How marketizing and technologizing education undermines spirituality

ABSTRACT

This paper takes education to be concerned with human flourishing, and education that is distinct from instrumental training and which attends to the spirit of students. Such education is holistic and integral and develops the capacity for sustained attention and concentration. Marketization does not, and its impact on education has been long decried. The use of technology in education has always been met with ambivalence. What comprises technology is not obvious, and aspects of it, especially developments in media, undermine sustained attention and concentration. Both marketizing and technologizing an impact on spirituality in education but how they do so in concert with one another and under the aegis of corporations warrants particular scrutiny, which to date has been insufficient, for their combined impact is greater than the sum of the parts. In this paper, markets are distinguished from marketization, and religion from spirituality and mindfulness from what has been labelled McMindfulness and positive psychology. The latter are critiqued for how they have been co-opted by marketization, technology and corporate interests. The conclusion of the paper is that the contemporary pain of educators and students and dysfunctional institutions arises from the loss of spirituality and purpose and that reversing this is essential for humanity’s well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• marketization
• mindfulness
• spirit
• technologization
• the corporation

There has never been widespread agreement over what education is, though there is some consensus on purposes to which it may be related such as socialization, training, preparation and instruction and some consensus that it is a social, economic and political activity. Much of what may now seem common sense to many – a taxonomy of learning outcomes, for example – has been contested for decades (Pring 2001; Sockett 1971). There could never be universal agreement on the content, mode and purpose of education because every society has to arrive at its own conception which has a historical dimension as each generation assesses for itself the nature of its society and what it wants, which is to say what it socializes its members into and what is worthy of instruction. Education is the means through which a society examines and realizes and renews itself – a philosophical, moral, political, economic and practical endeavour, inevitably contentious and debatable (Jones et al. 2020; Parker 2021). It is education’s contestable nature that gives rise to the persistent questions: What is education for? (Orr 1991); What are universities for? (Collini 2012); Is Education Possible Today? (Hansen 2013); What is Knowledge for? (Peters 2014). Insofar as it relates to the ultimate purpose, education is a spiritual endeavour.

Education grapples collectively and individually with fundamental questions (Hansen 2013): what is the nature of this world, why are things the way they are, and do they have to be this way? Such questions imply the possibility of change which is risky and requires courage as it can disturb and alienate. An educated person, according to Morrow (1989, 72), ‘is one who has escaped from embeddedness in a particular culture. She is a person who has achieved a critical understanding of how much is simply conventional in the cultural group within which she happened to have been raised’. Such a person would be an ironist (Rorty 1989, 73). She doubts the vocabulary she currently uses and realizes that it cannot dissolve those doubts, nor does she think her vocabulary is closer to reality than others. She knows her education has been and always will be highly contingent. She seeks solidarity.

Education in this paper is taken to be contingent and critical, requiring and aimed at enhancing attention and concentration. It relates in this way to mindfulness and contemplation and is purposeful, as in the person who approaches a man chiselling stone and asks what he is doing. ‘Chiselling stone’ is the reply. The person asks another man apparently doing the same thing the same question, but he replies, ‘Building a cathedral’. The first man’s work may be framed as training and following an algorithm – a technological achievement. The second man’s work emerges from the kind of education considered here – present to meaning and purpose, individually and collectively, and in that sense a transcendent spiritual quest.

This quest is undermined by the interplay between marketization, certain aspects of technology, and corporate power. In tracing how this happens I first address marketization, then technology, then spirit followed by particular attention to McMindfulness. I conclude that the heartfelt pain endemic in education today – four in 10 UK academics are considering leaving their universities (Fazackerley 2019) and a ‘great resignation’ appears to be underway (Gewin 2022) – stems from loss of spirit.

Marketization

There is a commonsense view of the market as a social realm where businesses engage in exchange of goods and services for mutual benefit. I do not argue that education must be divorced from the market. Buildings must be maintained, teachers must be paid and equipment bought. But the market is not marketization. ‘Marketization’ is that reductive process that casts student as customer, education as product and educator as courier.

Marketisation enshrines the satisfaction of the sovereign student as a legitimate and central imperative of the HEI. It increases the pressure to be seen to be responsive to student desires, wants and ‘needs’, despite the ancient insight that seeking the learner’s satisfaction extinguishes more enduring intellectual development engendered through challenge, struggle and problem-solving. (Nixon, Scullion, and Hearn 2018)

A faith in ‘the market’ as a force for good or harm confuses a commonplace everyday activity – buying what one may need, or running a business that meets those needs – with an abstraction that is variously shaped to suit a range of economic and political ideologies that are constantly contested. Marketization is an ideological term and its meaning is ‘far from self-evident’ (Furedi 2010, 1). The problem with marketizing education is that it transforms ‘what is an abstract, intangible, non-material and relational experience into a visible, quantifiable and instrumentally driven process’ (Furedi, 2). Satisfying the customer can hardly be part of challenging and discomforting the student and provoking a process of transformation. It is a problem that Furedi traces back through JS Mill to Socrates.

It is important to distinguish between markets, capitalism and marketization led by neoliberalism. The neo-liberal ideology of free markets is not capitalism but destroys it and debates about free and fair trade are essentially about moral values and political decisions (Chang 2010, 7). What is required is an assessment of foundational values. The problem is ‘the expansion of markets and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong … we need to ask whether there are some things money should not buy’ (Sandel 2012, 7). How to value health, education, family life, nature, art and civic duties are, Sandel rightly insists, moral and political questions. The worldview currently dominated by marketization is predicated on fragmentation, alienation and extraction, and given the state of the earth, is manifestly bankrupt. An education with spirit rejects fragmentation, alienation and extraction, is holistic and relational, and entails environmental awareness. It is not grounded in financial efficiency and individual interests.

On the assumption that private sector management efficiently allocates resources and ensures that through performance targets, control and audits the goals of the enterprise can be met, the practices are deployed in education. What is elided is the ideological basis of this managerialist assumption. HEIs can indeed point to ‘success’ but only by defining success in terms of a performative ideology. HEIs often proclaim success in student satisfaction ratings, but that does not mean students have developed a greater capacity for critical thinking, expressing complex reasoning or understanding others or self-awareness, let alone empathy.

To better appreciate marketization in higher education, consider ‘neoliberalism’. It is not a stable term, hence ‘actual existing neoliberalism’ in its many manifestations (Peck, Brenner, and Theodore 2018) but it has implications for education in democracies (Ford 2020). Neoliberalism, understood as ‘the complete reorganization of social existence in pursuit of narrow economic interests … normalizes ideas and behaviour that would appear obscene outside of an economistic frame of reference’ (Berdayes and Murphy 2016, 1). Education through the value-frame of neo-liberalism is a process of ‘disfiguration’ (Choi 2016), creating students who are socially illiterate (Freire 2004). Neoliberal pedagogy becomes a ‘market-driven illiteracy … [that] has eviscerated the notion of freedom, turning it largely into the desire to consume and invest exclusively in relationships that serve only one’s individual interests’ (Giroux 2014, 6). This instrumental attitude reduces students to consumers and faculty to sellers of a commodity. This ‘individualized academic capitalism breeds an organizational culture marked by increasing egocentricism, very conditional loyalties to the university and education, and a declining sense of responsibility for others, particularly for students’ (Lynch 2010, 57).

The provision of higher education to the masses does not necessarily mean greater access to the core benefits of education. It may provide a qualification as a means to better employment but that is by no means guaranteed. It certainly does raise the importance of credentialism and commodification (Tomlinson and Watermeyer 2022). It increases the pressure on institutions to enhance human capital and the institution’s economic value and in so doing intensifies competitive accountability and performative evaluation. This does not enhance human flourishing. Altbach and de Wit (2023, no page), commenting on the internationalization of HE as an industry warn that it carries academic, economic and ethical risks and continues a trend towards internationalization ‘as recruitment for the purpose of revenue generation from an elite … [it] is simply exploitation of the Global South’.

The more we wish to relate education to something profound and meaningful about being a human in society, the greater the tension between education and the marketplace. To say that ‘education is an investment’ is to work with a specific and spiritless concept of education. Asking for how much an activity or a life can be traded is not the same as asking what an activity or a life might matter or mean. If education is to be a source of human flourishing and social renewal, its critical function is crucial. A critical education develops the capacity for critical sustained attention in the light of ultimate purpose. The purpose of marketing by contrast, is to persuade you to a purpose that requires a specific good or tool that you supposedly need and must constantly update, and then distract you from changing your mind except to enter the process again, preferably with a more expensive tool. It immerses the consumer in the process of consuming. That is to say, it distracts from and relentlessly inhibits a re-evaluation of ultimate purpose. Customer satisfaction, as Bauman (2000) has pointed out, must be instant as in immediate and fleeting.

Technology

There are good grounds for distrusting educational technology (Selwyn 2014). Technology, like markets, is part of human civilization and being discerning about it requires a long view. What Bowers (2000, 109) called for decades ago in terms of computers – that we need to ask probing questions about the forms of knowledge that computers cannot process and the deep cultural assumptions embedded in their use – is now even more urgent in the light of the privatization of communication technology (Tarnoff 2022), its post-covid surge into education (Teräs, Suoranta, and Teräs 2020) and the emergence of AI (Future of Life 2023).

As education is increasingly saturated with technology, this means looking at the corporations that own that technology, for, ‘When we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organization that runs the machines’ (Foer 2017, 72). Technology has always been a part of education, but never only enhancing it, or life itself for that matter. The important question is how it has changed it. At the level of acquiring skills or information, or enhancing abilities such as memory and concentration, no doubt there are technologies, mechanical, electronic and pharmaceutical, that may help, but if our idea of education revolves around a sense of purpose, meaning, and human flourishing, technology per se is irrelevant. What matters are the values embedded in the framing of its deployment. As Postman (1993, 5) points out, we should beware of ‘zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo’. New technologies change our language, our words, and alter ‘the structure of our interests, the things we think about …  the character of our symbols: the things we think with … and the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop’ (Postman 1993, 20). Barnett (1994, 37 and 45) makes the same point with respect to the pursuit of efficiency and markets in education. A vocabulary of competence means that ‘understanding is replaced by competence; insight is replaced by effectiveness; and rigour of interactive argument is replaced by communication skills’ and ‘capabilities and virtues that might promote a different kind of society – friendship, altruism, ethical concern, carefulness, generosity and a myriad others – are entirely neglected’. Technology, like marketization eventually shapes our language and our thought.

A common claim made for technology is that it may make processes more efficient. In some instances, this is obviously so, but much may be elided in such assessments. It is not for nothing that in the myths of humans getting power and knowledge, warnings, prohibitions and caveats abound. We may enjoy the gifts of technology but should note the violence and loss the gifts entail (Burnett, Senker, and Walker 2009). Marcuse (1964, 138) considered technical efficiency to be the key ideological fetish of modern industrialized authoritarian states and defined technology as ‘a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices and contrivances which characterise the machine age … an instrument for control and domination’, a state in which ‘the efficient individual is the one whose performance is an action only insofar as it is the proper reaction to the objective requirements of the apparatus, and his liberty is confined to the selection of the most adequate means for reaching goals which he did not set (Marcuse, 1964, 142 emphasis added). As in marketization, this is profoundly anti-educative and anti-spiritual.

Much technology cultivates the same superficial attention, short-term investment and replacement strategy as marketization. It condemns us to life ‘in the shallows’ (Carr 2011) and undermines the capacity for sustained attention and sustained concentration (Odell 2019). Failure to distinguish between such capacities and the choice of where that attention is directed undermines spirit. In this age of what Fry (2019) calls a technological Wild West, where algorithms make consequential decisions about our lives, we are in danger of losing touch with our lack of choice. We don’t know if the algorithms work and even if they do, nobody is checking if they are providing net benefit or cost. Zuboff (2019, no page) claims that we have been subjected to a ‘fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge’. At stake, she writes, is ‘the fight for the spirit of our information civilization’. ‘Fight for the spirit’ is not an excessive claim.

On 24 February 2023, University World News published a special report on AI and the implications for universities.¹ What is striking about the contributions is their ambiguity. One reads ‘calm your inner luddite but keep your sceptic … wildly differing opinions … the limitations as well as the helpful aspects … assessing benefits and risks … embrace or be afraid … ChatGPT as an aide, not a threat’. Assessing the impact of technology is itself a major enterprise and revives the persistent concern of what it means to be human. In this respect, I suggest that an important feature of AI as a technology is its irrelevance. Technology has always been greeted with a range of responses. Its impacts are not evenly distributed. Innovations – printing press, steam engine, telegraph, mobile phone or ChatGPT – have always been greeted with awe and fear, excitement and worry, carrying the threat of increased powers of deception and ignorance, affording new possibilities, and closing existing ones.

This is the milieu in which we have always and will always have to renegotiate our understandings of human well-being and social justice and what it means to be spiritual human beings. The specific technology itself is not the essence of the issue. Of consequence are the links between private enterprise and government, between marketization and big tech. Tarnoff (2022).

Education related to self-realization and human flourishing requires sustained concentration and a lifelong timeframe. Insofar as one becomes wedded to a tool and oblivious to its manipulations, one’s education and technology are at odds. When marketization joins forces with technologization, and both with the power of global corporations, the combined effect is greater than the sum of the parts, and the preciousness of being human and having a spirit is at risk, along with the environment. According to James (1890, 463), ‘The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will … An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence’. The parallels with meditation are clear and there is growing interest in mindfulness as a correction or palliative, but it is fraught with pitfalls which I discuss below.

I acknowledge that ‘we are a spiritual’ is an unprovable assertion and in an age of bionic humans, inter-species genetic splicing and cell creation, biological machines, spiritual machines and the idea of the Novacene (Lovelock 2019) what constitutes being human is debatable, and humans as spiritual beings more so. I proceed on the assumption that we are spiritual, but this still requires clarification of what ‘spiritual’ may mean.

Spirit

Given education’s role in how a culture explores and transmits its values and sense of purpose and meaning across the generations, its enmeshment with religion is not surprising but it is important to distinguish between spirit and religion even in the face of some societies apparently become more secular. Claims of a spiritual revival in America (Morley 2015) persist but we should be concerned about the tendency for dogma and social control to diminish the creative and generative role of spirituality, ossifying it into institutional religious authority. Whereas spirituality is the capacity of the human consciousness to apprehend ultimate meaning and value, religion is the institutional/historical manifestation of that capacity (Tackney et al. 2017). In his exploration of humanity’s quest for the spirit, Cottingham (2020, 4) notes that ‘the idea of the self or spirit as the precious and fragile moral core of one’s being, something that can be irretrievably lost, does not have to be expressed in explicitly religious, let alone Christian, terms’. It relates to the sense of an integrated moral self, understood teleologically and being ‘open and vulnerable to the needs and demands of others’ (Cottingham 2020, 20). This is where education and the flourishing of a person’s spirit converge. But one can be more precise.

Educator John Miller’s (2000) strategy to define spirit offers brief summaries of its conceptions to be found in various religions, from which may be drawn a strong sense of care, mindfulness, and connectedness towards a unity, towards Oneness. An inner world is emphasized, as is an acceptance of this state’s ineffability – one comes into it; one does not force or design it but creates the conditions for it to be experienced. Miller defines spirit as ‘a deep and vital energy that gives meaning and direction to our lives’ (Miller 2000, 9) and connects the lack thereof to the state of the environment. He quotes Al Gore on the global environmental crisis as ‘an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual’ (Gore 1992, 12, 367 in Miller, 5). Similarly, Orr (1991) opines ‘all education is environmental education’ and Bowers from 1993 onwards argued for what he called ‘the ecological imperative’. Harrison Owen, the developer of Open Space Technology, also notes the ineffability of Spirit but does not attempt to define it: ‘We all know spirit when we meet it. In its presence there is excitement, innovation, what we might call inspired performance’ (Owen 2000, 7).

Martha Nussbaum (2010) has called what is happening worldwide in education a silent crisis and likened it to a cancer. A decade later and the disease has progressed. Nussbaum claimed that in pursuit of profit, education has been downgraded to an economic and technical performance, but that we should be aware of a false choice: a flourishing economy requires the same skills that support citizenship, and thus proponents of ‘education for economic growth have adopted an impoverished conception of what is required to meet their own goal’ (Nussbaum 2010, 10). We seem, Nussbaum argues, to be forgetting about the spirit, how thought opens out of the spirit and connects a person to the world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner; about approaching another person as a spirit, rather than an instrument for or obstacle to one’s plans. Nussbaum is not concerned with spirit’s religious connotation. Spirit, she insists, is the faculties of thought and imagination that make our relationships richly human, ‘rather than relationships of mere use and manipulation’ (ibid, 6). Nussbaum’s view that in the rush for profitability in the global market we are losing values precious for the future of democracy has contemporary support (Tierney and Groves 2021).

Religion, spirit or spirituality are in complex association with the market and morality. On one view, even in avowed secularized societies ‘religious organizations and new spiritual movements operate in a competitive marketplace; postmodern consumers mix and match values, philosophies, and ideas from different religious and spiritual traditions; and globalization, the internet and social media, tourism and immigration provide access to spiritual and religious resources and communities at an unprecedented scale’ (Rinallo and Oliver 2019, 1). There is no necessary clash between the pursuit of productivity and a spiritual sensibility (Johnson et al. 2017) but we need a clear understanding of how spirituality can be trivialized and how it and economics stand in complex relation to one another (Zsolnai 2022a; 2022b). We also need to better understand just how current trends in education threaten spirituality in education.

With education in mind

Jones et al.’s (2020) analysis of the performative university identifies the theme of targets enacted through quantification, the ideal of perfect control and fabrication. Reducing educators and students to auditable commodities effectively banishes spirit, which is barely effable and certainly non-measurable. Quantity should not be confused with quality – the former cannot be a proxy for the latter. Care of the spirit is an end in itself, its purpose intrinsic. The spirit cannot be controlled, only realized. Crucial to its realization is authenticity. The performative university’s individualistic and competitive environment, inducing ‘terror’ (Ball 2003) and creating the Academic Potemkin Village (Lund Dean et al. 2020), destroys ‘the spirit as the generative energy and constitutive power of authentic academic labour’ (Sutton 2017, 630) and that which is ‘central to academic labour: love’ (Sutton 2016, in Sutton 2017, 626). In terms of building a cathedral, Sutton (2017, 626) refers to Biesta’s (2010) point that the culture of performativity in education replaces normative validity with technical validity. That is to say, the dressing of the stone is assessed but not the purpose of dressing it. What gets elided in this process is the human need for community, compassion, friendship and love of nature. This has been the focus of mystics and contemplatives through the ages in various religions and spiritual practices. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/the-future-of-intelligence/ It is a question of framing and the scale thereof. In their conversation (Hunt, Eisenstein, and Freely, n.d.) Freely describes AI as ‘the disconnection of the intellect from the living body’ and this self-perpetuating process ‘has been described for millennia’ and he quotes from the Srimad Bhagavatam written more than 1,000 years ago, what he calls ‘a precise description of artificial intelligence’: ‘This uncontrolled mind is the greatest enemy of the living entity. If one neglects it or gives it a chance, it will grow more and more powerful and will become victorious. Although it is not factual, it is very strong. It covers the constitutional position of the soul.’ One contemporary manifestation of the effort to control the mind is in mindfulness and contemplative practices.

Mindfulness in education is a growing field with special issues (Todd and Ergas 2015) and handbooks devoted to specific aspects thereof (Schonert-Reichl and Roeser 2016; Stanley, Purser, and Singh 2018). There is concern that mindfulness can trivialize, and that emphasis on an individual’s inner being can lead to ignoring outer conditions. There is also concern that the critical and inspiring function of education may be blunted by McMindfulness and shallow conceptions of flourishing, well-being, and happiness. There are variations of mindfulness and related practices that risk reinforcing the problems they were expected to ameliorate by individualizing responsibility for social ills and diverting attention from structural issues. That is to say, they blunt critical social awareness and awareness of the contingent nature of one’s own culture. In other words, they become anti-educative. The problem here is how any profound and complex practice can be trivialized and the trivial form taken for the substance.

Efforts to develop clarity of thinking and the capacity to concentrate and be self-aware would fit most educational curricula. However, making students or pupils happy would not generally be considered an educational endeavour, whereas mindfulness is considered a deep and meaningful aspiration. In both cases, there is a threat of marketization, exploitation, and trivialization, a gentrification of the dharma (Eaton 2014). The spirit may also be ‘translated’ into mindfulness and put to work in the interests of profit as in branding that captures ‘the spirit of the company’ which gets translated into ROI. These arguments form part of the general critique of positive psychology, the happiness industry (Ehrenreich 2009; Davies 2015) and the pursuit of perfection (Sandel 2007) and the moral limits of markets (Sandel 2012). Alistair Miller (2008) identifies two problematic assumptions in the positive psychology discourse – that life can be conceived in terms of setting and achieving goals and that beliefs and values can be consciously managed – that take us to the educational heart of the matter identified by Sockett (1971) and Pring (2001) in their critique of Bloom’s taxonomy. The problem is not only in identifying what is being measured, but that ‘the discourse around this research makes it impossible for us to talk of the things that cannot be measured’ (Suissa 2008, 577). We must return to the question of purpose: ‘Any coherent notion of education ought to involve meaning and values at all levels. Thus, to espouse teaching happiness as an educational aim without acknowledging this is, in an important sense, anti-educational’ (Suissa 2008, 579). The crux of the issue is moral, emotional, and spiritual agency. We should be especially of wary technologies of the self in the neo-liberal academy (Gill and Donaghue 2015). They will never assuage the anguish of spirit pollution, or vivify thinking in education, in universities.

My target in this paper is McMindfulness, that reduced, thin, attenuated version of mindfulness critiqued by Purser (2018). McMindfulness is rejected by many mindfulness practitioners as a perversion of mindfulness or contemplative practice. Far from the self-regarding practices promoted in certain McMindfulness and positive psychology discourses, a rigorous mindful and contemplative practice is likely to promote a regard for that which is not self. Careless terminology confuses the issue. Purser writes on his website (https://ronpurser.com/about) that ‘mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the neoliberal status quo’ but goes on to state that ‘if we are to harness the truly revolutionary potential of mindfulness, we have to cast off its neoliberal shackles’. If we succeed in the latter, what have we got?

Mindfulness has roots in Buddhist philosophy and is associated with Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1979. Kabat-Zinn helped to secularize mindfulness from its Buddhist roots, and defined it as ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally … [which] nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality’ (Kabat-Zinn 1994, 4–5). Its potential to counteract capitalist, instrumentalist education that leaves students and educators stressed and exhausted seemed clear. ‘Mindfulness and education are beautifully interwoven … When teachers are fully present, they teach better. When students are fully present, the quality of their learning is better’ David and Sheth (2009, xi). There is much empirical evidence supporting the benefits of mindfulness in education (Burnett 2011; Huppert and Johnson 2010; MiSP; Hennelly; Kuyken et al. 2013) and in neurology (Doidge 2007; Hanson 2013). Specifically, the link between developing the pre-frontal cortex and education is made by Siegel (2007, 261–262) with the concept of reflective thinking, in that ‘teaching mindful awareness would harness processes of neural integration and promote a reflective mind, an adaptive, resilient brain, and empathic relationships’.

However, there are reservations about the contemporary uptake of mindfulness. Hyland (2016) claims that its Buddhist roots are essential for a full understanding of mindfulness practice. Reservations such as Purser’s increase as mindfulness is reduced to a commodity and in this form reduced to quiescence in the face of capitalist production and neo-liberalism. The debate is fraught with ambiguity and ‘crucial ambivalences’ among scholars and advocates (McCaw 2020, 270), and concerns that ‘mindfulness practices risk reinforcing the problem they were expected to solve’ (Kristensen 2017, 78).

Stiegler (2010, 21) demonstrates how ‘attention channelling mechanisms can be both poison and remedy’ which leads Reveley (2015, 806) to argue that ‘there is no straightforward answer to whether mindfulness training within schools is empowering or oppressive’ in the digital era. Here is the nub: we have digital capitalism fragmenting attention, and mindfulness enhancing concentration. The problem is how pursuing the by-products of mindfulness, enhanced focus and well-being serve a neoliberal agenda ‘as it encourages students to accept and cope with oppressive structures rather than develop the awareness to challenge and transform them’ (Sellman and Buttarazzi 2020, 61). Sellman and Buttarazzi (62) call for a contemplative pedagogy ‘so that mindfulness is positioned as a means for personal and social transformation rather than culture reproduction’. This would be in contrast to the superficial mode of mindfulness as ‘intervention’. The distinction made by McCaw between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ mindfulness is useful. ‘“Thin” mindfulness ‘is conceived primarily in psychological, ethically neutral terms, configured around a teleology of individual self-improvement’ (McCaw 2020, 263), whereas ‘thick’ mindfulness is conceived ‘in primarily ontological terms and is configured around an ethically-grounded teleology of transformation’ (265). ‘Thin’ mindfulness may induce solipsism, isolation and suffering whereas ‘thick’ mindfulness leads to discernment and wise ethical judgment. Kristensen (2017, 179) is sympathetic to McCaw’s ‘thick’ mindfulness but points that ‘in order for real change to happen, a more humanistic and socially driven logic that embraces deeply rooted universal human capacities and needs for attention, awareness, relationality and caring has to be legitimated in society at large’. Such a mindfulness would in fact require an anti-oppressive pedagogy and a concern for social justice (Berila 2016). Purser’s worry that a certain kind of mindfulness may inculcate ‘social amnesia that leads to mindful servants of neoliberalism’ (Purser 2019, 23) sets up Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR as a straw man and he is taken to task by (Anālayo 2020, 477). MacPherson and Rockman (https://www.mindfulnessstudies.com/mindfulness-response-2019/) point out that it is the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn who has ‘the most credible claim to have introduced mindfulness to the West and who advised that meditation to should not lead to an escape from reality but to an increased awareness of reality and could be used by social workers and other social justice and compassionate workers in society’. They emphasize that ‘our conscious views have limited relationship to the instantaneous judgement that drive our actions’ which, given our age of ‘instant communication’ in social media, states a powerful case for mindfulness and contemplative practice. A reconciliation between the critics of mindfulness and its transformative potential is possible (Du Plessis and Just 2022).

The terminological slippage and discursive arguments in mindfulness are also found in the related arena of contemplative pedagogy. Fisher (2017, 10) is concerned over the capacity for self-knowledge to become self-absorption and the transgression of boundaries between intellectual, psychological and religious experiences. The danger is ‘a cognitive pragmatism in which an opinion is as good as an argument, and speculation as useful as interpretation’ (10). Students need to ‘leave home’. That is to say, engage with other perspectives. However, her respondent Fort ‘strongly believes’ that ‘first-person contemplative pedagogy can enhance most students’ critical thinking and overall academic experience’ (ibid, 24). Her other respondent Komjathy points out there is no single or dominant authority in contemplative studies but there are emerging trends. According to Komjathy, Fisher ‘mistakenly conflates contemplative pedagogy with “spirituality in education”’(ibid, 25).

The idea that sustained attention and concentration is a route to human understanding has been practiced in many cultures and goes by many names. Some may distinguish mindfulness from contemplation but the dominant themes are ‘ … cultivating personal and social awareness and an exploration of meaning, values, and engaged action … first-person meditative experiences, and the historical and cultural contexts … seeks to reveal, clarify, and inquire into experience and reality, going beyond yet embracing the operations of sense perception and inference … integration of mind, body, heart, and spirit … engage contemporary social-ecological concerns’.² As with mindfulness, contemplation is not an escape from the world. According to Davidson and Dahl (2016 online) what comprises contemplative practices ‘is somewhat hazy … [but it] emphasizes self-awareness, self-regulation, and/or self-inquiry to enact a process of psychological transformation … typically viewed as practical methods to bring about a state of enduring well-being or inner flourishing’. The theme of transformation is strong. Contemplative practices are ‘practical, radical, and transformative, developing capacities for deep concentration and quieting the mind … an aid to exploration of meaning, purpose and values’ (https://www.contemplativemind.org/practices), and much else. It is active and engaged and may be described as ‘entering a deeper silence and letting go of our habitual thoughts, sensations, and feelings in order to connect to a truth greater than ourselves’ and is directed towards ‘a new consciousness that is needed to awaken a more loving, just, and sustainable world’ (https://cac.org/about/what-is-contemplation/). Gunnlaugson et al. (2023) link transformative processes, contemplation and intersubjectivity to an understanding of the self that is participatory by nature and process. This is a far cry from the McMindfulness that will increase corporate performance and help an individual climb the hierarchy and positive psychology that delivers happiness.

As educational institutions become corporatized and technologized there is an exponential impact (Taplin 2017). It is an urgent contemporary concern (Baskin 2022). Corporate-owned technology of computers and software, virtual lecture theatres, Skype, Zoom and so on eventually create their own mindset so that when we talk about distance learning, or online courses, we are not simply appending an adjective to an artefact, we are changing what we mean by ‘learning’ or ‘course’ (cf Barnett 1994; Postman 1993). Foer (2017, 55) points out that Larry Page talking of Google some day employing more than one million people is ‘a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world’. He notes (57) that ‘Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square … a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation’. In this way, corporates not only end up owning universities and schools, they end up owning the very idea of education.

Spirit, purpose and pain

Parker J. Palmer (1993, ix) suggests that the first edition (1983) of To Know as We are Known (1983) was well-received because ‘educators of all sorts are in real pain these days, and that pain has compelled them to explore unconventional sources’. The fact that four decades later we may note ‘a great resignation’ indicates the depth of the problem. A schoolteacher judged by pupil’s scores on standardized tests no longer relates to pupils. The relationship is transformed into an abstract algorithm. A university lecturer under pressure to publish and subject to algorithms of rankings and citations becomes a marketing technology subject. Much of what he or she is required to do – targeting journals, attending to citations, managing an online profile, and so on – are not educational tasks, and it is a constant struggle to protect teaching against the predations of this ‘bullshit work’ (Graeber 2018) whilst the pain intrudes via hours spent working through IT management systems that are serving the interests of a management concerned with rankings, income, potential litigation and controlling the defensibility of assessment decisions.

As each academic year begins, we are reminded to use templates for our course design, to have standardized online portals for different offerings, how to estimate time and workload, how to specify the learning outcomes for each assessment, and so on. LOs are a kind of app to ensure the customer/student gets what they pay for, and spirit does not enter the transaction. There has been a coup, and Zuboff’s (2019, no page) observations about surveillance capitalism is pertinent: ‘most discussions focus downstream on arguments about data … downstream is where the companies want us to be, so consumed in the details of the property contract that we forget the real issue, which is that their property claim itself is illegitimate’. In education, we focus on downstream issues like form and delivery when the real issue is the purpose of the educational experience. We obsessively control the stone-cutters and allow technology corporations to dictate the design and purpose of the cathedral.

I am repeatedly confronted by the pain of students which strikes me as spiritual anguish, even when students themselves do not express it in spiritual terms. Beset by financial pressure and performance anxiety and subscribing to a neoliberal view of education, they take for granted that universities are businesses that must operate at a profit, and that they are individually responsible for their success and failure. Semester after semester, the requests for extensions and challenges to a grading attest to their pain. Like many educators, they seem swamped by the challenges of IT as they work their way through complex enrolment websites and assignment submission portals, tracking their accumulation of credits. They are not building cathedrals but chipping at stones; their ‘education’ is not an expression of deep personal values, merely an instrumental task. Their sensibilities are shaped by marketing/branding and technocratic capitalism; in this way engaging with an ongoing conversation and thereby demonstrating familiarity with the ideas of other writers is reduced to questions of how many references are required, and submissions decorated with citations of, thanks to Google, all manner of sources with little discernment about them. Turnitin may be losing its value as a tool for tracking plagiarism, but its use remains testimony to the failure of connection and the triumph of technocratic interests. The sudden contemporary rise of ChatGTP is another variation of this triumph. What educators and students come to share is not a learning adventure, but pain induced by the lure of the market and the thrall of technology, those most efficient exterminators of the spirit and educational purpose.

Education as a social good and force for good seems to be disintegrating as educators leave the field, unable to function according to their own moral framework and professional values. Their efforts to realize their vocation, that is, to pursue a spiritually informed professional life, are undermined to the point of despair. The link between spirit, vocation and profession is broken. The loss of spirit is medicalized as an individual pathology requiring individual treatment apps. Again and again, the pattern repeats: the market intrudes into education and exiles spirit whilst promising an ersatz version of it; technology intrudes into education and exiles spirit whilst promising increased fluidity, choice, and access as it diminishes the substance of all of them, and McMindfulness in one guise or another reduces mind/spirit to the tool of persisting power relations. In exiling the spirit of education, we exile the capacity for fundamentally reassessing the means for social renewal. We must rescue education from the marketplace, refuse to hand over our relationships to big tech corporations and insist on celebrating the ineffable, uncontrollable spirit of education. It is a matter of individual, collective and environmental well-being and survival.

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Damian Ruth

Damian Ruth lectures different areas of management at Massey University, New Zealand. He publishes on management development and education using craft, art and design, on the role of universities and higher education in general and on the scholarship of teaching and learning. He an Associate Editor for Higher Education Research and Development. He has won several teaching awards and Fellowships and his book, Education as Gift: The lure of the market, the thrall of technology, the snares of efficiency and celebrating spirit will shortly be published by Brill.

Notes

1 https://www.universityworldnews.com/specialreport.php?publication=global&report=AIandHigherEducation; https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20230221143153224.

2 These are drawn from the aims and scope of The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, Journal of Contemplative Studies, Contemplativa: Journal of Contemplative Studies, and Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education.