Renewing the Sacred

Our societies are in deep trouble. Many say education can help the situation. Such a view unconsciously assumes that current education is basically alright, though it may need some changes. It is not aright. It is failing our children. Others know that education is not working, and put their hopes and dollars in education reform. But proposals to reform education come and go, replaced by others; nothing seems to work for long. Why? For the author of Renewing the Sacred, William Barnes, reforms don't work because they do not go deep enough. We are renovating the house, when the ground itself is giving way beneath our feet. Something great and new in education must be attempted. We must find a new foundation for the house of education. Education must be transformed not reformed. That means something he calls spiritual education. Laying out the model of spiritual education what the book is mainly about, but it's about more than just what can be done in schools. Part One of Renewing the Sacred examines the larger contexts of nation and culture that schools are embedded in and which traditionally are meant to serve. He argues that nations and cultures are exhausted and disintegrating. The chief reason for this is that our secular civilization is itself falling into chaos and confusion, because its values no longer hold people together in common purpose. In fact, the entire secular, scientific, materialist world-view that defines the modern temper is increasingly discredited as an interpretation of Reality. A discredited view of Reality challenges the purpose of most schools at their deepest level. Some believe that the best response to the crisis of values is a renewal of religion. There is not much to recommend here, for traditional religions are incapable of meeting the complex challenges of today, whatever personal comfort they bring their followers. So if everything around it is collapsing, what can education do? The answer is that rather than being passive carriers of tradition, schools can be active laboratories of personal and collective transformation. Part Two presents the basic model of spiritual education: the principles that ground it philosophically; the experience of the sacred that grounds it experientially; the new faculties of the sacred heart and the spiritual mind that are awakened and developed by spiritual education, for every advance into a new form of consciousness must be accompanied by the awakening of some new faculty; the qualities that spiritual education brings forth from students that empower them to change their world. Part Three discusses the changes in curriculum, pedagogy, in emotional environment and in classroom structure that flow from the model of spiritual education. The final chapter lays out some larger questions that need further discussion. We must not be afraid to look deep into the heart of education and society and work out from there. This takes the spirit of the pioneer, the discoverer, the trailblazer. It is our only real hope. Renewing the Sacred is a pioneering vision of education.