ABSTRACT
Education and [spirituality], especially, should awaken in the young an awareness of the world in which they live, how it functions, how the human fits into the larger community of life, the role that the human fulfills in the great story of the universe, and the historical sequence of development that have shaped human physical and cultural landscape. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes the existing world, the modern Western world, as a social imaginary. A social imaginary means “the way our contemporaries imagine the societies they inhabit and sustain.” Over early Western history, formal education has typically been for the elites, through private academies, as in Classical Greece and Rome. In sum, the modern social imaginary in part comprises education via schooling—allied to the various purposes of proselytizing, civilizing, modernizing, globalizing, and producing.
