Our school systems produce a specific work environment expectation for the future. School systems shape what the ideal future individual looks like.

How do we perceive the ideal individual? Perhaps someone who follows rules, has a scientific mindset, and knows how to make a large income or earn a lot of promotions. This idea that we have about being ideal individuals is rooted in expectations impressed upon us during schooling.

Science based subjects tend to push humanities based subjects to the side. In many countries science based subjects including mathematics tend to take precedent over subjects such as literature, history, and philosophy. This has resulted in the modern citizen having a particular set of values - a set of values that might even come off as questionable.

Do you recall someone at school once giving you a lesson related to spirituality, self-awareness, or self-understanding? These lessons are so vital to our own personal growth that it seems careless that school systems would just pretend that they are not needed, or not a part of the curriculum, or inherit to us.

Spiritual Education is not needed
… I did not know

School children spend over 1,500 hours per year in the education system. This has a substantial impact on the kind of people they will become by the time they graduate from college. So when we ask whether spiritual education is needed should it not be up to parents rather than schooling policies? It is after all the investment of the parents into schools that keeps them running.

I would further posit that rates of dissatisfaction, work problems, and poor emotional literacy skills, are quite prominent in the world that schools supposedly prepare people to enter. Schools teach knowledge to prepare us to do work. This is their agenda. It certainly is not to improve self-awareness or to promote creative thinking outside the norm.

Spiritual Education should not be part of the curriculum
… I did not know

In 2006 I studied some philosophy at university, and those that were taking the class as an elective struggled with metaphysical concepts, as well as having trouble constructing a valid argument. How can critical thinking be taught only after school education and as an elective? Critical thinking, the basis of ethics, and metaphysical enquiry, should all be taught as soon as possible rather than being ejected into the corner of education and dominated by the sciences.

Some schools teaching religion once again resort to a scientific method of reciting scripture or remembering who said what from the Bible. Is a humanistic school structure not possible at all? Or is it just undesirable when considering that it might cause people to find themselves and not spend all 40 possible hours of the week working?

Schools will claim that their curriculum prepares a person for real-world life. This is of course because schools frame what that life will be like with the actual process of indoctrination that forces an individual to chase a certain standard. Change the entire curriculum of all schools - and watch the world change.

Our spiritual understanding is inherent to us and does not need to be developed
… I did not know

The last point I would like to make is that the first 5-10 years of a life sets more mental barriers within a person than that person will set for the rest of their life. If schools are dictating ethics rather than promoting tools, experiences, and exercises for looking at the basis of ethics, then we are sure to continue producing societies without personal moral awareness. If schools continue setting a curriculum based on an expected future then few people will have the wisdom to make their own future and dreams come true when the time comes.

If schools continue standardising science subject achievements as the crowning academic achievements then what kind of tomorrow are we promoting?

Mental illness, depression, and unhappiness rates have increased more and more in the last decade because people are not being allowed to do what it is their heart wishes to do. Furthermore, in the modern world more and more people are being restricted from being who their true self desires to be. This has been a common historic trend – but whether we continue to support it or reject these standards is and has been in our hands the entire time.