1.1 Classical Science, De-Spiritualization, and Global Crises
Intrinsic in human temporality, there exist existential questions about the meaning, purpose, and significance of life. While generations of curious youngsters enter into education systems anticipating acquiring the answers to these questions, school and university curricula generally fail to provide sufficient wisdom to address such inquiries. This might be attributed to the fact that the cultural framework for approaching such existential questions is largely considered to be religious in nature, and is therefore excluded from the scope of school curriculum as a consequence of intentional distancing of education from religion. For example, in the United States, the Lemon Test, formalized in 1971, had been “employed by the Court to determine whether laws, policies, and practices related to religion in the public sector were constitutional” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995/2008, p. 613). According to Pinar et al. (1995/2008), the three parts of the Lemon Test are: “(1) the government act that bears on religion must reflect a secular purpose, (2) it may neither advance nor inhibit religion as its primary effect, and (3) it must avoid excessive government entanglement with religion” (p. 613); and “it has affected not only specific legal decisions but a more general perception of public education in the United States” (p. 613). In such a context, educators in the USA have made efforts over several decades to distance their work from its origins in Christian traditions, and the place of religious traditions in education has been gradually replaced by scientific and technical enterprise, as exhibited in the symbiotic relationship of the testing industry and schooling (Huebner, 1985b/1999c, p. 340). Huebner (1985b/1999c) observed that the questions of values and ends, despite not possibly being suppressed, has altered the rhetoric and increasingly cloaked it in scientific or developmental language (pp. 340–341). As he pointed out, despite the fact that Western and Eastern religious traditions “all acknowledge the spiritual as an integral aspect of human life,… [and] human beings participate in a spiritual dimension of existence, something more than the material, the sensory, and the quantitative” (Huebner, 1985b/1999c, p. 342), and that the “questions of life’s meaning and significance loom large within the religious traditions, the dependency of education upon those traditions appeared to yield to dependency upon the traditions of science” (Huebner, 1985b/1999c, p. 340). Looking back, the main problem of this substitution is that, during the period when the educational and scientific traditions were merging, positivism—with its root in classical (Newtonian) physics—and its associated absolutistic and objectivistic worldview as well as materialist social values were assuming a dominant role. As a result, the spiritual wisdom of long-standing religious traditions was largely rejected.
Formally founded and named by the sociologist and philosopher August Comte (1798–1857) in the 1830s as a distinctive movement, positivism maintains the Newtonian world-as-machine worldview (Nickle, 2005, p. 1854), rejects “the possibility of knowledge of unobservable physical objects… [and regards] metaphysical speculation as failing to keep imagination limited by observation” (Sullivan, 2009, p. 395). Because of the rejection of spiritual speculation and wisdom, human beings become forgetful of the grand source that give life profound meaning and purpose. The exclusion of spiritual language and wisdom from education also hides from us “what we are really about when we educate” (Huebner, 1985a/1999b, p. 359). In the absence of spiritual wisdom in education, we forget that “knowing is a relation between the person and the other” (Huebner, 1985a/1999b, p. 365). Huebner (1985a/1999b) suggested,
Huebner (1985a/1999b) lamented that “the mutuality of love and reverence is broken in technical communities, for we no longer care for that which cares for us” (p. 366). This mutuality of duty, love, and reverence became gradually replaced by the absolutistic and objectivistic worldview which assumes the mind-independence of reality (Bryman, 2004) and a sharp distinction between the observer and the observed, and by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is often interpreted or misinterpreted as connoting the life as war metaphor to represent human experiences (McTaggart, 2011, p. xxi).[by failing to recognize knowledge] as an invitation to join hands with someone else in their involvement with earth,… [and] an invitation to establish a relationship of care and being cared for—a relationship of duty, love, and reverence,… we make the objects of the world care for us. We harness these objects, their qualities and characteristics, to our needs and wants, frequently destroying them, and gradually the earth, so they can serve us. (p. 366)
In the educational context, in the absence of spiritual wisdom and the mutuality of duty, love, and reverence, students are either blindly accepting of the absolutistic and objectivistic worldview, seeing competition among humans as human nature, viewing the doctrine of virtues as mere platitudinous and hypocritical dogma for social control, or to the contrary, struggling strenuously to maintain their deep beliefs and values that are contradictory with, and confused by, the prevailing absolutistic and objectivistic worldview. On the societal and political levels, the absolutistic and objectivistic worldview and the materialist social values are reflected in the formulaic logic of The Market and the language of global competitiveness along with the formula of “Unless we do X, we will fall behind” (Smith, 2000, p. 18). Smith (2000) commented that this becomes “a simple and powerful recipe for the creation of Loser Culture” (p. 18), for winning implies losing, and that “any social and educational planning motivated by the sheer desire to win of necessity breeds not only hypercompetitiveness in the social realm, but also its adjunct effects of heightened social paranoia and the turning of friends into enemies” (p. 18). Also, since there must, by definition, only be a few winners, more and more people feel as if they are losers and that life is a race (Smith, 2000, p. 18). He quoted remarks by the Canadian philosopher of technology Franklin that “the language of global competitiveness is the language of war” (p. 18), and remarked that, as educators, we might ask: “Who can survive it, and how?” (p. 18). Smith (2000) foresaw that the increasing forms of resistance against the radical commercialization of human values on a global scale might prefigure a global conversation regarding “what it means to live well humanly speaking” (p. 16), and indicated that “discussions regarding shared futures must inevitably involve religious questions, that is, questions about meaning, purpose, and what is truly required to nurture and sustain human life in its most noble and dignified senses” (p. 16).
Since the rise of classical science, the excessive desire to gain and win nurtured by the absolutistic and objectivistic worldview and materialist social values has gradually blinded humankind to the interconnectedness and interdependence of everything on the Earth, and to the existence of infinite transcendental possibilities. Such blindness can lead to dire consequences for not only human beings, but also the planet as a whole. In his lecture to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee at Oslo, Norway in 2007, Al Gore (2008) addressed the issue of global warming, cautioning: “We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency—a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential” (p. 55). Moreover, climate change is not the only global crisis we face today. According to Lomborg (2004), the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus conference identified more than 30 major global challenges, including conflicts and arms proliferation, terrorism, corruption, deforestation, chemical pollution and hazardous waste, depletion of the ozone layer and water resources, loss of biodiversity, vulnerability to natural disasters, malnutrition and hunger, etc.
Underscoring the interdependence of various elements for the diversity of life on Earth, indigenous law scholar Borrows (2010) reminded us that “to look just on the surface, and...