- Title
- Spirituality and the public school
- Creator
- Lovat, Terence
- Relation
- Meaning and Connectedness: Australian Perspectives on Education and Spirituality p. 19-30
- Relation
- https://austcolled.com.au/articlepurchase/meaning-and-connectedness-australian-perspectives-education-and-spirituality
- Publisher
- Australian College of Educators
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- Those responsible for the foundations of public education in Australia in the nineteenth century were sufficiently pragmatic to know that its success relied on its charter being in accordance with public sentiment. Part of the pragmatism was in convincing those whose main experience of education had been through some form of church-based education that public education was capable of meeting the same ends. Among these ends was a spiritual perspective that had been at the heart of all forms of church-based education but especially so within Catholic education where religious orders increasingly made up the major part of the teaching force. Whatever the precise motives that impelled them, the documents of the 1870s and 1880s that contained the charters of the various public education systems of the then colony states witness to a breadth of vision about the scope of education. Beyond the standard goals of literacy and numeracy, education was said to be capable of assuring religious understanding and personal morality for each individual, and so a suitable citisenry for the soon-to-be new nation. The notion, therefore, that public education is part of a deep and ancient heritage around religious neutrality is mistaken. The evidence suggests that public education's initial conception was of being the complete educator, not only of young people's minds but of their inner character, including their spiritual character. Nonetheless, for all the attempts to position public education as the comprehensive educator, and so capable of supplanting the role played by church-based education, the history of both the country and the times was against it. Among many practical effects, it seemed that public educators moved away deliberately from their charter around spiritual content and awareness, preferring to leave this to the churches.
- Subject
- public education; spirituality; religious education; churches
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/929422
- Identifier
- uon:10578
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781920819880
- Language
- eng
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