For good reasons, we believe that church-related beliefs should not influence public education, unless the beliefs are part of a curriculum that involves the history or comparison of religions. With that in mind, and with our emphasis on educating the individual, it seems that concepts involving spirit are off limits in our schools.
Similarly, in India, the cradle of so many spiritual traditions, there is a national interest in Values Education and an abhorrence of such a curriculum coming from any of India's many spiritual traditions. Colonial influences have left India as secular about education as the United States.
This becomes important when we grasp that Values Education is a secular frame for millennia of spiritual traditions. The world's first cultures see the environmental and cultural genocide by colonial and post-colonial “commercial”, evangelical, and industrial countries as symptomatic of a lack of spirit, a disharmony with the beauty, balance and consciousness of the earth. Reasonably, they suggest that our environmental and related crises are caused by human disharmony, or a lack of spirit, sensitivity, or we might say sympathetic, intuitive, and aesthetic resonance with the creation.
Yet, ironically, our schools are all about spirit rallies. In these exercises of team spirit we use sports to light the torch of a collective belief and passion similar to nationalism during wartime. Thus, we might hypothesise that inspiring spirit, a collective purpose that inspires deep enthusiasm, in the service of sports is a healthy secular activity. But inspiring spirit, as a collective, unifying concept for the care of one another and the earth is not.
It's time we took another look at the relationship between secular disciplines and spiritual teachings. While I'd argue for keeping specific religious teachings out of our schools, in the name of psychology, anthropology, comparative religions, team work, and shared purpose, I'd argue that to be fully human, which may be one good definition of being fully educated, people need to understand the towering spiritual traditions that teach to the heart of our humanity.
Teaching such a balanced curriculum should NOT preach beliefs that come from any specific spiritual tradition. Indeed, by comparing these traditions, we can learn the common themes and divergences. We can also learn that many great people who were not within any religious tradition, held values in common with believers. Good and great people come clothed in widely varying spiritual and secular robes.
Education should not be about maintaining ignorance about a core element in our nature--our joy in joining fully in events that quicken our sense of spirit. If people are not educated to the dangerous excesses of belief and spirit, as manipulated by authoritarians, then a secular education may leave people lonely and vulnerable rather than united and empowered to sympathetically serve our collective values, which are so similar across all spiritual and humanistic traditions.