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The Meaning of Life

The Meaning of Life (I)

Antony Flew on Tolstoy’s obsession.

Inspectors of schools in the United Kingdom, under the Direction of OFSTED, the Office for Standards in Education, are charged with reporting on the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils in the state schools which they inspect. The primary school of which my wife serves as a Governor was recently inspected, and the Inspectors qualified their generally strongly favourable report by faulting the school for its failure to ensure the satisfactory spiritual development of its pupils. She tried but failed to persuade her fellow Governors to request enlightenment on what that key expression ‘spiritual development’ was supposed to mean and how its referent was to be identified.

Undeterred by this failure she herself put the question to OFSTED, and was rewarded by the receipt of the definition provided in OFSTED’s Framework for Inspection (revised 1993 edition). This runs: “Spiritual development relates to that aspect of the inner life through which pupils acquire insights into their personal existence which are of enduring worth.

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