That view has recently been popularized in the writings of Depok Chopra. If clarification of one's purpose is important in business, psychology, and religion, so is it in education. I have been working for such clarification with my students, and am convinced it has value. Choosing a project for a course becomes easier. And because the project comes from the student's deep sense of life purpose, the student has a voracious hunger to learn anything contributing to the project.
All teachers have a sense of their purpose in teaching.
Commonly that is expressed as curricular goals and objectives. Here I am talking of something different - the student's sense of her deep life purpose, and of ways of furthering that purpose through her work in a course. Here, I will share a few approaches I have taken in my classes. Although I teach in a community college with students from 18 to 80 and of diverse backgrounds, I believe the principles I have followed may be used in most educational settings. I begin with the assumption that almost all students would like to find a deep sense of purpose, and that they can do so.