Educational Philosophy for a Post-secular Age

David Lewin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317410553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational Philosophy for a Post-secular Age reinterprets post-secular insights for educational theory by recognising that the persistence of religion in contemporary life raises new questions about the place of religion in education. Two common assumptions are critically examined: first, that the better educated a society becomes, the more secular it becomes, and second, that religion can and should be separated from public education. For too long, religion has had an uneasy relationship with education, being seen either as a foreign invader, a problem to be solved, or as a mechanism by which to reinforce particular religious, cultural or national identities. In order to move educational theory beyond the debates about indoctrination and competing rights between parents, children and nation states, the argument undercuts rationalist conceptions of religion and education that tend to frame the debates in terms of competing truth claims or worldviews.

Drawing on a diverse range of theological, philosophical and educational sources, this book demonstrates the continuing significance of the Christian mystical tradition to educational theory. It proposes an exploration of democratic education that brings together two apparently irreconcilable poles: the meaning of religion in education and contemporary life, and the need for a deliberative democratic process that is fit for the post-secular age. It argues that religious literacy can be served by democratic encounters in public religious education.

Educational Philosophy for a Post-secular Age will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of the philosophy of education, philosophy of religion, education policy, politics, anthropology and cultural theory. It will particularly appeal to those, of both secular and religious persuasions, interested in the place of religion in education and public life.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A eulogy for the secular?

Is secularism dying? Is it time to believe again, to return, like prodigal children, to our religious roots, our spiritual home? Or is the idea of the end of secularism and the return of religion itself just a fleeting revival, within an ultimately certain trajectory: the death of belief. Brought up as a practising secularist by agnostic parents who had other things on their mind than religion, I found the community of a local Baptist church in outer suburban London offering a sense of belonging through a religious community framed by what seemed a potent vision of what human life could be. (I should confess that my interest in the church was enhanced by that fact that the Baptist Minister was the father of two important people in my life: my best friend at school, and his sister, with whom I had a brief but formative relationship). These teenage experiences remained important to me, and following a degree in theology I continued to think about the meaning of things and my place among them. Although my commitment to that church was not long-lasting (a not uncommon experience for students of theology!), an interest in the religious remained, a quality which, as I hope to show, can be meaningfully applied not just to religions conventionally conceived, but can cut across the sacred and the secular.¹ Through encounters with a variety of Eastern religious practices (training seriously in Tai Chi Chuan for many years), postgraduate studies in mysticism and religious experience, and working at Brockwood Park School, an alternative ‘Krishnamurti’ school, I developed a commitment to a rather amorphous and postmodern religiosity, which I can with hindsight reconstruct as an interest in the space between the secular and the confessional. Whether the post-secular is the best term for such a space remains to be seen.

Does any of this suggest that it is secularism rather than religion that is in terminal decline? From a European perspective, forms of non-belief (e.g., the ‘no religion’ category on public documents) are more characteristic of the emergent zeitgeist, though these categories are not identical with atheism (Lee 2015) and seem to stand somewhere between committed confessionalism and atheism. Just as there are many atheisms depending on which God or religion is being rejected (Turner 2002), so there are many secularisms depending on how the prepositional relations between religion and society are framed.² This leads to the recognition of multiple secularisms that the post-secular must somehow supersede, suggesting many possible formations of the post-secular.

The varied formations of the post-secular invite broad reflections about whether religion has something positive to contribute to culture. My general view, notwithstanding the manifest problems with institutional religion, is that tradition, insight and inspiration permeate the great religious cultures of the world. In the context of the rising tide of secularism in the twentieth century, it became unfashionable to acknowledge these riches, let alone draw explicitly from them. To say that the secular tide is turning may be something of a simplification, but framing this book in terms of the post-secular age is justified since it is widely recognized that religion is an “enduring and pervasive global cultural force” (Bowie 2012, 195). Not only could we draw upon religious traditions for insight and inspiration, but also, for better or worse, our cultural and educational structures are built upon them. While educationalists understandably focus on general literacy and numeracy, religious literacy takes on a particular significance here partly because the post-secular condition appears to leave young people somewhat spiritually perplexed, many finding that the logical conclusion from the presence of multiple modernities is something like the bland relativism that Allan Bloom (1987) lamented nearly 30 years ago, or, perhaps in reaction to such a vapid pluralism, reconstructing a revisionist religiosity that today is identified as extreme. Dinham and Francis (2015) suggest that religious education, in England certainly, does little to remedy this perplexed and polarized condition. The post-secular denotes how things have moved beyond this dichotomy, such that it is not a simple revaluation of our religious traditions, but a recognition of the multiple ways in which secularisms are felt, from benign, protected, liberal spaces of a softer secular public, to a kind of totalitarian disavowal of our historic religious setting (Berg-Sorensen 2013). This points to what sociologists of religion increasingly recognize as the fact that religious history is no longer read as a grand narrative either of secular decline, or of religious restoration.

Post-secular education

Although governments and educationalists around the world find various ways of negotiating the complex relations between religious life and education, it remains an unfortunate fact that “most democracies either ignore religious education or treat it very superficially” (Arthur et al. 2010, 5). This book is primarily concerned to explore the relations between religion and education in general, rather than with the curricula of religious education or the existence of religious schools. But issues around religious formation and education in schools are not separable from wider post-secular educational concerns, so it is worth making some preliminary remarks about the place of religion in schooling.

In the Western world, faith schooling can assume an evangelizing or conservatively religious function, as in some traditional Catholic schools and Muslim madrasas. But common in the UK, more particularly in England, is a ‘weaker’ form of faith schooling whose purposes are less evangelical, and in which soft religiosity informs the general ethos and, to some extent, the Religious Studies curriculum.³ State funding is available to many faith schools in England though this state-funded faith school model is less common among secular states, notably the US and France, where a stricter division between religion and education is enforced. The politics of religion in England have shifted since the widely discussed 2003 interview in which UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell famously intervened, saying, “We don’t do God.” Campbell probably intervened for reasons that speak of a wider suspicion of the place of religion in public life, namely that an inevitable secularization will displace any public discussion of religion, and that this secularization is tied to the ‘advanced’ nature of Western liberal democracies. The kind of intellectualist neocolonial alignment of Western systems of governance with the triumph of reason over religious superstition has been regularly denounced over recent years and was probably ill judged even in 2003 when the post-secular had yet to be widely discussed. First of all, as Arthur et al. (2010) has shown, democracy is less in opposition to religion than is often assumed, and in fact, finds its roots in the development of particular forms of religiosity. Secondly, and more importantly for the present discussion, religion continues to form and inform public debate. In 2015, evidence of the fact that we do ‘do God’, in the UK at least, is demonstrated, for example, by the publication of the Woolf Report into religion and public life entitled “Living with Difference”, which states that “governments and public services have a legitimate and indeed necessary interest in religion, even though they may insist … that they ‘don’t do God’ ” (Woolf Institute 2015, 14). Although religion remains influential, it should not enjoy ‘special’ status over the philosophical or aesthetic. Consistent with the 2010 UK Equality Act, I will not argue for any privileging of the religious over the secular, humanist or atheist, but will suggest that something recognizably religious is at play within much educational theory. As will become clear, the post-secular does not necessarily disavow secularism. Some readers will fail to see the need for the language of religion, a question that Chapter 3 will address. A short answer here is that religion is neither going away nor can be entirely separated from public life. Across Europe some alignment between church and state is the norm with the French case of separation being the European exception (Arthur et al. 2010, 16). Nevertheless, the commitment to separationism is often taken to be desirable, even where it is recognized that churches continue to exercise influence within the public lives of European citizens.

What a strict separationist view tends to overlook is that education has at least two key roles bearing upon religious life, one backward-facing, the other forward, or as Arendt (2006) would put it, between past and future. First, religious traditions bind us to the stories of our shared cultural heritage through educational processes and practices, bonds that are experienced with ambivalence, both as constraints as well as providing roots. Second, religious life, also entailing education, carries our histories and cultures into an uncertain future, a future that requires acts of human commitment embodying ultimate concerns. The Janus-faced nature of education and religion means, in other words, that education is bound by the traditions of the past and oriented towards transcendence through an uncertain future. By transcendence I have in mind something minimally defined, but sufficient to consider education at all worthwhile: what in the hands of the theologian Teilhard de Chardin (1959) might be called a faith in the future. While a theology of transcendence is not the only way to understand religious expression in a post-secular age, it is an important dimension that resonates with the purposes and practices of education. This transcendent dimension has been obscured by the complexities and insecurities of the postmodern, but the time has come to open up a renewed, post-critical dialogue: towards shared transcendence.

In the context of the political, religious and cultural turmoil since the events of 9/11 that have come to frame the post-secular, the notion of shared transcendence will sound naïvely idealistic and implausible. The world could scarcely be further from a shared vision of the good life than it is today given the increased ideological tensions and the evident failure of history to have ended with Western liberal democracy. There is precious little evidence of the possibility of shared transcendence, and the idea that post-secularism would be an appropriate context for developing the idea fares little better. Less controversial or naïve is the idea that the post-secular initiates a renewed sense of the responsibilities of educators to think about the political dimensions of modern life which should take more notice of diverse religious and cultural traditions. This has implications for the tidy division between public and private spheres that many conceptions of secularism espouse. It is important, of course, to remember that education is not just schooling but entails a wider conception of upbringing, formation and ongoing learning that makes this neat division between private and public untenable. If the efforts of Ivan Illich, Everett Reimer and others to de-school society – whereby the model of universal institutional public education is shown to be ineffective or even corrosive – were successful in softening the division between upbringing (which might be called informal education) and schooling (formal education), then the division between private and public spheres in education could not be so easily assumed. We will note how the secular division between private and public relies upon a kind of religious illiteracy, but the division also compartmentalizes our educational experience if we think only of education in the ‘public’ domain. Whatever home is, in these displaced and liquid times, it is the site of upbringing and formation that is thoroughly educational (in the sense of Bildung).⁴ Because education occupies both private and public domains, and draws together tradition and transcendence, it is worth exploring whether education offers a way to imagine a shared transcendence.

Education, education, education

In the chapters that follow I draw attention to the multiple modernities and narratives that throw the story of Western emancipation and enlightenment through education into sharp relief. My interests are specifically post-secular insofar as what I take to be a certain Western parochialism arises out of a secularization narrative that, from the perspective of global trends seems increasingly untenable. The educational significance of this secular perspective arises through a particularly problematic alignment of education with ‘critique’ and the assumptions of progress in which triumphalist reason displaces the premodern. In so many ways secular culture embodies a set of commitments that go unnoticed, and so I argue that the practices of secular culture are formative of identity and desire in ways that should be understood as educational. There are harmful dimensions to secular formation, inasmuch as secular culture adopts the ideologies and practices of neoliberalism. To interrupt the smooth flow of neoliberalism requires, I argue, some form of transcendence. I do not necessarily mean by this a conventional conception of God. Transcendence is again minimally defined as for example, a feeling of absolute dependence (as the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher famously put it in the 1820s) or as an awareness of what is missing, to borrow the title of a recent publication about the relations between faith and reason by Jürgen Habermas (2010).⁵ The argument of this book explores the role of transcendence in education partly by examining the ways in which education entails an attenuation and deconstruction of conventional ideas about selfhood and formation. This could ultimately be seen as a ‘negation’ of the self. What I call the post-secular forms of negation are not ‘negative’ in the undesirable sense, but might be acknowledged through what John Keats called a negative capability: understanding the uncertainties, doubts and limitations of existence, and maintaining an openness to mystery. While for some people, religions are there to provide answers to ultimate questions, I would suggest that actually religions offer spaces for reflection and opportunities to dwell in the mystery, rather than straightforward answers. The negative capability can be sensed, for example, in the curious uncertainty surrounding the etiology of attention in education. Who is in charge of attention, or can attention be managed? This kind of question is fundamentally anthropological, inviting us to interrogate some deeply held convictions about the tolerance and inclusivity found in modern public life. Towards the end of the book, I go on to argue for a reinterpretation of democratic education that takes account both of the widely divergent views of what education is for and the meaning of religion in contemporary life, while also arguing for a deliberative democratic process fit for the post-secular age. This deliberative culture is important if we are concerned to raise the question of the nature of the good life implied in the secular and religious forms of education. In his quest for a shared educational culture for a pluralist age, Neil Postman reflects on the necessity of gods, arguing that the loss of religion in modernity does not imply the loss of the ultimate concerns that the religions ostensibly address. Although Postman is prone to overstatement, he offers important insights that show how the secular public sphere does not remain neutral on the question of the purpose of existence, rather it inspires its own set of narratives:

The question is not, does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, what kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teaching accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity for such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling

(Postman 1995, 18).

I do not suggest that we need gods or religion to avoid angry, soulless, directionless masses, but that secular and religious cultures embody values and commitments underpinned by narratives. So my own first religious experiences in the Baptist church were not, in fact, the first kinds of religious views or liturgies that formed me. My religious identity was not left unblemished, so to speak, by the atheist/agnosticism of family background even if, in my early years it was largely appropriated by the whims of consumerism, desire satisfaction and the pursuit of happiness. An important idea here is that there is, of course, no neutral formation. The idea of the neutral secular space neglects, I argue, the commitments entailed in any educational process, by seeking to establish education and religion as separate domains: public vs. private. The reader must keep in mind, though, that religion is not opposed to the secular: many Christians, for example, believe in the autonomy of the saeculum (the saec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Understanding the frame
• Part II Experiments in reframing
• Index