CHIEF SITTING BULL: EDUCATION AND THE PROVISION OF MEANING FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
“We need to put our heads together to work out a view of life that offers a future for our children.” By 1890, the native Americans of the Lakota Sioux Nation had been negotiating convulsive changes in their life world and culture for more than 30 years. Their free ranging life on the Western plains had been dramatically disrupted, leaving them in a restricted dependency on reservation land. They were in cultural and ideological conflict with a powerful invading culture – a culture dominated by ideas of expansion, development and profits that took little or no account of indigenous traditions. |
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Hopefully, they would develop understandings that could help their young make sense of the terrible things that had happened to them, and help them chart a hopeful way forward. Things would never again be the way they were in the past, and the future was uncertain and threatening. But they wanted their children to cope and possibly thrive in a rapidly changing world, while maintaining some sense of being Lakota.
We may not be in as desperate a situation as were the Lakota. But the message is still one that is important for contemporary religious educators to heed.
All of us adults have some responsibility for the next generation. One of our tasks is to offer our children and young people a view of life that interprets what is going on in the world from a value perspective, and offers positive ideals and goals for human fulfilment and satisfying community. This issue is particularly important for educators who want to be sure that there is a relevant spiritual and moral dimension to schooling. Their aim is to help young people develop as ‘critical interpreters of the culture'. There is much in contemporary Western culture in need of such evaluation. For example, individuality and improving one's lifestyle are desirable themes to pursue; but excesses in these and other areas can compromise authentic human fulfilment and happiness while having even more damaging repercussions for others.
On the face of it, Sitting Bull did not appear to have been as successful as he might have hoped. Not long after this, the same year, he was killed by one of his own people in an incident with local Law enforcement. But that is not the point – he was trying to do something positive and explore the way forward. He could not solve the problems, they were too big; he knew that; but he helped point his collective children in a hopeful direction.
Expectations of Australian Schools in Promoting the Spiritual and Moral Development of Young People
Educators in both public and church-related schools need to be aware of the development evident in state education documents over the years as regards the spiritual and moral purposes of education.
In the past, even where there were no official statements detailing the school's aim to promote the spiritual and moral development of young people, it is likely that this purpose would have been implied in the ways teachers looked after their pupils. They were always concerned with the welfare of their pupils as persons, and not just with the development of literacy and numeracy skills. What was said in a recent national education statement in 2003 had long been the case in practice: “education is as much about building character as it is about equipping students with specific skills.”(Curriculum Corporation, 2003, p.6).
The importance of this spiritual/moral aim has probably never been in question; but spelling out what it implies for classroom practice has remained a perennial problem. Perennial – because the problem has been not so much in finding the right content and pedagogy, but in the very complexity of young people's spiritual and moral development itself. The links between teaching/learning processes and personal change in pupils are naturally much more complex and tenuous than those with say knowledge of mathematics or science.
The National Values Education Project (2003), sponsored by the Federal Government, has raised the prominence of values and other personalist aims for education. Its contribution to the spiritual/moral dimension of education across four areas:
• Personal development terms used for articulating spiritual/moral purposes to education.
• Listing of core values for education (both the values underpinning education as well as the values it is hoped will be developed in pupils).
• Particular teaching programs in values, and in subjects like ethics, personal development, religion etc.
• Across-the-curriculum strategies for promoting pupil spiritual/moral development
However, one of the problems in discussion of the spiritual/moral role of education is that insufficient attention is given to the different (but related) requirements of each area. For example, talk about ‘teaching values' is often diffuse and unfocused; and the ensuing vagueness hampers both the conceptualisation of educational processes as well as realistic and effective implementation. If a discussion of values education refers to all four areas in a relatively undifferentiated way, then it can obscure the precision needed to advance the agenda across each of them separately.
Over the past 30 years the spiritual and moral purposes of the curriculum in Australian schools have been progressed. But such developments have not been adequately complemented by investigations of links between these intentions and classroom practice , even though study of pedagogy has been prominent in the literature. The actual lines of potential personal influence need further clarification; otherwise much of the talk about holistic education will remain where it is now, at the level of good intentions – and not effectively translated into practice. Also, not enough attention has been given to the active role of students in their own spiritual/moral education; this means that in both education theory and practice, more consideration is required of young people as autonomous, thinking, feeling, individuals involved in their own personal change in response to education and other aspects of their social and cultural environment.
The development of a framework for understanding links between education and pupil personal change would give a better perspective to the personal aims for education; and more coherence and integration to the practical efforts to achieve these aims.
Increasingly, much store is being placed on enhancing the dimensions of meaning, purpose and value in school education. But an adequate conceptualisation of how this translates into practice is urgently needed; if not, there is a danger that expectations of the spiritual/moral role of education will remain little more than ideological rhetoric, covering up confused patchy practice.
Catholic school systems across Australia have given attention to all four of the areas referred to earlier, especially in the area of religious education. Nevertheless, more could be done to clarify area 4 – the way in which across-the-curriculum studies can promote pupils' spiritual and moral development. Here too, the same problem noted above – a gap between purposes and practices – remains significant. In this area, both the public and church-related schools face a similar educational challenge.
Notes
Curriculum Corporation, (2003a). Draft National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools , (Prepared for the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training). Carlton South Vic: Curriculum Corporation.
Curriculum Corporation, (2003b). Values Education Study: Final Report , (Prepared for the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training). Carlton South Vic: Curriculum Corporation.