For most of my career in developmental and educational psychology, I have been guided by a single question: what do children truly need to flourish in the world they are entering? I don’t mean the world their parents inherited or the one textbooks were designed for, but the one unfolding – volatile, technology-saturated and deeply uncertain.
Eight years ago, during my PhD studies at the University of Cambridge, I was certain I was close to finding the answer; I immersed myself in building frameworks for computational thinking and complex problem-solving, convinced that these cognitive capacities formed the backbone of future readiness. Decompose problems. Recognise patterns. Reason algorithmically. If we sharpened young minds with these skills, surely we would prepare them for whatever the future might bring.
I held this belief until the data began to say otherwise.
Even as digital fluency and academic achievement climbed, something else was collapsing. In Hong Kong – my home – rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among young people have hit record highs and this pattern is global. Perhaps these are systemic signals suggesting that while we are investing enormously in shaping capable minds, we are losing something essential about the person inside.
It took me a while to pinpoint what was missing, but I’ve come to see it as this: spirituality.
I do not mean religion. I mean something more fundamental – the cultivation of an inner life. The capacity for meaning, connection and orientation when everything around us is shifting. It is the layer of human development that grounds values and purpose; the dimension that makes us, in the deepest sense, human. Modern education has grown remarkably effective at measuring what students can do. It barely touches on who they are becoming or why it matters.
