Search

Philosophers of education often view the role of religion in education with suspicion, claiming it to be impossible, indoctrinatory or controversial unless reduced to secular premises and aims. The ‘post-secular’ and ‘decolonial’ turns of the new millennium have, however, afforded opportunities to revaluate this predilection. In a social and intellectual context where the arguments of previous generations of philosophers may be challenged on account of positivist assumptions, there may be an opening for the reconsideration of alternative but traditional religious epistemologies. In this article, we pursue one such line of thought by revisiting a classic question in the philosophy of education, Meno’s Paradox of inquiry. We do this to revitalise understanding and justification for religious education. Our argument is not altogether new, but in our view, is in need of restatement: liturgy is at the heart of education and it is so because it is a locus of knowledge. We make this argument by exploring St Augustine’s response to Meno’s Paradox, and his radical claim that only Christ can be called ‘teacher’. Though ancient, this view of the relationship of the teacher and student to knowledge may seem surprisingly contemporary because of its emphasis on the independence of the learner. Although our argument is grounded in classic texts of the Western tradition, we suggest that arguments could be made by drawing on similar resources in other religious traditions, such as Islam, that also draw upon the Platonic tradition and similarly emphasise the importance of communal and personal acts of worship.

This paper explores religious adolescents' reported experiences of secondary schools. Fifty-four qualitative interviews were conducted in places of worship in three cities in England with Christians (n=46), Jews (n=38) and Muslims (n=15). Secondary schools of a religious and non-religious character were reported as not providing a suitable environment for religious observances, nor as a place to act and behave according to participants' religious principles. Religious adolescents reported prejudice and criticism of their beliefs or religious affiliations from their peers and sometimes from teachers. They also perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented in some lessons. The focus of this paper is the identity choices religious adolescents reported in response to these challenges. Three groups of identity choices are theorised and explored: religious identity seeking, religious identity declaration and religious identity masking. The findings are discussed in view of religious identity construction theory, good practice for teachers and also the potential concerns of faith communities.

While we agree with Cooling’s argument from fairness, we argue that Cooling fails to give an adequate account of how fairness can be conceived, particularly because he does not decisively tackle the issues surrounding doing God in a plural context, or the contentious issues of compulsory collective worship and faith schools. In order to explore an argument from fairness with these issues in mind, we introduce three key concepts from the philosophy of John Rawls: reasonable pluralism, overlapping consensus and hypothetical contract. We then invite readers to conduct a thought experiment based on a hypothetical contract to explore the issues of faith schools and collective worship. We conclude from this exercise that hypothetically, a rational person behind a veil of ignorance would choose a system of educational provision where faith schools should be made available, but compulsory collective worship in religiously unaffiliated schools should not be enshrined in legislation. By appropriating concepts from ...