A New Curriculum

We need to consider the creation of a curriculum of the inner life.

(Education and the Soul: 50)

            Curriculum means to run a course.  Spiritual education will need a new curriculum, perhaps a new kind of curriculum, than what exists in schools today. In addition to a curriculum of academic subjects, it will need, as John Miller suggests above, a curriculum of the inner life that runs the course of spiritual transformation.  But in keeping with ideas of transformation, the new curriculum should not only grow out of the old, and not simply supersede or replace it, but also outgrow the old to meet new circumstances and challenges.  There must be connection and conservation along with discontinuity and breaking with the old.  Spiritual education is not separated from other forms or styles of education by well-defined borders. Neither is spirituality just another fenced in field of study.  Rather the human spirit is a magnetic center of interest and a focus of intellectual relationships.   

            The proper form of organizing this new curriculum is based on organic, not mechanical, metaphors. That is, the logical relationship between the subjects of a curriculum is not solely one of linear, organizational-chart connection, such as A is necessary to know before B, but one of resonant fit with connections in every direction.  In such a fit there exists a harmony of subjects in the curriculum pointing not just outwardly toward a remote horizon, called employment, but also inwardly toward a center which is the heart of the student. Thus it would be both a curriculum of contexts as well as of subjects.  Such interconnected curricula will enable students to not only acquire knowledge, but also to acquire self-knowledge.

            The first and real subject of spiritual education is the student, and not math, science, art and language, which become from this perspective the means for a student to understand himself or herself and the world. This means that whether a student is studying physics, literature, or physical education, study of that “subject” should lead him to understand human nature and the world more deeply. 

            The purpose of any curriculum is not really to efficiently and sequentially package a certain body of information.  The real purpose of any curriculum is to train the powers of perception, cognition, emotion, and volition to see and experience the world in a particular way.  Every learning community, Robert Bellah writes, “has a coherent curricular focus that connects the various courses into some kind of whole and allows students to understand education as a common enterprise.”  The curriculum of public schooling is never an arbitrary construct, but in all cases is meant to both reflect and inculcate the cultural view of reality.  This has always been true.  Walter Ong wrote that the great educational reformer of the European Renaissance, Peter Ramus, believed: “the ‘arts’ or curriculum subjects hold the world together. Nothing is accessible for "use," that is, for active intussusception by the human being, until it has first been put through the curriculum. The schoolroom is by implication the doorway to reality, and indeed the only doorway." 

            It was out of the reorganization of the school curriculum from an oral, communal, disputational model of the Middle Ages to a silent, sequential, individual model based upon Ramus' ideas of the logic of curriculum that schools of the modern West embodied their linear, mechanical understanding of the world.  This was one of the topics of McLuhan's fascinating study The Gutenberg Galaxy.  Even today the close relation between school and society--the classroom as doorway to reality--holds true, for our fragmented curriculum of episodic hours of instruction of disconnected subjects reflects our fragmented social reality of episodic lives of disconnected Subjects.  This fragmentation is one theme of Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America,  and it is the result of the breakdown of what is called the organizations of civil society, those mediating organizations, of which education is the central institution, that form a nation’s “social capital.”   

            To counteract this fragmentation, the curriculum for spiritual education must build unities, intellectually and socially, and enable students to construct symbolic structures of understanding in order to achieve the goals of transformation and transcendence both for the individual and for the collectivity.  In spiritual education the curricular focus must be on “educing” the human reality, which is the same everywhere whatever cultural form it may appear in.  The first identity of every person is a human being, cultural, racial, linguistic, and other identities are smaller and secondary to the primary identity of member of the human race.  Spiritually, human beings are unified because every individual is a child of God.  Upon this common foundation other unities may be created as diverse expressions of the common essence.  How to embody this in a curriculum?  That is the topic of the next few posts.