Scott Webster

Educating for Meaningful Lives Scott Webster

Why are students becoming disengaged from schooling? Many teachers, administrators and designers of policy and curriculum are expressing concern over this issue. Current approaches to schooling are dominated by a perceived need to enable learners to particulate in the knowledge economy. Both knowledge and learning how to learn knowledge have become the primary discourses in schooling - rather than education. School curricula rarely offer any sense of personal significance and for many learners such an approach to the curriculum is meaningless. Educating for meaningful lives must be a central aim for educative curricula. This book offers curriculum designers and teachers a greater understanding of this relation that education has with living significantly meaningful lives and it does so through the notion of existential spirituality. Spirituality is not to be reduced to something religious but rather pertains to how a life is lived. An existential perspective enables the meaningfulness of life to provide the necessary significance which is required of a curriculum if it is to be understood as offering personal meaning for learners. Approaching the design and teaching of curricula through this perspective of existential spirituality enables learners to live a meaningful life in an uncertain world.