The National School Chaplain Association (NSCA) is supporting schools with spiritual advisors equipped to help prevent some of the most difficult challenges facing education today.
In the years following the enlightenment, industrial revolution, and scientific revolution, the materialistic viewpoint has become the dominant one in the west. This transformation has resulted in the displacement of the ancient religious perceptions, which once formed the center of moral education and understanding in society.
Through this transition, technology and science have become the new gods of culture. Neil Postman famously characterized this new ethos as a Technopoly, the belief that “what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”
One result of this worldview has been the complete neglect of the spiritual care of students throughout the western school system. As such, the National School Chaplain Association (NSCA) provides spiritual counselors to meet the growing spiritual starvation of the 21st-century student. Read about their important mission and services at https://nationalschoolchaplainassociation.org
In the 21st century Technopoly (to steal Postman’s phrase), school shootings have horrifically (yet unsurprisingly) continued to rise. While the materialist viewpoint focuses on physical solutions like increased security and active shooter training, the NSCA has approached the problem from a different angle: fulfilling the spiritual needs of students — a concept foreign to the 21st Century Technopoly.
The NSCA offers chaplains that are well-equipped to listen, counsel, and comfort students struggling with the challenges of adolescence. In the United States, traditional school curriculum focuses on the mainstays of western education, but the NSCA provides a spiritual service missing within this syllabus.
As part of this approach, NSCA chaplains emphasize the value of friendships to combat the significant difficulties of depression and loneliness common among students. To the NSCA, the fairest rose in the garden of life is friendship, and as a result, their chaplains emphasize conversation and relationship as the cornerstones of contentment.
NSCA chaplains guide students through life’s biggest questions often neglected in the 21st century classroom: Why do people exist? Is there a God and what is his purpose? Are good and evil real laws of the universe or are humans merely contestants in mother nature’s game of survival of the fittest?
Students are at a defining moment in their life and seek to understand these purpose-linked queries and their implications for adulthood. NSCA chaplains are ready to help them on this journey and serve as go-to people in times of struggle.
Equip your students for life’s great challenges with a chaplain at https://nationalschoolchaplainassociation.org/chaplains
