The Soul Of Education: The Students Find Connection, Compassion, And Character At School
4 Pages 902 Words
The Soul of Education: The Students Find Connection, Compassion, and Character at School
By Rachael Kessler
Why am I here? Does my life have a purpose? How do I find it? How can I NOT be a cynic? I have been hurt so many times, I wonder if there is God. How does one trust oneself or believe in oneself? Why this emptiness in this world, in my heart?
These are a sampling of real questions posed by high school students involved in an innovative in-school program that integrates heart, spirit and community into academic learning. The Soul of Education: Helping Students Find Connection, Compassion and Character At School by Rachael Kessler (Published by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, May 2000, traces the development of this approach and addresses the many issues surrounding it. The story is told through the compelling experiences of dozens of adolescents from classrooms around the country.
The Soul of Education is also the story of Kessler’s passion to understand what feeds the spirit of young people and her mission to create curriculum, methodology and teacher development that serves that need.
Does a child’s soul have a place in the classroom? Educators and parents have struggled with this question for years. “We decided to exclude the spiritual dimension from education because we adults couldn’t agree on what it was or how to teach it”, says Kessler. Liberals fear that fundamentalists will sue them as new-agers if they introduce a spiritual dimension into the classroom. Christians fear that secularists will paralyze their efforts to provide spiritual guidance to children in schools. Collectively, we reached a standoff, and our children have been the losers.
The Soul of Education tells how Kessler and her colleagues successfully addressed the question of the inner life in the classroom. After listening for many years to the adolescents in her classes, Kessler began to see a pattern. She calls t...