Week 9 - Shenmiao Wang

Week 9 Topic - The Future of Spiritual Realms Study by Riyad Ahmed Shahjahan

The article emphasizes that academic discourse is privileged to incorporate some forms of spirituality in its literature. For instance, the Christian worldview affects educational institutions as it provides guidelines on scheduling holidays. Besides, Christian beliefs form the basis of personal values such as honesty and work ethics in school instructions (Shahjahan  25). This development indicates that unlike other religions, Christians have the privilege of expressing their spirituality within their communities. However, other forms of indigenous religions appear in higher education.

             Organized religions such as Catholicism, Hinduism, and Islam exist in higher education. The beliefs are not considered as the basis of spirituality in academics. The academic fraternity, interestingly, only recognizes Christianity and completely ignores the other religion as termed as ‘a secular spirituality expression’. Thus, the academia world silences spirituality and recommends that the foreign religions should not disrupt educational practices (Shahjahan 39). Universities, however, use market ideologies, which focus on academic capitalism in knowledge creation and dissemination.

            Academic capitalism enables an educational institution to use a business operation model in knowledge production. Knowledge production targets a specific market clientele, which is wrong. The allocation of university resources focuses on developing intellectual property, entrepreneurship, and governance (Shahjahan 42). Such principles transform students into capitalist consumers who do not acquire the knowledge that promotes individual growth and empowerment. The present educational process is failing as it shifts the focus of education from supporting social justice to become a market commodity.

 Knowledge creation in universities only benefits the corporation and disrupts community functions. The purpose of academics today is to create market knowledge that helps organizations maintain a competitive edge. The academic discourse has neglected traditional methods of acquiring public education, which includes indigenous healing techniques, oral traditions, traditional spirituality, and elder’s wisdom. Therefore, it is essential to streamline educational practices to include secular life interpretations that will generate awareness of the purpose of life.

Work Cited

Shahjahan, Riyad Ahmed. “Spirituality in the academy: Reclaiming from the margins and evoking a transformative way of knowing the world.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 18, no. 6, 20 Jun 2006, pp. 685-711. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390500298188.