Religion, education and the post-secular child

Abstract

This essay endeavours to reframe current discussion of the relationship of religion to education by highlighting an often seriously neglected element of contemporary educational thought: the changing, post-secular understanding of childhood in the globalised age. Drawing upon recent ethnographies of childhood, and an older anthropological scholarship, the essay seeks to illuminate the place of religion and religious experience in the education of the young by interrogating prevailing and competing perceptions of childhood that often implicitly underpin the discussion of the relationship of the ‘post-secular’ to both liberal and critical-constructivist accounts of educational purpose. In rehabilitating this core concern with childhood, the essay also seeks to recover the ‘pre-secular’ child of folklore, myth, fairytale and romantic aesthetics in order to propose that current Western conceptions of the child are constitutively implicated in these living legacies.