Schools with spirit

In Schools with Spirit, twelve respected educators show how they welcome the sacred into their own work with students, in spite of their fears of "overstepping" and in the face of the complex obstacles to nurturing the inner life of children in a school setting. Since the mid-1990s, when Daniel Goleman established that nurturing a young person's "emotional intelligence" enhances his or her ability to learn, schools have been struggling with ways to attend to students' emotional and social -- as well as intellectual -- development. Yet too many recent books and programs tout the "character education" of children as a cure for incivility and worse, and too many of these are barely disguised tracts with religious or culturally noninclusive agendas.