From Spirituality to Technontology in Education

Florent Pasquier

Following the traumatic earthquake caused by the wave of terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and its aftershocks in Belgium, Germany and Great Britain, many people questioned the possibility of spirituality in education.

For many, a concern on the interest and the possible place of the spiritual in the educational processes found its source following the traumatic collective earthquake caused by the wave of attacks in France in 2015 and then by its aftershocks in Belgium, Germany and Great Britain. These dramatic events have rekindled existential questions that professionals had previously put to one side by lack of a dedicated institutional space and time to reflect on educational bodies aims and modes of operation.

This concern is motivated by the idea that our world ought to be passed these behaviors. Indeed, the immense advances in modern technology and the easy access to information it provides, combined with worldwide available primary education seem far from being up to the level we would hope for.

This concern is therefore based on an appreciation of a contemporary humanity and state of the world that seems far from being up to the level that would have been hoped for by the immense advances in modern technology, including access to information, combined with a very large scale of primary education across the planet. According to UNESCO’s 2013 figures, 92% of the world’s population had a mobile phone (55% in developing countries), and 82% of the world's population had completed basic education, the equivalent of primary school (74% in developing countries). Seven years later, the Digital Report 2020 produced by We Are Social and Hootsuite, based on data provided by the UN and government sources, counts for a world population of 7.75 billion people: 17.2% of women and 11.2% of men over 15 are illiterate; "103% (of) mobile connections as a percentage of the total population" (due to the possession of multiple devices by some owners and/or of multiple-users for each device); 49% of people are active on social media; 59% of internet users, for an average of 6h43 min, i.e., 40% of the daily waking time. For all that, the overall global situation of humanity still does not seem to have improved, as if, according to the findings of the Complexity Intelligence Network, global connectivity has not resulted in a global human consciousness. Despite these incredible advances, it seems as if the overall global situation of humanity still hasn’t improved. In the words of Complexity Intelligence Network, it looks as if global connectivity has not yet resulted in a global human consciousness. It is still being seen as such because of the lack of access to clean water for more than two billion people in 2019, massive displacement of populations for economic, ecological or armed conflict reasons that are not decreasing etc.

A central hypothesis of my work is that if the spiritual dimension is in some way already present in schools’ curricula and in the common base of schools and colleges’ knowledge, skills and culture (especially through the humanities and relational psycho-social skills), then spirituality would never be exercised in a way that is sufficiently conscious. From this, I argue that spirituality’s positive effects can never be fully realized because it would never be exercised in a way that is sufficiently conscious for it to be beneficial.

This state of affairs, linked to a kind of repression, would slow down the capacity for the formation and emergence of a person who is responsible and acts in a positive manner towards himself, others and the planet. Therefore, the ongoing objective is to try to better understand and accompany the multi-referential process of our humanization through education, insofar as, as Erasmus stated in the Renaissance: “We are not born human beings, we each become one".

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