Is Personal Life Purpose Replacing Shared Worldview as Youths Increasingly Individuate? Implications for Educators

Abstract

This conceptual paper integrates scholarship from psychology, sociology, education, and philosophy to pose and consider important questions regarding how life purpose and worldview relate, especially in turbulent socio-cultural times. This exploration can help educators consider life purpose not as an individual attribute but rather as a practice . Both worldview and life purpose can be given from a culture or can be chosen by the individual, with more cultures increasingly incorporating individualized choice. However, it is important that individualization not become solely self-focused. Individuals’ purposes interact to weave a participatory worldview of personal contributions to the common good: “threaded” life purposes compose the social fabric of shared worldviews such that worldview and life purpose reciprocally compose each other to maintain self-regulation despite turbulence or transitions in social institutions. On this view, educators are challenged to design practice opportunities for students to strengthen the prosocial interdependence of their life purposes within the community, by acting in situations in which others are influenced by—and provide feedback on—the student’s purpose-pursuing actions. Ideally, students interact with people who have different purposes so everyone can master interweaving diversity to strengthen society. Thereby, educators support skills to value prosocial interdependence. https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.18.5.2

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