Conference Report
During the June break Sue and Roger Stack, attended the 1997 Spirituality in Education Conference with 800 delegates in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Internationally recognised speakers including the Dalai Lama, Parker Palmer, David Orr, Huston Smith and Joan Halifax expressed deep concern about the education of today's youth.

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Why Spirituality in Education?
Spirituality is seldom mentioned openly. But discussion of spirituality is often avoided at great cost to both individuals and society at large. We hear much about 'economic rationalism' these days but little or nothing about even the possibility of a 'spiritual perspective'. Surely it is just as irrational to disregard spiritual issues as it is to disregard economic or technological issues within contemporary education.

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Encouraging Compassion
Dr Rachael Remen, a professor at UCSF medical school, has implemented a program to help doctors and medical students remember their humanity and develop compassion rather than just "wearing the professional mask of objectivity".

She sees a medical degree as a disease from which doctors need to recover. Her program Care of the Soul aims to "heal the wounds of culture by discovering one's wholeness".

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The Dalai Lama on Education
It was 8:30am on Sunday morning and the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, entered the huge tent filled to overflowing with 800 conference delegates. Everyone had been waiting expectantly and rose to give him tremendous applause. Sitting in a throne like seat, smiling and animated, he gave us a general introduction and then answered questions.

"What is the purpose of life? I believe it is happiness. Our culture, education, economy and all human activities should be meant for that goal."

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Integrating Indigenous Wisdom with Contemporary Education
Greg Cajete, author of Look to the Mountain and a professor of Teacher Education at the University of New Mexico, is a Native American Indian who has one foot in the indigenous world and the other in the western world - and is trying to transform both.

Look to the Mountain has been acclaimed by educators and indigenous peoples around the world as a blueprint for bringing indigenous educational traditions into the 21st Century as well as showing how western education can be imbued with a greater understanding of our relationships with all things.

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Responsibility for the Planet
Over 10 years ago 70 Nobel Laureates wrote a letter to humanity. They emphasised the critical state the world is in ... greenhouse gasses, toxic wastes, loss of species etc. They strongly recommended that if we wished for a world where our grandchildren could live then we, the people of the world, needed to take serious action.

Have we? Why haven't we seen the urgency, the importance of this issue? How have we addressed these issues through our education system?

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Recovering the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching and learning
Parker Palmer, the keynote speaker for the Spirituality in Education Conference, likened the human soul to "a wild animal - tough, self-sufficient, resilient, and exceedingly shy." We cannot approach any human being's soul with heavy handedness, but must wait for that precious inwardness to emerge. "We need to sit quietly and that wild animal will reveal itself."

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Southwestern College: An Holistic University
Southwestern College is situated in a adobe style building on the outskirts of Santa Fe. With about 140 students it offers accredited graduate courses in counselling therapies. It has a burgeoning reputation with its graduates being highly sought after. The vision for the college started forty years ago with a handful of people who over many years collected books for a library, then began community classes before embarking on delivering their 2 year Masters programs.

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