Spiritual Development In High School Essay

It is a pretty well-known fact that high school is a rough time in the development of many young individuals. No matter what high school one attends, it always seems that difficulties will come up, even if these difficulties are not directly related to the school experience, the problems are often brought in because humanness does not allow neat separations in life. But the question that has not been asked nearly as often is: “Is spiritual development an integral, unique element of the human experience that has been overlooked or ignored, particularly in childhood and adolescence?” (Benson, Roehlkepartain, & Rude, 2003, p. 205). If spiritual development is an integral element in the development of a person, then this should surely be brought into the high school experience, at least to some degree. Some types of development follow a set of usual and expected checkpoints, as with puberty, but there are others, like identity development, that are much less easy to predict (Petersen, 2008). One of these identity development facets is spiritual development (Petersen, 2008). Accepting that spiritual development is essential to the formation of a young person’s identity would force those who work with young people to “nurture, feed, and support that animating force (spiritual development)” (Quinn, 2008, pg. 75).

It would therefore seem that the typical high school experience is one that includes ostracism, broken rules, and cliques. Even so, the majority of the people who filled out the questionnaire were involved in some type of extracurricular activity. So there had to be some degree of acceptance among the small group. The types of extracurricular activities these people were involved in ranges from sports to choir, from student senate to spring plays, and from yearbook to youth group. The participants in this study were as varied in their interests as one would