sought a recovery of the effervescence and vitality of human feeling and sensitivity: romantic wisdom affirmed the superiority of feeling over rationality, and intuitive insight over cognitive certainty. The romantic sensibility sought to uncover the possibility of a depth and breadth of human experience that transcends the ordinary and mundane. Though the relationship between the educational discourse of spirituality and romanticism is often merely implied, Priestley (1992) draws explicit attention to it, linking the current concern for spiritual awareness directly back to the liberal theology of Otto and Schleiermacher, and the romantic critique of modernity offered by Whitehead, Coleridge, Wordsworth and others. Spiritual education adopts a typically romantic anthropology in which the human being is "primarily a spiritual subject" (HoIIey, 1978 p.59), and the search for spiritual meaning "a fundamental human activity" (Lealman, 1982 p.76). Grimmitt makes this issue explicit: "in speaking of human spirituality, therefore, I am referring to a human capacity for a certain type of awareness the activation of the human capacity for self-transcendence and movement towards a state of consciousness in which the limitations of human finite identity are challenged by the exercise of the creative imagination" (Grimmitt, 1987 p.125). HoIIey places his discussion of spiritual education in the context of a romantic neoKantian ontology that affirms the metaphysical primacy of the transcendent or noumenal dimension of reality over against the phenomenological perceptions of our immediate experience. He takes this realm to be "the objective reality of the spiritual ultimacy of the cosmos, both essential and ineffable" (HoIIey, 1978 p.61). Our spiritual experience "intuits that the spiritual order is fundamental to all that exists and that in the spiritual order is to be found the unconditional character of the moral imperative and the power of right action, the inexhaustible depth of genuine creation and the illumination of the beautiful and the lovely, and the desire and longing for embracing the real which is the essence of truth" (p.53). When dealing specifically with religious issues spiritual education draws on romantic formulations in advocating a distinction between spirituality and religious culture. Hay follows Schleiermacher's romanticism in asserting that it is necessary to see "the historical faiths as the cultural expression of personal religious experience" (Hay, 1982 p.48, cf. Schleiermacher 1958, 1976). It is not enough simply to define religion merely in terms of observable phenomena, rather its essence is to be found
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in that noumenal dimension of religious experience, awareness and sensibility that transcends any cultural expression. For Priestley (1985 p.116) it is not the religious dogmas and beliefs that are essential, since such constructs "however intellectual they may be, are, in the last analysis, images and, therefore, a product of the human imagination". Webster (1993 p.138) quotes Tillich (1963 p.95) in affirming this viewpoint: "in the depth of every living religion there is a point at which the religion itself loses its particularity, elevating it to spiritual freedom". The task of stimulating spiritual insight in the classroom thus draws on a romantic experientialexpressive model of religion that presents religious culture as the secondary expression of primary spiritual experience (cf. Lindbeck 1984). Spiritual education also draws upon a romantic pedagogic tradition that can be traced back to Rousseau. His educational programme is grounded in a critique of modern culture: "everything is good as it comes from the hands of the maker; everything degenerates in the hands of man" (Rousseau, 1986 p.56, following the translation of Bowen, 1981 p.187). Nevertheless, "the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart" (Ibid.). The original innocence and purity of children, Rousseau suggests, is contaminated by contact with corrupt society. Consequently he advocates a negative education in which children are protected from culture and thus freed to explore their own inner life and natural impulses. This romantic turn to the self stimulated the development of progressive child-centred forms of education, and it is to this tradition that spiritual educators turn. Despite being eclipsed by conservative subject-centred models through the 1988 legislation, it is seen as offering the most appropriate pedagogy for stimulating pupil's spiritual experience and insight. Thus, for example, Bates (1982 p.32) notes "clear signs of unease with the notion of religious education as the phenomenological study of religions and a movement towards a more pupilcentred, personalistic approach". The discourse of spiritual education, in its anthropology, ontology, theology and pedagogy, thus acknowledges its broad dependence on romanticism as a resource for its attack on the spiritual sterility of modernity. As such it commits itself to a tradition that, by distinguishing phenomenal fact from noumenal value "had the effect of giving rise to a romantic idealism where the human spirit could range at will, uncontrolled by scientific evidence or knowledge" (Torrance, 1980 p.25). In affirming its relationship with this particular tradition spirituality appears to take a naive stance: there is no evidence of, (i) any attempt at a critical assessment of romanticism, (ii) any understanding of its 20th Century evolution, or (iii) any awareness of the range of philosophical and theological critiques directed against it. This lack of critical assessment suggests that spiritual education uses romanticism not merely as a resource, but also as an authority.

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The integrity of spiritual education is threatened as a result of colonisation by the tradition of post-modernism Given that spiritual education seeks a universal outlook, the uncritical adoption of the romantic tradition carries with it the implication that its particular perspective is in some sense universal. A more circumspect approach to romanticism would have revealed a fundamental critique, developed in the present century, that places a question mark over such universal claims. Advocates of romanticism seek to hold fast to some form of realism. That is to say, romantic sensibility and spiritual experience is held to bring the individual - in some The International Journal of Children's Spirituality Volume 1 No. 2 February 1997
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sense at least - into contact with the transcendent or primal structures of reality. Such experience is not to be dismissed as subjective illusion, rather it brings with it an unmediated relationship with ultimate reality. This may take on a secular form, as in Kant's categorical imperative, which claims to transcend the phenomenological world of appearances and reveal the noumenal realm of moral truth. Newby (1994, 1996) transfers this to an educational context, referring to "a shared spirituality abroad in our secular culture in which traditional religious belief is superficial or local, and often both" (Newby, 1994 p.17). Such spirituality is not mere illusion, but the actuality of "a post-religious spirituality of agapaistic love rising out of the ashes of a dead orthodoxy" (Ibid.). In its theological form romantic realism affirms the belief that religious experience actually brings humanity into direct contact with transcendent or divine reality. Thus Hay affirms that there are "grounds for some confidence in the objective reality of the states of awareness achieved in contemplative practice, whatever the variety of interpretations provided by the different traditions" (Hay, 1982 p.49, cf. Hick, 1989).
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Advocates of the cognitive value of such experience refer to empirical evidence of its common occurence and subjective power in affirming that it cannot be dismissed as mere illusion. While it would be foolish to reject this evidence, the core issue remains that of interpretation. There is no consensus as to whether the object of such experience should be understood as some form of divine reality, or as an immanent response to the natural world. The key issue here is not the decision between secular and religious forms of romanticism, but the fundamental claim common to both - that romantic experience draws us into contact with some form of ultimate reality previously hidden by the excesses of modernity. In other words, romanticism claims to offer a more realistic and authentic way of understanding the universe than the rationalism of modernity, despite the fact that it can point to no consensus as to exactly what the structures of reality are that stand revealed. The context of romantic experience is limited to the experience itself: the ultimate reality that is glimpsed cannot be named or contextualised beyond the abstract moment of comprehension. As such romanticism itself becomes the cultural context: far from identifying any universal structures of human cognition, the educational discourse of spirituality operates within a specific historical tradition, that of western liberal romanticism. The claim that spiritual experience has cognitive validity has been subject to fundamental criticism. From within modernity itself Logical Positivism - to give but one example - argued that such experience was simply subjective emotivism incapable of verification and consequently devoid of any objective truth (Ayer, 1971). Hay here finds just another example of the spiritual blindness of modem culture that must be actively countered by teachers. However he fails to acknowledge that the critique of romanticism extends far beyond the bounds of modernity. Karl Barth, for example, rejects romantic experience as a means of knowing from a very different perspective, that of a Reformed Trinitarian Christianity. Drawing on the work of Feuerbach, and in an un-holy alliance with positivism, he affirms the judgement that romanticism tends towards anti-realism, being simply a descent into a subjective projection of human desire. Since there are no criteria for distinguishing authentic from inauthentic experience beyond the subjective authority of the experience itself, and no agreement regarding the actual object of experience, one cannot distinguish between mere subjectivity and any realistic external reference. (Barth 1982, Feuerbach 1957). From a very different perspective Cuppitt offers a radical liberal Christian critique of romanticism, embracing the anti-realist thesis that talk of God has no substantial contact with the

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actual order of things in external reality. He argues that religious language cannot be demonstrated to have any reference to a reality beyond the words themselves: it neither depicts facts in the world nor expresses inner experience. (Cupitt, 1980). Hay's critique of positivism cannot, as it stands, be extended to either Barth or Cupitt: neither can be charged - at face value at least - with a lack of spiritual sensitivity, nor accused of being captivated by the modernist agenda. It is not the reality of romantic experience that these contrasting alternative traditions question, but the assumption that such experience has any cognitive value that extends beyond the merely subjective. In the absence of any agreement within the romantic tradition on the basic issue of secular versus theological frameworks of interpretation, the case that the cognitive claims made of romantic experience are merely rhetorical at the very least demands recognition and response. Advocates of the utility of the romantic tradition for spiritual education have not yet fully addressed or grappled with these issues.
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The critique of romanticism draws strength through being a common argument supported by a diversity of conflicting traditions. The case that the romantic tradition claims cognitive value for experience but is unable to identify the material content of such cognition, made independently from the perspectives of modernity, classical theism and radical liberal Christianity, is further reinforced by a parallel critique emanating from the tradition of post-modernity. At first glance post-modernity and romanticism have much in common, since both concur in their rejection of the excesses of modernity. Post-modernity sets out to deconstruct the modern metanarrative of scientific naturalism: science has no privileged status in its programme of describing reality, and must be seen as relativistic, contingent and devoid of any ultimate authority (Feyerabend, 1987, Lyotard, 1984, Rorty, 1980). However postmodernity adds to its critique of modernity a parallel rejection of romanticism (Boyne, 1990, Derrida, 1976, 1982, Foucault, 1989, 1991, Gasche 1986). The belief that romantic experience gives unmediated access to the heart of our being in the world is misplaced. The romantic image of humanity has no essential substance, it fails to construct a lasting picture of humanity, and will inevitably be erased "like a face drawn on the sand at the edge of the sea" (Foucauit, 1989 p.387). Post-modernity dismisses the entire intellectual history of the modern western world, in both its modern and romantic forms, as " a momentary 'fold' in the fabric of knowledge" (Norris, 1987 p.221). All cultural signs, symbols and traditions are radically deconstructed by postmodernity. There can be no meta-narratives, no substantial account of the essential nature of reality. Words have no reference beyond themselves: they neither picture physical reality as modernity claims, nor express an inner experience of transcendent reality as romanticism contends. There can be no criteria for judgement between competing linguistic systems, no ultimate truth. We are left with a post-modern playground in which individuals are free to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct models of reality at will, unguided by any external constraint, on the basis of personal will, desire and preference (cf. Cupitt 1987). A post-modern spiritual education thus becomes no more than an abstract cultivation of will and desire devoid of any criteria of meaning or truth. The child is effectively nurtured into a post-modern vacuum, indoctrination by default into a post-modern ideology (cf. Usher & Edwards 1994). In such a context the child is powerless to challenge the economic and political forces of a consumer society, is left prey to manipulation by an advertising industry that seeks to cultivate the very ethic of desire that postmodernity brings into being (cf. Agger 1991).

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Aspects of spiritual education already embody a post-modern perspective The path towards the colonisation of romanticism by post-modernity is a simple one. A single move is required: the acceptance that romantic sensibility is merely subjective and consequently has no contact with objective reality. If romanticism, by failing to identify publicly the material substance of experiential cognition leaves the door open for the realistic object to be determined on the basis of private preference, then it is vulnerable to being utilised as a tool of post-modernity. The discourse of spiritual education is particularly susceptible to this possibility, given (i) that contemporary discussion has produced a de-contextualised working definition of spirituality that is effectively devoid of material content, (ii) that its romantic roots agree with post-modernity in rejecting the culture of modernity, and (iii) its uncritical acceptance of the framework of romanticism. The final step towards a spiritual education that merely cultivates subjective sensibility, without reference to questions of the truth and authenticity of such experience, is not a particularly difficult one to take. Indeed, there is evidence that a post-modern perspective has already - even if only by default - been adopted in some sections of the literature. Thus, when Priestley suggests that spiritual education "must begin and end with pupil's own inwardness" (1985 p.118) and that "the greater purpose of education should be to give people a greater reliance on the validity of their own inward and private experience" (1992 p.35), he fails to offer any criteria for discriminating between merely subjective impressions and any connection with external reality. Indeed, he appears content to accept the dualism of internal experience and external reality: spiritual education "may well involve an intellectual awareness of the world outside but it does so for the purpose of evoking the world inside us" (1985 p.116, italics original). Lealman also fails to show any necessary link between experience and reality. Indeed, she appears to go further in advocating that children be encouraged to utilise religious symbol as a means of creating their own private reality: "let there be a shaping of symbol to represent what for you is the reality with v/hich religion is concerned" (1982 p.75, my italics). This appears to be closely linked with Hay's affirmation of "the relativity of all belief systems" (1982 p.47). Against such a background it is not surprising to encounter the suggestion that the constructs of theology "are, in the last analysis, images, and therefore a product of the human imagination" (Priestley 1985, p.116). In similar vein Erricker (1993) suggests that "metaphor actually generates meaning" (p.139) and that education has to do with "helping children to construct their own enabling metaphors" (p.146, my italics). The conclusion to be drawn from this brief review is that there is substantial evidence that spiritual education, in accepting a romantic framework, has failed to recognise the boundary between romanticism and post-modernity, and consequently has, by default, transgressed the limits of the romantic vision. The stress of human experience, though intended to allow children authentic understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, has fallen into the trap of abandoning them to the post-modern game of personal reality creation.

An authentic spiritual education requires contextualisation in a plurality of spiritual traditions The preceding discussion concurs with Hull's observation that spiritual education "tends to undervalue the specific historical and social characteristics of the The International Journal of Children's Spirituality Volume 1 No. 2 February 1997
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spirituality which is generated in our society by its present human relationships and practices" (Hull, 1995 p.132). Indeed, it is possible to suggest that contemporary hermeneutical philosophy insists on both the inevitability and necessity of human understanding being rooted in specific cultural traditions. Taylor has drawn attention to the incoherence of an understanding of humanity that dislocates the individual from any form of relationship (Taylor, 1992, cf. Ricoeur, 1994, McFadyen, 1990, Yu, 1987). The Enlightenment's watchword of freedom, understood as freedom-from-relationship, is fundamentally misplaced: we are the people we are in so far as we relate to others in society, to our environment, to our historical and cultural traditions, and to questions of ultimate truth and ultimate reality (Wright, 1996a, 1996b). Human freedom must be understood as freedomfor-relationship. It follows that a spiritual education that seeks, for whatever motivation, to dislocate pupils from specific cultural contexts, will produce merely a spiritual vacuum in which the only authentic relationship possible is an introspective relationship with ones own desires. In similar vein Gadamer has attacked the Enlightenment myth of objectivity and neutrality as the only appropriate means to achieving understanding. He observes that "the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which deprives tradition of its power" (Gadamer, 1979 p.. 239). In seeking to achieve insight we always bring with us a fore-structure of understanding, a set of expectations provided by the culture we indwell. Authentic understanding requires the recognition and acceptance of our pre-understandings and prejudices, and the courage to enter into a dialogue between them and alternative and contrasting world views. For Gadamer the recognition of the nature of our cultural heritage is a necessary part of the hermeneutical process. Maclntyre (1985) and Ricoeur (1977, 1984) have drawn attention to the role narrative and story play in our understanding. Language is not something to be transcended in favour of a pure unmediated romantic experience. It is precisely by rooting our understanding of the world, within the narratives and stories we tell, that we find meaning and purpose in our lives. 'The story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of a historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide" (Maclntyre 1985, p.221). What are the implications of this for spiritual education? In a national education system that places spiritual development at the centre of its educational aims, it is necessary to ground spiritual education in the nation's historical traditions, to understand spirituality in terms of national identity. This requires not the formulation of an abstract concept of spirituality divorced from any specific cultural tradition, but rather the recognition that national identity is itself made up of a variety of spiritual traditions, not all of which sit easily with one another. As well as the spiritual traditions of modernity, romanticism and post-modernity, our cultural heritage embraces a range of traditions owned by specific religious communities: Christian, Islamic, Jewish etc. An authentic spiritual education must begin by recognising and nurturing children into the specific spiritual tradition they bring with them to the classroom, the spiritual outlook they already own. At the same time, pupils will need to be brought to an awareness that their own specific spiritual tradition does not exist in isolation from others, and that British society operates with a diversity of traditions. Spiritual education thus demands recognition and awareness, coupled
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with wisdom and discrimination, of the rich variety of spiritual traditions that make up society. This will produce an education in which a hermeneutic of faith is balanced by a hermeneutic of suspicion. Pupils will need to acknowledge and articulate their own spiritual tradition(s), and to be aided in moving towards increasingly appropriate forms of participation in them. At the same time, they will need to cultivate a critical distance that will allow them to locate their own tradition within the cultural context of others. This would appear to be preferable to a spiritual education that seeks to dislocate itself from any specific tradition, yet in the process ends up indoctrinating children into the spiritual tradition of romanticism, oblivious of the consequence that romantic spirituality all too easily is transformed into a cultivation of post-modern spiritual sensibility. This is not to suggest that romanticism and post-modernity should not form part of the educational agenda, merely that there can be no justification for allowing either to become the only item. What is being advocated here is a genuinely critical spiritual education, using the word critical in its very best constructive sense: to be critical is to posses wisdom, insight, discrimination, intelligence, sensitivity and appropriate levels of spiritual literacy. It is not clear that a de-contextualised spirituality can actually achieve this goal.

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Conclusions Spirituality is inevitably contextualised within a world view, an underlying metanarrative concerning the basic truth of the reality we indwell, whether it be that of a diversity of religious and theological traditions embodied within specific religious communities, a universalised theology emanating from the western liberal academy, or stories rooted in the perspectives of romanticism, secularism, naturalism, postmodernity or the host of New Age movements. At the heart of this paper stands a belief that spiritual education has yet to make the fundamental educational move from education-as-advocacy to education-as-critical-understanding. The old confessional model of nurturing into a specific spiritual tradition has quite properly been firmly removed from the agenda, only to be replaced however by a similar nurturing model that seeks to avoid the charge of indoctrination by stripping spirituality of any material content. The result is indoctrination, by default, into the world-views of romanticism and post-modernity. A critical spiritual education does not imply a modernist analytical approach that inevitably destroys the spiritual dimension in a haze of suspicion, but rather an education for discernment that recognises the material content of a diversity of spiritual traditions, and leads the child towards spiritual wisdom through a pedagogical dialectic of nurture and critique. Only thus can the next generation be empowered to take authentic responsibility for the critical nurturing of the riches of the nation's diverse spiritual heritage.

References Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder & Herder. Agger, B. (1991) A Critical Theory of Public Life: Knowledge, Discourse and Politics in an Age of Decline, London: Falmer Press. Ayer, A.J. (1971) Language, Truth and Logic, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Barth, K. (1982) The Theology of Schleiermacher, Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

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HMSO (1988) Education Reform Act, London: HMSO. Holley, R. (1978) Religious Education and Religious Understanding. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religious Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hull, J.M. (1995) "Editorial: Spiritual Education and the Money Culture" in, British Journal of Religious Education, 17(3), pp.130-132. King, U. (1985) "Spirituality in Secular Society: Recovering a Lost Dimension" in, British Journal of Religious Education, 7(3), pp. 135-139, 111. Lealman, B. (1982) "Blue Wind and Broken Image" in, Webster, D.H. and Tickner, M.F. (ed.) Religious Education and the Imagination. Aspects of Education: 28, Hull: University of Hull Institute of Education, pp.74-84. Lealman, B. (1986) "Grottos, Ghettos and the City of Glass: Conversations about Spirituality" in, British Journal of Religious Education, 8(2), pp.65-71. Lindbeck, G.A. (1984) The Nature of Doctrine. Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Philadelphia: Westminster. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Maclntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue, London: Duckworth. McFadyen, A.I. (1990) The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NCC (1993) Spiritual and Moral Development, York: NCC. Newbigin, L. (1986) Foolishness to the Greeks. The Gospel and Western Culture, London: SPCK. Newby, M. (1994) 'The Spiritual Development of Children in a Secular Context: Reflections on Some Aspects of Theory and Practice" in, SPES, 1, pp.17-20. Newby, M. (1996) 'Towards a Secular Concept of Spiritual Maturity" in, Best, R. (ed.) Education, Spirituality and the Whole Child, London: Cassell, pp.93-107. Norris, C. (1987) Derrida, London: Fontana Press. Phenix, P. (1982) "Promoting Personal Development Through Teaching" in, Priestley, J.G. (ed.) Religion, Spirituality and Schools. Perspectives 9, Exeter: School of Education, University of Exeter, pp.7-22. Priestley, J.G. (1985) 'Towards Finding the Hidden Curriculum: A Consideration of the Spiritual Dimension of Experience in Curriculum Planning" in, British Journal of Religious Education, 7(3), pp.112-119. Priestley, J.G. (1992) "Whitehead Revisited -- Religion and Education: An Organic Whole" in, Watson, B. (ed.) Priorities in Religious Education. A Model for the 1990's and Beyond, London: Falmer Press, pp.26-37. Ricoeur, P. (1977) The Rule of Metaphor. Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1984) Time and Narrative, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1994) Oneself as Another, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Rousseau, J.-J. (1986) Emile, London: Dent. SCAA (1995) Spiritual and Moral Development. SCAA Discussion Papers: No. 3, London: SCAA. Schleiermacher, F.D.E. (1958) On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, New York: Harper and Row. Schleiermacher, F.D.E. (1976) The Christian Faith, Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Slee, N. (1992) '"Heaven in Ordinarie": The Imagination, Spirituality and the Arts in Religious Education" in, Watson, B. (ed.) Priorities in Religious Education. A Model for the 1990's and Beyond, London: Falmer Press, pp.38-57. Taylor, C. (1992) Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Tillich, P. (1963) Christianity and the Encounter of World Religions, Columbia: Columbia University Press. Torrance, T.F. (1980) The Ground and Grammar of Theology, Belfast: Christian Journals. Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1994) Postmodernism and Education: Different Voices, Different Worlds, London: Routledge. Webster, D.H. (1993) "Being Aflame: Spirituality in County and Church Schools" in, Francis, L.J. and Lankshear, D.W. (ed.) Christian Perspectives on Church Schools: A Reader, Leominster, Herefordshire: G r a c e w i n g / F o w l e r Wright, pp.130-140. Wright, A. (1996a) 'The Child in Relationship: Towards a Communal Model of Spirituality" in, Best, R. (ed.) Education, Spirituality and the Whole Child, London: Cassell, pp.139-149. Wright, A. (1996b) "Language and Experience in the Hermeneutics of Religious Understanding" in, British Journal of Religious Education, 18(3), pp.166-180. Y u , C.T. (1987) Being and Relation. A Theological Critique of Western Dualism and Individualism, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Dr Andrew Wright College, London.

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in Religious

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King's

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