Nurturing the Souls of Our Children: Education and the Culture of Democracy

© 2005 ROBERT MITCHELL. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 06/21/05

ISBN: 1-4208-2372-8 (sc)

ISBN: 1-4208-2373-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-7517-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2005900028

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I

TRANSCENDING THE CULTURAL WAR

CHAPTER ONE

Examining the Foundation: Is Educating a Child a Public Trust or a Sacred Trust?

CHAPTER TWO

Forming The Cultural Identity Of The United States

CHAPTER THREE

Shifting Emphasis: Acculturation to Socialization

CHAPTER FOUR

The Twentieth Century: From Socialization to Popular Culture

CHAPTER FIVE

Redefining Cultural Identity through Education

CHAPTER SIX

Creating a new Cultural Education Curriculum In the Context of the Sacred Trust

PART II

SEEKING THE ARCHETYPE OF THE TEACHER

CHAPTER SEVEN

A New Teacher’s First Year

CHAPTER EIGHT

Becoming a Professional Teacher

CHAPTER NINE

Defining Professional Objectives

CHAPTER TEN

Seeking the Soul in Personality and Education

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A New Look at Educational Psychology:

The Psyche and the Cultural Environment

CHAPTER TWELVE

Practicing the Art of Teaching

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Examining Archetypal Relationships in Child Development and Education

APPENDIX

An Outline For A Cultural Education Curriculum

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Notes

References

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For Schalah and Jason and David and Blake

And the reason you are here as an

adult, as a citizen, as a parent [and

as a teacher]? To make a world receptive

to the daimon. To set the civilization

straight so that a child can grow down

into it and [his or her] daimon can have a life.

James Hillman

The Soul’s Code

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over the course of the years that I spent researching and writing Nurturing the Souls of Our Children, I was helped along the way by many friends and professional colleagues who encouraged, criticized, and lent valuable support to the project. I particularly want to thank Susan Drake, Barbara Vogl, Jason Moran, Rita Kuhnke, Page Smith, Syd Ginsberg, Ron Miller, and Victoria Robbins.

I owe particular debts of gratitude to John Anderson for the deep and probing conversations that have made this a better book, and to Paul Tietz, whose encouragement, support, and editing skills were an important part of bringing this project to fruition. I also want to thank Les Boston and Joy Parker for their editing skills and editorial insights.

INTRODUCTION

There is the question of what culture is and the question whether it is anything we can control or influence. These questions confront us whenever we devise a theory, or frame a policy, of education.¹

T.S. Eliot

Writing more than fifty years ago, Eliot had an astute sense of the cultural decline of Western civilization. Today, the cultural decadence of which Eliot spoke is much more clearly defined, as both cultural awareness and cultural expression among the general populace are overshadowed by the transient materialism that defines our day-to-day popular culture. We have lost our sense of the sacred—of transcendental values—and replaced them with pragmatism and immediacy.

Thus, art works are not valued for what they might say about the timeless spirituality of the human condition but for their commercial value and investment potential. Many new works in art, literature, theater and film assault our senses and our sensibilities by stretching temporal, spatial and emotional boundaries to evoke a reaction, but they do not lift the spirit by transcending those boundaries. Transcendental works are shunned as too ethereal for our pragmatic sensibilities and our desire for immediate gratification. In the more practical sense, the vast majority of the utilitarian products of daily life are simply manufactured goods that convey the tasteless banality of modern culture rather than display an esthetic of design and craftsmanship. We might conclude that our American civilization has lost its collective sense of refined cultural appreciation and expression.

Is this the fault of education? We can blame the education system only if we acknowledge that an education should instill in the young a sense of culture that transcends the immediate, nurtures the soul, and provides us with an acute vision that perpetuates cultural vitality. Our current educational system does none of these. Some, like Eliot, have long believed that the decline of our culture is a blatant failure of our system of universal public education and that a cultural education should be the domain of elite private schools. In Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), Eliot says:

For there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture—of that part of it which is transmissible by education—are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.²

This passage brings to mind two disturbing images from our pervasive popular culture—modern punks and the barbarian nomads in the trilogy of Mel Gibson Road Warrior films from the 1980s. Neither of those allusions stirs optimism for the future, for they are unsettling images from a deconstructionist current that would culminate in the rise of the anti-cultural barbarism that, despite our best efforts to disguise it, lies just beneath the surface of popular culture.

Since the 1950s, those deconstructionist currents have risen to destroy elitist cultural pretenses and our guarded self-deceptions about modern American culture’s place in the world. To counter the deconstructionist current, since the 1980s those cultural pretenses and self-deceptions have reared their heads once more. But which of the two—deconstructionism or self-deception—should usher in the future? I would hope that, for the reader of this book, the answer would be neither. Rather, it is time to reconstruct a less pretentious and non-self-deceiving model of our cultural identity based on the ideal of democracy. Thus, even with his elitist views, we are invited to pay close attention to Eliot’s important discussion of the cultural dilemma of our time and the juncture between culture and education that can help us define a new model for the educational process.

In the above passage, Eliot’s opening phrase reveals that in his conservative opinion a cultural education should belong only to a select few. In that view, the universal education system is not charged with the responsibility of providing everyone with a cultural education. Rather, it is responsible for ferreting out those who are qualified to receive a cultural education and, thus, become the elite corps that preserves our national-cultural heritage and identity. It is a meritorious system, where the verity of our democracy is determined by the egalitarian fairness of determining and rewarding merit. Eliot explains this concept of cultural elitism in the body of his essay.

Here, Eliot’s objective is not to define culture. He takes the view that both terms—culture and education—are more conceptual than definitive, so that seeking a definition of these terms takes into consideration several contextual variables. Eliot discusses four variables that lead to the juncture of culture and education.

The first important assertion is that no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion: according to the point of view of the observer the culture will appear to be the product of the religion, or the religion the product of the culture.³ This concept, that culture and religion are inseparable, implies that an individual’s cultural and religious identities are inexorably intertwined.

That concept played an important role in initially defining the American national-cultural identity. Throughout the nineteenth century the Protestant ethos was an important element of acculturation that was perpetuated in the schools as well as in the churches. But in this century, the intertwining of cultural identity and a dominant religious identity has served to complicate the issue of defining our national-cultural identity. This has subsequently confused the issue of how we should provide our young people with a cultural education that perpetuates the national identity and builds a strong and consistent individual cultural identity. Eliot’s second observation sheds some light on this issue by qualifying the question of cultural identity.

Eliot says that in modern societies there are three levels of cultural identity: that of the entire society, or nation-state; the group level of cultural and religious identity and the individual level of cultural-religious identity. The focus of Eliot’s discussion is on the relationship between the cultural identity of the modern nation-state and the various group cultures that exist within it. This cultural pluralism, in which a nation is made up of various ethnic and religious groups, creates a multicultural society.

In Eliot’s view, however, a multicultural society must have a dominant religious-cultural identity. His model is that of the Anglican Church and English culture. But Eliot also emphasizes that a dominant, national religious-cultural identity must tolerate group cultural expression. In Britain, for example, this means freedom of religious expression for non-Anglican Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists as well as independent cultural expression by the distinctive ethnic groups—Scots, Welsh, Irish, Britons, and immigrants from other parts of the empire. Though there are obvious similarities between the melting-pot that we call a multicultural society and the British concept of multiculturalism, in Britain distinctive group cultures are more pronounced than they are in the United States.

Eliot persists in making the distinction between a national-cultural identity and group cultural identities and emphasizes the importance of cultivating both in the individual. He says that, while the cultural identity of the nation-state is primarily self-conscious and consciously perpetuated through a system of universal education, group-level cultural identities are mostly unconscious. But Eliot also warns that a self-conscious, national-cultural identity does not, in and of itself, constitute a complete cultural identity. Culture cannot altogether be brought to consciousness; and the culture of which we are wholly conscious is never the whole of culture.⁴ Heeding Eliot’s warning, we can conclude that modern, popular culture cannot provide an adequate foundation for the formation of an individual’s cultural identity. This implies that unconscious and more traditional group and individual cultural identifiers play an important role in the development of individual cultural identity and personality. It begs the question of what role a cultural education can, or should, play in influencing those non-self-conscious identifiers that help mold the developing personality of the child.

Here, it is important to note that Eliot dismisses the third level of culture—individual cultural identity—as organic and hereditary, which he defines as genetic, implying that it is not an important factor in the formation of the individual’s cultural identity. My arguments here will challenge Eliot’s view. In the following chapters, I discuss individual cultural identity and show how it is vitally important in the development of the child’s complete cultural identity and the formation of his or her character—particularly in a democratic society. I also show how cultural-identity formation and personality development should be integral parts of the child’s education. That is, personality development should be considered a primary goal of education—whether our view is non-elitist—supporting an egalitarian democracy—or elitist—in which the education system is crucial to selecting the ruling class. Eliot’s elitist view is explained further by the last two observations leading to the conjunction of culture and education.

His third observation is that the cultural elite preserve the cultural identity of the entire society. Eliot says that the cultural elite should be defined by meritorious selection—outside of the social classes of inherited wealth and position. Thomas Jefferson had advocated the same view a hundred and fifty years earlier. Thus, Eliot also advances the democratic goal of an open and meritorious social mobility so that, regardless of social class origins, the cultural elite will rise up out of the general populace.

That elite, formed of individuals apt for powers of government and administration…will be spoken of as ‘leaders.’ But there will also be other elites concerned with art…science…philosophy, as well as…men of action.⁵ This is probably close to what Jefferson envisioned as a natural aristocracy. Jefferson’s qualifiers, however, were that the cultural elite would emerge through their display of virtue and talent, where virtue was defined according to the Protestant ethos and talent according to one’s capacity for enlightened reason. Eliot’s qualifiers are that the cultural elite is formed of those, representing a more conscious culture and a greater specialization of culture,⁶ rather than possessing more culture than the lower classes.

Eliot’s forth observation links culture, politics, and education. He says, ‘Culture’ is recognised both as an instrument of policy and as something socially desirable which it is the business of the State to promote.⁷ Eliot then argues that the decline of Western civilization brings culture and education together through the State.

Our motives, in attempting to do something about our culture,… arise from the consciousness that our culture is not in very good health….This consciousness has transformed the problem of education, by either identifying culture with education, or turning to education as the one instrument for improving our culture.⁸

From these four steps we might conclude that Eliot interprets the educational process as a means by which state-supported universal education perpetuates—through the process of selecting a cultural elite—a national-cultural identity that is inherently self-conscious and intended to unify various group cultures in a culturally pluralistic society. That is, universal education is conceived in terms of a public trust, which serves the public’s interests and is preserved by public policy. This definition of a cultural education does not sustain group cultural identities but implies that those identities are perpetuated within the group through the child’s inherent relationships with parents and other adults in the distinctive cultural community.

Perhaps influenced by Eliot’s essay, as well, Professor E.D. Hirsch published a work in 1987 that dealt with the idea of reforming cultural education in America. His book Cultural Literacy gained popularity among cultural conservatives and conservative educationists. That work spawned the Core Knowledge Foundation, the subsequent compilation of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and the development of a Core Knowledge cultural education program for grades one through eight. The objective of that cultural education program is to redevelop and sustain a self-conscious national-cultural identity that embraces all group cultural identities within a multicultural republic.

My purpose here is also to reiterate the importance of reinstating a viable cultural education program in our elementary and secondary schools. But in doing so, I provide a counterpoint to the conservative view of cultural education expressed by Eliot and Hirsch. I do that by taking into consideration educational processes that nurture the soul as well as educate the mind of the child. Thus, my discussion is of a holistic approach to education. It focuses on the fundamental concept that education is a process by which parents and teachers work together to help the child discover those sacred aspects of cultural identity and character that are representative of the higher self and emerge from deep within the soul to affect personality development. In this scenario, teachers, parents and children are bound together in a new concept of education that I call a sacred trust. This concept does not undermine national or group cultural identities but transcends the restrictions they place on the personality by introducing the role that archetypes play in defining cultural identity.

In part I, I contrast the fundamental concepts of education as a public trust and as a sacred trust. I then present a brief history of education in the United States that emphasizes how the concept of universal education as a pubic trust has led to the degradation of cultural education in our schools. It is a discussion of how the educational process has affected cultural identity and individual personality development throughout our history. Chapter five reiterates Eliot’s three levels of cultural identity—national, group, and individual—and advocates a shift in emphasis from a national-cultural identity to an individual cultural identity in the context of a democratic culture. Thus the concept of an individual cultural identity is developed in reference to both individual cultural heritage and universal cultural archetypes that give substance to the higher self.

In part II, I use anecdotes from my own teaching experience to broaden the discussion of cultural archetypes into a discussion of the archetypal relationships between children and their parents and teachers that directly affects personality development in the child. The theme of seeking the archetype of the teacher is presented both anecdotally and by referencing innovative investigations in archetypal psychology.

An appendix that illustrates my concept of a cultural education follows the text. It presents an outline for a K-12 cultural education curriculum within the contexts of a sacred trust and a democratic culture.

PART I

TRANSCENDING THE CULTURAL WAR

CHAPTER ONE

Examining the Foundation: Is Educating a Child a Public Trust or a Sacred Trust?

Any inquiry into the nature of education must reiterate the question of what it is that we expect the educational process to accomplish. In an essay entitled The Aims of Education—from lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in 1950—Eliot states three aims of education. These are 1) professional, or training to earn a living; 2) social, or preparation for citizenship; and 3) individual, or the development of an individual’s highest potential. The interrelation and the contradiction of these three aims are the subjects of Eliot’s lectures.

However, in our collective consciousness we do not have a fixed idea of what the objective of the educational process should be, and several different interpretations have arisen. For example, Professor Kieran Egan, in his book The Educated Mind, also states that education is dominated by three ideas that, too, are interrelated and contradictory. He says that one idea is to shape the young to the norms and conventions of adult society. This objective is similar to Eliot’s social aim. Egan’s second idea is that education should teach the knowledge that ensures that the thinking of the young conforms to what is real and true about the world. This objective implies that the child’s view of reality should conform to the worldview of his or her parents and of the culture—an epistemological objective that has important philosophical implications for K-12 education. Egan’s third idea is that each student should achieve his or her highest potential. This conforms to Eliot’s individual aim of the educational process.

I present these two views only to show that while there is some flexibility in defining the objectives of education, some of those objectives are uncontested. For example, the educational system has a mandate and an obligation to socialize the child. Though this objective may be stated in different ways, dissent—such as that of the 1960s and ’70s—is usually short lived. Another uncontested objective is that the educational process should help the child achieve his or her highest potential. Still, that vaguely defined objective depends on how we define human potential. In a utilitarian and pragmatic culture, for example, it might mean the highest development of an individual’s vocational or professional skills. In a system with a more holistic underlying educational philosophy, human potential implies factors dealing with the child’s personality development. A third uncontested objective of the modern utilitarian definition of education is that it must teach the child the skills necessary to become vocationally or professionally competent. Lastly, Egan’s epistemological idea plays an uncontested role in how we define educational processes.

With these four definitions of the objectives of education in mind, we can now take note of the idea that education also plays a significant role in child development. This results from several factors that include development in the areas of speech and language acquisition, thinking skills, and emotional, social, and moral development. For example, speech, language and social development in the child can be related to the social objectives of education. Thinking skills relate to the epistemological and some of the professional objectives of the educational process. Emotional and moral development relate to the individual goal of reaching one’s highest potential, though these developmental objectives atrophy when utilitarianism dominates educational philosophy. Thus, the intertwining of education and child development puts a greater emphasis on personality development, represented in education by the objectives of cultural identity formation and character development.

Under the rubric of acculturation, personality development was an acknowledged objective of education in nineteenth-century America. The educational objective was assimilation, by the individual, of an already defined cultural identity. We no longer acknowledge acculturation or a cultural education program with the goals of cultural-identity formation, yet personality development remains a powerful implicit effect of the educational process. Thus, how we frame our fundamental concept of education has an important effect on personality development.

For example, when we frame education in terms of a public trust, the intent of both the explicit goals and the implicit developmental objectives is to serve the greater good of society. Educational goals, and subsequently developmental objectives, become matters of public policy that are administered by an educational bureaucracy. On the other hand, as a sacred trust, the explicit and implicit developmental objectives of education follow a pathway that leads the child toward the discovery of the sacred aspects of his or her personality—the higher self. This gives the child a transcendental purpose for achieving his or her highest potential. Because this process places greater emphasis on personality development, it should not be directed by a bureaucracy but by an active relationship between teachers and parents. That is the essence of the sacred trust. Thus, how we frame this conceptual foundation becomes the basis on which to establish the vocational, social, epistemological, individual, and developmental goals of education.

When education is defined as a public trust, the child’s character—moral, social, and emotional development—is determined by a dominant, common ethos. That ethos may be religious, secular or a combination of the two. In the United States, our common ethos usually refers to a merger of both Judeo-Christian religious values and secular civil law. In the home, the community, and the schools we try to teach the rules of moral and social behavior, and hold the child accountable to the collective for that behavior, but it is an uphill battle against popular culture, where all values are transient and relativistic. That battle is evident in the conflicts between parents and their teenage children. To combat the effects of popular culture, adults in the home and in the schools often attempt to coerce the child into compliance with a collective behavioral standard and expect the child to temper his or her emotional responses to an acceptable norm. To achieve this end, we instill, in the child, feelings of shame and guilt, and, through education, we try to instill a social conscience. We teach the child that control over his or her emotions and compliance with the rules in personal, social, and cultural behavior are the determining factors of a moral life and must be assimilated into the self-vigilant behaviors of a socialized self-conscious ego.

In contrast, the character development objectives of the sacred trust transcend abject obedience to a common, dominant ethos—either religious or civil. It proposes that the archetypal characteristics of a culture define character in the individual, so morality is a transcendental quality of the personality directed by the higher self. Parents who adhere to the concept of the sacred trust and inherently nurture the souls of their children generally find that the intensity of conflicts with teenage children is greatly diminished. That is because the mysterious process of soul nurturing draws morality out of the higher self and is, therefore, less susceptible to the relativism and transience of popular culture’s conflict with established values. Though all young people need guidance from adults in making appropriate decisions about their behavior, it is that higher self that inherently knows the difference between right and wrong. The educational objective of the sacred trust is to nurture the soul of the child, so that he or she develops that vital relationship with the higher self.

Thus, when we make the concept of the sacred trust our foundation of education, we strive to develop a personality in harmony with sacred values that transcend cultural differences. This makes character a harmonious expression of the instincts, intuitions, and feelings of the higher self, in contrast to character based on a code of self-vigilant behaviors followed out of complacency or fear of punishment. The difference between these two educational concepts is not easily detected in the resultant values taught to the child, for many of those values will be the same. But there is a significant difference in the methods by which they are taught and, subsequently, in the conviction by which the individual assimilates, practices and defends those values.

The other part of personality development is cultural-identity formation. The public trust has a mandate to play a significant role in defining our common national-cultural identity and instilling that identity in the child, though this often conflicts with a superficial and transient popular-cultural identity. To the degree that acculturation still takes place in our schools, homes, and communities, it draws the individual child into the common national-cultural identity, which is reflected in the personality. In our diverse multicultural and multi-religious society, our common history and popular culture have the most influence on defining the common national-cultural identity. These prevail over the cosmological, or mystical and archetypal, foundations of the personality, thus mocking Eliot’s observation that a cultural identity cannot be entirely conscious. Psychologically, this also establishes an inner conflict between the ego’s cultural self-image and a cultural identity drawn from the archetypal images and metaphors of the higher self.

In contrast, when we make education a sacred trust, we teach young people that the most significant aspect of their cultural identity is that which is sacred in themselves. That higher self resides in the soul as a mystical foundation of the personality. It is defined by universal archetypes that transcend cultural and religious differences. Young people learn about those foundations of their own personalities by studying the cosmological—mystical and archetypal—foundations of culture. The more culturally diverse the society, the more important it is to emphasize the metaphysical aspects of cultural identity and the sacred values they engender. A cultural education can then be defined not in terms of acculturation but as a study of the various ways that individuals and whole cultures give expression to the sacred.

To summarize, the public trust teaches a secular-based morality and a historically based cultural identity, which does not encompass a reverence for the sacred or for the higher self. That public trust is defined by a set of philosophical governing principles—called the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education—that were established in 1918 and still, in this century, rule our fundamental concept of education. They determine the content of the curriculum and its degree of difficulty, or rigor. In the classroom, those principles define the teacher-student relationship that is often hierarchical, authoritative, and adversarial, in spite of the best intentions of individual teachers. Those fundamental principles are necessary because they serve the relationship between the individual and the public—that is, between the child and the collectivity—and, in that regard, the teacher must act as an instrument of public policy. Under the Cardinal Principles and the concept of education as a public trust, there are several objectives that can be summarized and compared with Eliot’s three primary goals of education.

1. The child should acquire the culture of the society into which he or she is born and raised. This is the process of acculturation, or acquiring cultural literacy. As shown above, this objective of the educational process has become more of an implied, rather than a stated, educational goal, and it is in constant conflict with popular definitions of cultural identity.

2. The child should learn his or her place in the social strata, and learn the civic responsibilities of good citizenship that go with that position. We accomplish this through processes of socialization.

3. The child should acquire utilitarian skills and pragmatic knowledge necessary to become an economically productive adult.

In a democracy, a fourth educational objective related to personality development is to instill a sense of self-governance. In terms defined by the public trust, however, self-governance means the development of a social conscience and self-vigilant conformity to the beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors sanctioned by the collectivity. Outwardly, we govern ourselves by conscious compliance to civil laws. Inwardly, our social conscience, or cultural superego, usurps the authority of the higher self to govern our behavior by producing responses that range from self-righteousness to shame and guilt. These are emotional reactions to the self-vigilant relationship between the ego and the superego.

Of the three general objectives of education as a public trust the most practical is that of acquiring utilitarian skills and pragmatic knowledge geared toward benefiting the social economy. This object requires the subordination of the child’s developmental processes—communication and thinking skills and social development—to the needs of the social economy and not to the general acquisition of knowledge or achieving the highest developmental potential. Thus, the educational system sees the child as a socialized unit of intellectual capital, or a being that, in order to contribute to the greater good, must be equipped to succeed in a competitive social and economic environment. This utilitarian objective of education reinforces American culture’s materialistic and pragmatic view of reality. But, when the greater good is defined in materialistic and pragmatic terms, educational objectives that would stimulate an active inquiry into the mystical and archetypal foundations of personality are undermined.

Ironically, the loss of public confidence in the educational system stems, not from the materialistic and pragmatic intent of its goals, but from the fact that the education system fails to achieve its own primary objectives. For example, the objective of an implicit doctrine of pragmatic utilitarianism focuses young people’s attention on material success. Yet a significant number of high school graduates are unable to realize that success because their education does not give them the tools they need to achieve it. Large numbers of students graduate from our high schools and colleges functionally illiterate, more economically dependent than self-reliant, and incompetent in the skills and knowledge that would be an asset to both themselves and the national economy.

Additionally, the failure of the public trust of education is a failure of acculturation and socialization, so that, rather than playing a vital role in helping young people with the difficult task of cultural-identity formation, the education system has become reactive to the influences of popular culture. For example, in an age of television, the television culture has come to replace literate culture, and just teaching children to read is an uphill battle. The significance of this struggle lies in the psychological processes of image making. The reading process requires imagination and stimulates the psychological function of image making, while television provides the images, thus repressing the imaginative function of the psyche. More important, good literature stimulates images that arise out of the individual’s inherent reservoir of archetypes, or universal symbols. Thus, literature is a metaphorical medium through which the cultural imagination is stimulated, bringing to life its repertoire of archetypal images. The messages that literature conveys come from the individual’s higher self.

Television is different in that it presents the viewer with pre-formulated images. As the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan noted, The media is the message. Transient images of flickering light from the television hypnotize and captivate the cultural imagination. The result is that the child’s critical development of an affinity with cultural archetypes atrophies. Consequently, the archetypal imagery that stimulates the higher self to guide the personality is replaced by stereotypical images conveyed by the media that intend to induce social conformity.

The job of the teacher is to find appropriate reading material to stimulate the cultural imagination of the child in order to counter the mass social stereotyping found in the mass media. The teacher’s objective is to give the child a real sense of self-worth grounded in powerful and immutable cosmological and archetypal cultural identifiers. But the popular media of TV, films, music, and cyberspace convey a more powerful message about adaptation to our culture than does the educational curriculum or the classroom teacher’s lessons.

Government educational standards exacerbate these problems. They place children into categories such as advanced placement, mainstream, and special needs that stratify the child’s social environment and define young people primarily in terms of intellectual capital in a pragmatic, utilitarian, and materialistic culture. This competitive atmosphere categorizes the individual personality according to social status, stigmatizes the individual’s degree of moral responsibility and ability for self-governance, and, subsequently, further categorizes individuals into classes of winners and losers.

The result of this standardization model of child development is widely evident on junior high and high school campuses. Students who easily adapt to the requirements of intellectual and personality standardization surrender themselves to the mass psyche. They defend the mass psyche and its value system by bullying those students who express a more independent individuality. This reveals how the public trust has come to socialize young people—by using the brutality of the peer group to enforce the will of the collectivity. Among those young people who are rejected, such contempt for the uniqueness of the identity, personality, and talents of each individual causes anger and frustration. Some of those young people are driven to express their inner rage in acts of violence against the school and community.

In contrast, the primary objective of education as a sacred trust is to help young people discover a non-competitive relationship between themselves and the sacred—between the ego and the higher self-expression of the soul. For young people, such discovery is not without conflict. It requires the loving guidance of adults—both parents and teachers—whose primary concern is to nurture the child’s soul. This conceptual foundation of education does not embrace the specific beliefs of any one religion. Rather it teaches all of the universal religious symbols, metaphors, and ideas—expressed in their cultural contexts—which lead to an acknowledgement of the archetypes that define the higher self in all cultures. In this way, the concept of education as a sacred trust teaches that the sacred defines the term culture, even in popular expression, and that a culture must necessarily have cosmological and archetypal foundations.

This lesson nurtures a child’s soul by simultaneously illuminating transcendental characteristics in the individual and in the culture that is being studied. This reinforces transcendental characteristics of the higher self so that they may be expressed in the personality with confidence. The work of the teacher is not to impose a model of personality development but to draw the transcendental qualities of each individual’s higher self up into unique expression in his or her personality. Thus, at the heart of the concept of education as a sacred trust is the interpersonal encounter between teachers and students. In order to be effective, such a relationship must enjoy the blessing and active participation of the students’ parents.

In terms of the curriculum, the concept of education as a sacred trust illuminates cultural archetypes through a study of world cultures with a focus on their religious, artistic, and literary symbols, metaphors, and ideas. The study includes an individual inquiry into the metaphysical origins and sacred expressions of each student’s inherent cultural identity. This gives young people the apperceptive tools they need to free themselves from abject conformity to the mass psyche and pursue the process of individuation.

Individuation differs from individuality. As described by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, it is a dynamic process by which the universal symbols of the archetypes can be expressed in the personality as the sacred values of the higher self. When individuation is validated as a part of the educational process, the expression of the higher self in the personality has culturally validated models. Subsequently, the individual comes to revere the sacred as it is expressed in the personalities of others, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity or religion.

Incorporating the developmental objectives of the sacred trust must change our psychological approach to education and redefine our educational objectives. First, it shifts the educational focus away from developing a common, self-conscious cultural identity that dominates personality expression, toward the discovery of an individuated cultural identity influenced by culturally validated archetypal models. Thus, the objective of personality development is to arrive at a balance between the spirit’s seat at the center of a timeless universe, the soul’s role in an unfolding cosmic drama, and the ego’s perception of itself in historical time and space. This emphasis on the role of the higher self in defining an individual’s cultural identity and personality replaces the process of acculturation.

Second, education as a sacred trust replaces the process of socialization. It awakens, in each individual, an awareness of his or her unique gifts and talents that result from a unique cultural heritage anchored in the cultural continuum of humanity. This self-understanding lies at the foundation of a social conscience that expresses