Please find further resources on Children & Young People within this section of the site.
Resources list for Schools - This list has been put together by Spiritual England researchers to start you off on your journey of making schools more spiritual places! Please note that you need to check out the resources for yourselves to make sure they will be acceptable and appropriate for use in your schools.
Spiritual England Director, Anna Lubelska – ‘Spiritual England has created the ‘Peaceful Schools' campaign to bring some stillness and peace into our children’s lives at a time when concerns about young people’s mental health are escalating. Children and young people are bombarded with information, advertising and are under all sorts of other pressures too. We believe that there should be dedicated spaces at the heart of our schools where pupils and students can be quiet and reflect, meditate and/or pray’.
Felicity Kaplan from Maharishi Foundation®, an educational charity which offers Transcendental Meditation™ in schools thinks it is essential for children to find inner peace and happiness through meditation. She says: “The Spiritual England campaign to bring stillness and peace into children’s lives is inspiring and timely”.
A teacher - ‘Life for our young people is very busy, crammed with activity and information. It is vital not only that we create opportunities for stillness and reflection for our young people, but that we also teach them how to be still.’
Ofsted, ‘Promoting and evaluating pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development’, March 2004 - ‘Schools are required by law to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and inspectors are required to inspect it.’ ‘Spiritual development is the development of the non-material element of a human being which animates and sustains us and, depending on our point of view, either ends or continues in some form when we die. It is about the development of a sense of identity, self-worth, personal insight, meaning and purpose. It is about the development of a pupil’s ‘spirit’. Some people may call it the development of a pupil’s ‘soul’; others as the development of ‘personality’ or ‘character’.
U Thant, former Secretary General of the United Nations - ‘Spirituality is a state of connectedness to life. It is an experience of being, belonging and caring. It is sensitivity and compassion, joy and hope. It is the harmony between the innermost life and the outer life, or the life of the world and the life universal.’
Sir George Trevelyan (regarded by many as the grandfather of the movement for spiritual regeneration in Britain) - ‘Out of the confusion of a crumbling society, will emerge individuals who are touched by higher guidance. These will inevitably flow together with others of like inspiration, and a new quality of society will begin to form. This is the true adventure of our time.’
Blaise Pascal, 17th Century French mathematician, philosopher and physicist - ‘All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’
Professor Ursula King - ‘The development of a balanced, wholesome spirituality which relates to our political, economic, scientific, educational and cultural activities, as well as to our personal lives, is the most urgent task that humanity has to address in the new millennium.’
Penny Moon- ’ A Quiet Place has independent research evidence that shows that this work changes children’s behaviour for the better.’
Derek Casells from the Maharishi School ™in Lancashire asserts that meditation in schools has a huge affect on the way children think and act. At Maharishi School they have ten minutes meditation at the beginning and end of every day. Derek Casells believes meditation should be something that takes place within every school. His school has been practicing meditation since 1986. He says: ’It’s not just children that meditation has an impact on, but also teachers and administration staff. It creates a peaceful and good working environment. Over six hundred research studies have been done on using this system and it has also been proven to help children with ADHD. It also enables children to put more depth into their work’. A young person, aged 12 who has been meditating for three years, quoted in the Transcendental Education (Transcendental Meditation™)brochure, said: ‘I never thought I could sit quietly for ten minutes with my eyes closed, but meditating is easy and fun’.
Allan Kirkman from Still Learning regularly visits schools to teach pupils about Buddhism and life as a Buddhist. He also gives tours around the Sheffield Buddhist Centre, where pupils appreciate the calm atmosphere of the shrine rooms. Allan explains that as part of their workshops they lead pupils through a stilling exercise (short meditation), which is aimed to develop inner peace, calm and positive emotion. Allan says: ‘the overwhelming feedback we get at the end of the exercise is that the vast majority of pupils really appreciate the opportunity to be still and tune into their emotional experience’. Teacher from School, Allan visited: ‘Life for our young people is very busy, crammed with activity and information. It is vital not only that we create opportunities for stillness and reflection for our young people, but that we also teach them how to be still. There was a wonderful calming atmosphere in your session and students told me how much they enjoyed the chance to be quiet and to reflect.’
Pratistha from Byoma Kusuma Buddhadharma Sangha is empathetic towards the pressures surrounded by children today. She said: ‘Meditation is a great tool for children, it enables them to relax and creates a conducive environment for them to be themselves’.
Jenny Mosley Consultancies: ‘We believe that children need space and time dedicated to being still and peaceful, as part of their own natural growth and development and also as an 'antidote' to some of the pressures that they come across in their daily lives’.
Stella Von Thun from Heal Your Space works with children in schools to bring reassurance and peace into their lives as she believes that schools can be a scary and daunting place. She said: ‘The challenge we face is getting teachers to agree with such techniques and some people are very closed when it comes to getting children more involved with who they are’.