For a long time education has been very successful in developing knowledge, technical skills and intellectual intelligence. More recently, we have also begun to understand the importance of emotional intelligence and soft skills.
But today I believe we need to go one step further. We are educating a generation that is growing up in a world of extraordinary technological acceleration, artificial intelligence, environmental crisis, polarization, mental health issues and a profound search for meaning. And this raises an important question:
Is it enough to prepare young people only for a profession or should education also help prepare them for life?
This is where the conversation about spiritual intelligence becomes so important and when I use the word spiritual, I’m not talking about religion – religion and spirituality can certainly meet, but they are not the same thing.
Spiritual intelligence is a human capacity, our capacity, to ask deeper questions. Who am I? What gives me meaning to my life? What values guide my joys? How do I respond to suffering? How do I relate to others? And what kind of contribution do I want to make to the world?
Spiritual Intelligence involves qualities such as meaning, purpose, compassion, self-awareness, ethical discernment, resilience, hope, and a sense of interconnectedness.
The WCCM Spiritual Intelligence Program and Symposium explicitly approaches this as a capacity available to people regardless of their faith, beliefs or traditions.
In addition to that, I believe we need to make an important distinction here: Education should be secular, but secular education doesn’t need to be spiritually empty: A secular school should never impose a religion, a belief system, or a particular worldview but at the same time, education cannot simply remain silent when it comes to cultivating our deepest human values. If education doesn’t create a space to talk about compassion, responsibility, dignity, meaning, service, etiquette, very young people learn to explore these dimensions of their humanity. Perhaps one of the great challenges of education today is precisely to recover this balance: educating not only the mind but the whole human being.
Spiritiual Intelligence in Education Symposium
And this is the conversation we want to deepen at during the Second Online symposium on Spiritual Intelligence in Education that will take place in the beginning of October. We will bring together leading leading thinkers, researchers and educators from around the world, including Dana Zohar, Alexander Moreira, Cindy Wigglesworth, Patricia Curry, Laurence Freeman to explore spiritual intelligence from different perspectives: science, education, mental health, contemplative practice, and a practical experience in university.
So if you are an educator, researcher, university leader, student, or simply someone who believes that education is about more than preparing people to make a living, it is also about preparing them to live a meaningful life, I would love to invite you to join us because perhaps the future of education will depend not only on how much our students know, but on who they are becoming.
I hope to see you there!
