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Spirituality and higher education: a vital link

BY Alexander Astin

Should spirituality be a legitimate concern for higher education? Let me first try to clarify what I mean by “spirituality.” The spiritual domain has to do with human consciousness — what we experience privately in our subjective awareness. More specifically, it has to do with our sense of who we are and where we come from, our beliefs about why we are here and our sense of connectedness to each other and to the world around us. Spirituality can also encompass aspects of our experience that are not easy to define or talk about — such things as intuition, inspiration, the mysterious and the
mystical.

So why shouldn’t cultivating the ability to observe your own mind in action — becoming more self-aware or simply more “conscious” — be one of the central purposes of education? Even a cursory look at our educational system makes it clear that the relative amount of attention that we devote to the “exterior” and “interior” aspects of our lives has gotten way out of balance. Thus, while we are justifiably proud of our “outer” development in fields such as science, medicine, technology and commerce, we have increasingly come to neglect our “inner” development — our values and beliefs, emotional maturity, spirituality and self-understanding.

For years, I’ve been interested in educational transformation and reform, and nowhere is the importance of “the inner versus the outer” more obvious than in our attempts to change institutions. I see a movement gradually emerging in higher education where many academics find themselves actively searching for meaning and trying to discover ways to make their lives and their institutions more whole. This reflects a growing concern with recovering a sense of meaning in society. The unease about our institutions and our society has led some of us to start talking about the “S-word.”

How one defines his or her spirituality — or, if you prefer, sense of meaning and purpose in life — is not the issue. The important point is that academia has for far too long encouraged us to lead fragmented and inauthentic lives, where we act either as if we are not spiritual beings, or as if our spiritual side is irrelevant to our vocation or work. We hesitate to discuss issues of meaning, purpose, authenticity, wholeness and fragmentation with our colleagues. At the same time, we discourage our students from engaging these same issues among themselves and with us.

How do we begin to give greater emphasis to these neglected aspects of our conscious experience? Several recent developments in higher education suggest that we may be ready to pay more attention to our inner lives and those of our students. One of these is the movement to redirect the attention of faculty and staff away from teaching and more in the direction of learning. Another closely related trend is the shift in emphasis away from the individual teacher and learner toward learning communities. These innovations are headed in the right direction: to shift our attention away from what we academics do toward a greater concern not only for the interiors of our students, but also toward seeing the entire educational process in a more holistic way.

Astin is the founding director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.