The Process of Internalizing Spiritual Values by Adolescents within the Context of Challenges of the 21st century

Abstract

Educational policy makers in post-modern Europe have taken to creating strategies of life-long education that overestimates one type of spiritual values (consisting of truth, goodness, beauty) and lead to the pragmatic needs satisfaction. The system of education in Lithuania goes hand in hand with modern European tendencies and aims at defining the desirable values and skills alongside the key competences acquired in the processes of education. The greatest attention is given to learning and moral values that involve the individual's relationships with the micro and macro-environment (dignity, responsiveness, honesty, tolerance, national sensitivity, civic educational component). The present study has established that adolescents are able to internalize most successfully those spiritual values that are related to their interpersonal relationships (persona] dignity, sensitivity, honesty). However, other important values that also make up part of the educational content of school curriculum (national sensitivity, civic education component, wisdom, creativity) seem to be much more problematic in the processes of value internalization in adolescents; though these values in particular are exclusively important for the processes of adolescents' spiritual becoming, and these values have a complimentary character.