Nurturing the Spirit
'The primary task of education is the nurture
of the spirit of the child.'
I enjoyed reading this remarkable and rewarding book, first published in 1998. That a revised edition has already appeared attests to the vitality of the original, and a steadily growing interest in an important topic. Comprehensively annotated, with an extensive bibliography and index, it is authoritative, informative and easy to read. I suspect that anyone with any serious interest in the future of mankind will want to read it.
In the 1990s, David Hay was Reader in Spiritual Education at the University of Nottingham and Director of the Children's Spirituality Project. He is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He was also once Director of the Alister Hardy Research centre.
Rebecca Nye is a child psychologist and a member of staff in the faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. The book hinges on the work she undertook as Hay's research assistant interviewing children and clarifying their spiritual sensibilities.
In the first of Nye's two chapters, 'Listening to Children Talking'(Ch 6), she identifies her role visiting two primary schools: 'To encourage children to share their feelings and thoughts with me'. She comments, 'Throughout the process of data collection I had the repeated sense that a child's unique spirituality was being expressed in how and what they spoke about'. Several illuminating extracts from the 38 case studies, involving both six and ten year old English schoolchildren, prepare us for Nye's further comment: 'Seeking ways to identify, condense and make sense of the spirituality that the children had shared with me was an extremely challenging task'.
It is a task in which, however, she has been admirably successful. In 'Identifying the Core of Children's Spirituality' (Ch 7), she coins the term relational consciousness to represent the central identifying feature of children's spirituality.
It seems important to understand this term: A distinctive property of mental activity, profound and intricate enough to be termed 'consciousness', and remarkable for its confinement to a broadly relational, inter- and intra-personal domain. The quality suggests, 'A distinctly reflective consciousness', the children being objectively aware of themselves as subject. In addition, the word 'relational' was applied broadly, to include not only I - Other relations, but also I - Self, I - World and I - God.
'In this relational consciousness', Nye writes, 'Lies the rudimentary core of children's spirituality, out of which arises meaningful aesthetic experience, religious experience, personal responses to mystery and being, mystical and moral insight'. She is effectively saying that it is also the origin of much else of great value including compassion, creativity and wisdom. It is thus the forging dynamic behind spiritual attitudes and values throughout life.
In 'What is Spirituality and Why is it Important?' (Ch 1), David Hay has already prepared us for Nye's discoveries and their significance, by making spirituality and its relevance as clear as possible. In 'The Social Destruction of Spirituality' (Ch 2); which includes sections on 'the origins of modern secularism' and, more hopefully, on 'the survival of the spirit'; he describes the educational context of today's children in Britain, concluding pointedly that, 'No obvious alternative to religion has emerged with sufficient power to act as a vehicle for the nurture of spiritual awareness'. These two chapters are as relevant to adults as they are to the predicament of children. They tell us what, as former children, we might also be neglecting, and why; giving us the opportunity to reflect on how our lives may have been detrimentally affected, and on ways in which to grow spiritually rich again through cultivating this awareness. (As a psychiatrist, I am increasingly conscious of, and necessarily therefore attentive to, the spiritual needs of patients whose poverty of meaning and absence of a sense of belonging and connectedness often underpin their key symptoms and distress.)
These two powerful and persuasive chapters are worth the price of this book alone, but there is much more. In 'Children's Spirituality - What We Know Already' (Ch 3), Hay impressively, if briefly, reviews the available psychological research. He finds developmental theory and some other approaches wanting, but does refer favourably to Robert Coles' influential 1992 book,
The Spiritual Life of Children, and his conclusion that spiritual awareness is a universal human attribute.
What is missing, Hay goes on to say in 'A Geography of the Spirit' (Ch 4), is an accurate map of the spiritual realm, which will include: a tuned and flowing consciousness, mindful awareness centred on the immediacy of the here-and-now; a sense of mystery involving responses of wonder and awe, and engagement of an active imagination; a sense of values experienced through emotions like delight and despair; an intuition of ultimate goodness, and a profound sense of meaning, arising from the creative capacity of humans to make meaning in the context of everyday life.
Hay simply and accurately describes this landscape, rendering it, 'Much more familiar in contemporary experience than might at first be expected'. He certainly confirms the idea that you do not have to be either religiously active or knowledgeable to have a vivid and vital spiritual dimension to life.
After Part One ('Orientation') comprising these four chapters, Part Two ('Investigation') contains Nye's chapters preceded by another from Hay. In 'How Do You Talk with Children About Spirituality' (Ch 5), giving further background to the study, he asserts the increasing call upon us to enter into an understanding of the culture and beliefs of others, but warns against underestimating the difficulty of the task. Referring to, 'The myth of objectivity' in the context of this type of qualitative research, he approves as necessary that the researcher engages mindfully, employing 'total awareness'. This high degree of focus then provides, 'An instrument engaged in understanding and interpreting the information that emerges as a result of the bond created with the child'.
After Nye's chapters, in Part Three ('Reflection') Hay begins by describing his own surprise, on reviewing his assistant's findings, to discover the communal direction of children's spirituality, derived as it is from deeply personal experiences. In 'The Naturalness of Relational Consciousness' (Ch 8), speaking of links between relational consciousness and altruism, he says he was led astray by the pre-suppositions people usually share, 'In the individualistic society in which we are all immersed'. In other words, he thought children would be more self-absorbed (and possibly selfish) than they turned out to be.
He goes on to emphasise the inadequacy of post-religious language to express relational consciousness at any depth, suggesting that in this regard, 'There is something seriously wrong with a schooling that colludes with the impoverishment of language'. He says, 'The educational system seems designed to suppress or ignore spirituality as an insubstantial extra on the curriculum', before convincingly offering the strongest of opinions that spiritual education is paramount for the personal and political wellbeing of the community.
This is strong meat, but in 'Nurturing the Spirit of the Child' (Ch 9) he warns us about what can happen to a child whose creative attention has been damaged or ignored, with a true story of the brutal and unfeeling murder of a five year old by two older, pre-teen boys. Having identified a serious educational problem, he then offers a solution in the form of a four-point plan. The teacher, he suggests, has four main responsibilities: helping children keep an open mind; exploring ways of seeing; encouraging personal awareness; and becoming personally aware of the social and political dimensions of spirituality.
This is a very good chapter, at the end of the original version of the book. In 1998, Hay concluded: 'Spiritual education as a cross-curricular element is still a distant dream', identifying the need for a radical change in educational culture with the creation of new teaching materials right across the syllabus, also guidance to schools and teacher training institutions in a way that could only happen with the backing of a policy directive at a national level. Speaking about, 'The spiritual health of a school community', and relational consciousness as, 'The bedrock of a free and humane society', his final message is clear: 'The primary task of education is the nurture of the spirit of the child'. After reading his book, I challenge anyone to disagree.
David Hay makes a good case, and in the new final chapter, 'Developments Since 1998' (Ch 10), he indicates how others have been reaching similar conclusions. Noting an accelerated interest in spirituality generally, he describes changes in the social context in children's spirituality before taking the opportunity to respond in some detail to several earlier critics of his ideas. Common to most challenges were, he reports, 'Anxieties about the status of religious education in the curriculum and fears that it will be displaced by a shallow and eclectic spirituality'.
However, anyone reflecting with an open mind on this book's contents will be spared such anxiety. Genuine spiritual awareness, as demonstrated even in six year olds, leads to profound and meaningful observations and insights with universal relevance, rather than anything shallow or trivial. This central point about the source of much-needed wisdom has been missing for so long, not only from education, but also from health care, politics and many other key areas of human interaction and endeavour.
David Hay and Rebecca Nye have therefore done us all an immense service in reminding us about the centrality of this forgotten spiritual dimension in human affairs. In a hopeful way, they point to a form of educational philosophy and practice that, within a few short generations, could lead humankind out of its current maze of meaningless rivalry towards a genuine, mature, stable and deeply compassionate humanity. From childhood onwards, as they have shown, this is nothing less than our birthright.
Larry Culliford is a psychiatrist and successful author. His next book, Love, Healing and Happiness: spiritual wisdom for a post secular era,
will be published by O Books in February 2007.