Abstract
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.
Highlights
Since the 1970s, philosophers of education have tended to hold religious education under suspicion as an example of indoctrination ‘par excellence’ (White 1970, p. 109)
The problematic of religious education turns on the justification of religious propositions: religious knowledge requires an assent to certain ‘religious propositions’; yet, it seems, the truth criteria of such religious propositions depend on faith, are private, and, as such, are not available to public scrutiny; religious education is not justifiable, nor even possible
We suggest that just as history is taught according to the practice of historians, religious education should be taught according to the practice of the religious, open to a recollection, and explored by a philosophical theology of education
Summary
‘After all, who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks?’—Augustine of Hippo (c. 389/1995, p. 145). As the claims of religion are contestable, it seems to many that compulsory religious education is questionable, and religious initiation in childhood may be morally reprehensible (Tillson 2011, 2019) Against any such suspicion, the ancient African theologian, philosopher, and Doctor of the Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo, casts aside the authority of the teacher and recommends a programme of education that may be more liberal precisely because it is more religious. Analytic philosophy of education has often tended to marginalize the religious as a set of propositions that can either be publicly verified or excluded from knowledge, as from any publicly sponsored programme of education. It has rendered the ‘religious’ as a static inventory of discrete judgments rather than a living tradition of corporately recollective practices. We recommend a novel approach to the philosophy of education that will be better equipped to answer to the most forgotten questions of religious education—the questions of theology
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