Spirit and Physicality Are Missing From Education’s Core
The Athlete’s View - Fall 1999
Joel Kirsch, Ph.D.
American Sports Institute
They are called education’s core courses. Core as in essential. Essential as in determining whether or not a high school student qualifies to go on to a four-year college or university, receives a higher education, and eventually enjoys the fruits of that education.
What are the core courses and who determines what they are?
The courses include math, language arts, social studies, sciences, and foreign languages. They begin with the basic levels and grow in complexity in the advanced courses.
For example, most students wishing to go on to a four-year university directly from high school must go beyond basic math and take algebra in the ninth grade, geometry in the tenth grade, advanced algebra as a junior, and precalculus/calculus as a senior. The same is true for the other core subject areas.
The colleges and universities determine what these courses are. Some institutions have higher requirements than others as to how many advanced courses must be taken to qualify for entrance. And, along with college entrance test scores (SAT and ACT), students compete with one another to get into these four-year universities through the grade point averages they earn in these core courses.
What is so conspicuous about these core courses is not what they include, but rather what they omit. Core courses do not include sport, music (band, orchestra, choir), dance, and theater. These courses are not considered essential to getting into a four-year university. They are not considered relevant to higher education.
Why is this so? Why aren’t courses in these disciplines considered core?
What distinguishes these courses from the esteemed core courses are spirit and physicality.
While extremely important to the education of everyone, the core courses do not require that the students perform in front of others. With the turning in of assignments and tests, the only one who judges a student’s performance is the course’s teacher.
With sport, music, band, and theater, not only are the students evaluated by the teachers to receive a grade in their respective courses, the students must also perform and/or compete in front of others and be judged accordingly. Not only do the students have to make the right moves, hit the right keys, turn the right way, or project their voices in the proper manner, they must do so with spirit to qualify as true performers or to compete at their best.
This intangible yet essential quality of spirit is what moves us. It touches us in a way that fulfills and enriches the souls of the observers. In the core courses, it’s pretty much facts and information that go back and forth between the students and teachers. In today’s schools, there isn’t much spirit in our geometry classes.
But is spirit truly important in education? Does it count for anything in everyday life? And just how important is spirit to the growth and development of kids? This point is, indeed, debatable. However, the issue might be addressed best by what happened at a high school in the northern suburbs of Chicago, a high school from a very affluent community.
This large high school of 3,800 students is considered one of the academic leaders in Illinois. Most of its students go on to prestigious universities. The school has the predictable core-course offerings.
However, two years ago, when the administration decided to take a chance and offer one non-core, elective course on spirituality, the administrators wondered if anyone would sign up, especially with the requirement that the highly-educated and driven parents have to sign off on what courses their kids take. The administrators hoped they would get close to the 25 students they needed to justify the costs of the course. In total, 150 students signed up for the one course.
Another factor that characterizes this community and all others like it across the country is the high-stress environment that leads to heavy alcohol and drug use by so many students.
While the high schools in these communities send their students to prestigious universities, they are in denial of the drug and alcohol use of their high-achieving students. This is easy to understand, though. When all that matters is from the neck up regarding going to college, it is easy to sweep this problem under the core-course rug and tout college entrance statistics. This denial is symbolic of the overall denial of the spiritual aspects of a true and whole education.
It appears that while our universities are searching for students with brains, the students are searching for their souls. And without finding answers to this search through core-course offerings, the students find refuge in mind-altering ways that, in the end, rob them of their spirit rather than nurture it.
It is no accident that the very disciplines that bring forth the human spirit are those that also have a physical component. Sport, music, dance and theater are all disciplines that involve the body. And, in the same way that spirit is missing from core-course offerings, this is also the case with the physical domain.
Looking at current core-course offerings, the physical domain is nowhere to be found. The reality of humankind’s physical nature is relegated in education to extracurricular status, meaning apart from the regular curriculum as opposed to an integral part of it. In addition, grades in these subjects, as well as physical education itself, not only are not factored into core-course grade point averages, the courses themselves are called electives. They are not even worthy of being mandated by those who set the standards.
This very process perpetrated by our institutions of higher learning, although well-intentioned, is another way in which our humanity is denied. If anything, we are physical beings.
Again, is it any wonder why students are not excited about their academic courses? Is it any wonder why drinking and drug-taking are so prevalent among students who are overloaded with core courses? A core element of our humanity is being denied, cast aside as an elective. We do not elect to be physical beings. We are physical beings. Descartes had it wrong. It isn’t, "I think, therefore I am." In reality, it is, "I am, therefore I think."
The lack of spirit and physicality in the core-course offerings is offset by an extreme overemphasis on abstraction. Most core courses deal with abstract learning. In these courses, students deal with important concepts regarding the solving of equations, the components and flow of good writing, thinking through issues related to America’s place in history and its governing process, the forces of energy, and the ability to communicate with those in countries other than our own in an ever-shrinking world.
All of this is, indeed, important. But, for the most part, the reality of these classes is that they are about math, about language arts, about history and government, about science, and about international languages. They are not math applied, they are not actual communication, they are not making history and governing, they are not impacting forces in nature, and they are not immersion in a culture where the relevance of an international language becomes obvious. No, our core courses are about these disciplines rather than the disciplines themselves. Using today’s language, this is virtual learning instead of real learning.
Theories and concepts are very important. However, if they are not integrated into a total learning experience where they are brought to life with spirit and physicality, then real learning does not take place. As the American Indian proverb at the beginning of this article points out, it is in the doing where real learning takes place.
Any system that is out of balance will eventually fall. A system with an overemphasis on abstraction and theory at the expense of spirit and physicality will fall, as will one that overemphasizes spirit or physicality at the expense of the mind and its limitless capabilities. Once students become overexposed to abstraction, they become indifferent at best, behavior problems for many, and violent for a few.
The problems in our educational system today are not student related. Rather, they are related to standards and measurements from higher education that numb the mind, neglect the body, and drain the spirit.
What’s needed today to return our students to balance in their educational experience is an affirmation of spirit and physicality in the educational enterprise. We need to affirm all three aspects of our humanity, not just one.
We see this in sport, music, dance, and theater. Students work very hard at these disciplines. They are even willing to put a great deal of time into these disciplines after school, knowing they have hours of homework ahead of them once they get home. But these are disciplines of the spirit and the body as well as the mind. These disciplines make the students whole once again, they enrich and fulfill the students.
In a survey, school superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents were asked two questions:
Question 1: "On a scale of one to ten, with ten being totally excited and one being totally apathetic, how excited are middle and high school students about going to school for their academic courses only. This does not include the social or extracurricular aspects of school?"
Question 2: "Are kids natural learners or unnatural learners?"
The range of responses for the first question was between 2 and 5, with the greatest number of responses being 3. However, everyone said that kids are natural learners.
If kids are natural learners but are not excited about school, then something is fundamentally wrong with how we go about educating them.
When the whole student is not acknowledged and valued in our schools, when an integrated body/mind/spirit approach is not taken, especially at the core of education, we have problems. We have problems manifested through disinterest, we have problems manifested through disruptive behavior, we have problems manifested through drugs and alcohol, we have problems manifested through violence.
By excluding sport, music, dance, and theater from the core-course category, our university systems are telling us that we only have to be partial human beings to be enriched, fulfilled, and successful. The so-called institutions of higher learning perpetrate and perpetuate the fallacy that all that matters is what happens in our brains. These institutions deny our spirit, our physicality. The students become slaves to an educational process that only partially meets their needs, a process they drudge through rather than one in which they exalt.
To deny spirit and physicality in our high schools and universities is to deny core elements of our very existence. Is it any wonder, then, that most high school students are bored with school and just try to get through it all rather than finding education to be enriching and fulfilling for its own sake? |
