The Postsecular Turn in Education: Lessons from the Mindfulness Movement and the Revival of Confucian Academies

It is part of a global trend today that new relationships are being forged between religion and society, between spirituality and materiality, giving rise to announcements that we live in a ‘postsecular’ or ‘desecularized’ world. Taking up two educational movements, the mindfulness movement in the W...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Wenning, Mario, Wu, Jinting
Tipo de documento: artigo
Data de publicação:2016
País:España
Recursos:Universidad Loyola Andalucía
Repositório:Brújula
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uloyola.es:20.500.12412/5185
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/5185
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Postsecular turn
Mindfulness movement
Confucian revival
Secularism
Education
Descrição
Resumo:It is part of a global trend today that new relationships are being forged between religion and society, between spirituality and materiality, giving rise to announcements that we live in a ‘postsecular’ or ‘desecularized’ world. Taking up two educational movements, the mindfulness movement in the West and the revival of Confucian education in China, this paper examines what and how postsecular orientations and sensibilities penetrate educational discourses and practices in different cultural contexts. We compare the two movements to reveal a new quality of hybrid modernization in that they react, in different ways, to certain pathologies that are identified as consequences of secular modernity. Burnout syndrome, the sense of a spiritual void, but also the loss of a spiritual and cultural identity are being perceived as correlating to a one-sided push towards a modernity that emphasizes secular rationalization over mindfulness and Westernization over cultural particularity. The two case studies mark a critical insight on the present condition and limits of secularism and highlights the ongoing negotiations of values and modes of self-cultivation in schools. In an increasingly pluralistic world, the entanglement of the secular, spiritual, religious and wisdom traditions provides the opportunity to rethink education as a creative realm and an impossible possibility to reengage the minds and lives of those in the hybrid pedagogical time.