Sleeping Beauty Awakens

Howard Worsley is currently the Tutor in Mission at Trinity College in Bristol where he is also the Vice Principal. He is a researcher into children's spirituality and their early perceptions, a contextual theologian and an educationalist who publishes regularly for academic journals.

This book is being published at a time when public systems seem to be moving apart from each other. After the sense of political optimism that emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, there existed a period when it seemed that unification, common trust and global citizenship were terms that had currency. Then in 2016 came Brexit when the British people voted to leave the European Union in a single-issue poll. Separatism seems to be back on the agenda. This rhetoric of fear ushers in a realm where separatism is seen to be preferable to unity, a seemingly inevitable movement away from close partnership. However, a wide angled view of history shows that there is an on-going cycle whereby the flux of separation and coming together is a process similar to the waxing and waning effects of the moon. School systems record the same story as that written by national agendas. This book looks at the impact of separation in education from the lenses of history, ideology and Christian theology. It does so by using the story of Sleeping Beauty as a background narrative to suggest that separation is only a lull in consciousness between periods of wakefulness.