Abstract
There is a worldwide growing tendency to include religious education in school curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to probe the motivation(s), rationality and consequence(s) of such an inclusion from the perspective of philosophy of education. The contention is that motivationally the disposition stems from a set of desires that are actually conflicting and render the very purpose of the introduction of religious education into curriculum problematic. It will then be argued that the project is not justifiable or rational as it is predicated on the assumption that religion can and does constitute identity. The presumption is incorrect and strictly speaking identity cannot be constituted by religion. Finally, it will be shown that a consequence of religious education is to undermine, whether wittingly or not, one of the most fundamental objectives of education, viz. the induction of autonomous agency. This is particularly consequential for the case of morality and the ability to make ethical decisions. Overall, the intention is to evidence that religious education is more of a recipe for exclusion than inclusion and as such goes against the very spirit of education.
Motivating Religious Education
There are mainly two sources of motivation for introducing religious education into the curriculum: multiculturalism and religious revivalism. Multiculturalism which is often more prevalent and applicable to developed countries arises from a recognition of the cultural diversity and an attendant desire to include all the ethnic multiplicity of those societies. The underlying thought here is that the more one recognises the individual identity of each member or group of the society the more cohesive the society becomes. However, what often transpires in such contexts is a twofold, albeit implicit, identification: one is to identify religion with culture and the other is to identify culture with identity. Thus, cultural identity tends to be associated with religious identity and as such religious education is deemed to be an appropriate means of achieving a more encompassing social environment. Nevertheless, what is primarily distinctive of multiculturalism is its insistence on a more inclusive community.
Religious revivalism, due to its very nature, has also been responsible for advocating the incorporation of religious education into school curriculum. Unlike multiculturalism, geopolitically religious revivalism has had a wider scope and purview beyond the developed countries. Yet, like multiculturalism, it makes the same twofold identification and views the identities of individuals in terms of their religious beliefs. However, what is important to note about religious revivalist movements is that their identification of individuals or groups in terms of their religious affiliations has been mainly informed by a desire for marking oneself from others. In other words, religion is used as a means of affirming an identity by which non-believers are distinguished and excluded. Both phenomenologically and philosophically, religions are exclusivist as the path of salvation is principally paved through the subscription of individuals to certain doctrines and dogmas.
Obviously there is a conflict of intention and interest between multiculturalism and religious revivalism, but they both manage to converge on encouraging religious education. Therefore, the important issue is how they could come to the same conclusion with such contradictory agendas. Fundamentally, the agreement, as noted above, arises from a common conception between the two camps: namely, the identification of individual identity with religion; and, if anything, this is the conceptual culprit that calls for correction. It is, therefore, the burden of the next section to argue against this identification.
However, before that, one needs to address a possible misgiving. It may be objected that there could be a third motivation for introducing religious education into curriculum which is only incidentally shared by both multiculturalism and religious revivalism: that is, a concern for morality. Indeed, both camps could see religious education as a modus operandi for reinstating and reinforcing moral values. Thus, religious instruction would effectively be seen as ethical education. Now, is this plausible? There are several, though related, considerations that render this reading of the situation implausible. For one thing, contemporary multiculturalism is essentially secular in its orientation and could not comfortably comport with a non-secular, if not anti-secular, framework as espoused by religions. One way to highlight this point is to note that multiculturalism because of its secular pedigree does not recognise the sacred/profane distinction per se, whereas the dichotomy is a constitutive aspect of religious thought including morality. Therefore, due to its theoretical infrastructure, it seems rather difficult for multiculturalism to reconcile itself with a religious outlook on, for example, morality.
Moreover, there is a fundamental question about the nature and sanction of ethical values. Obviously multiculturalists, like many others, do differ in their meta-ethics and the theoretical understanding of ethical issues, and that is why the spectrum of their positions could range over moral realism, ethical relativism down to nihilism. However, what is common to all and, indeed, forms a central tenet of multiculturalism is the primacy of human autonomy and agency which, for this context, is concisely captured by Charles Taylor's pithy description as 'a freedom from the demands of authority.' In contrast, what is characteristic of religious understanding of morality is the primacy of divine command. This is an issue that is going to occupy the last part of the paper, but suffice it to say for the present that these outlooks on morality, to say the least, are quite at variance with one another. Thus, an interest in moral education fails to forge a link between multiculturalism and religious revivalism in their respective advocacy of religious education in schools.
Rationality of Religious Identity
It was said earlier that what apparently unites multiculturalism and religious revivalism is their identification of religion with identity. In fact, it is a commonplace to come across the expression religious identity in both ordinary parlance and academic-cum-technical discourse of, for example, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists. What is not, however, common is to find an explication of the notion of identity in such contexts; indeed, the concept is frequently taken for granted. The purpose of this part is to argue that despite appearances the use of the concept of identity in such contexts is highly problematic and to plead for a clarification. The argument is developed through an analysis of revelation. The phenomenon of revelation plays a pivotal role, for instance, in the Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition, yet by its very nature owes its authenticity to something prior to itself, viz. reason. This entails the priority of reason over revelation and as such undermines claims that purport to define identity in terms of revelation/religion.
Identity
The issue of identity has been a recurrent theme in philosophy since antiquity. Most students of philosophy, and indeed most people for that matter, are familiar with the epigram attributed to the fifth century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus that 'one cannot step twice into the same river'. The aphorism arises from the observation that nature is in constant flux and the challenge set by Heraclitus was to explain how things could change yet, in some important sense, remain the same.
Thomas Hobbes reintroduced the problem in terms of an ancient puzzle about the ship of Theseus. In Plutarch's Parallel Lives, it is related that the ship by which Theseus, the semi-mythical hero of ancient Athens, accomplished his rescue mission was put on public display in Athens, and as the need arose, new planks, boards, sails, ropes, etc. replaced the old, until one day none of the original parts of the ship remained. This obviously gave rise to the question: Is this repaired ship still the same ship? Hobbes, however, added a new twist to the conundrum by inviting his readers to imagine that all the old parts were preserved and eventually reassembled into a ship, like the original one. Then, the question becomes: Is this restored ship still the same ship? The moral of the story was that if the answer to both questions is positive, in Hobbes' words, 'there would have been two ships numerically the same, which is absurd.' But, on what reasonable grounds can the answer to either question be negative?
Before pursuing this question any further, there is an issue of conceptual clarification that needs to be addressed first. The clarification concerns the fact that there are various types of identity other than the numerical one to which Hobbes is making a reference in the passage. In order to forestall any possible confusion, one should first distinguish quantitative from qualitative identity: that is, numerical as opposed to similarity identity. If x and y are numerically identical, then they are one and the same thing; while, if x and y are qualitatively identical, then they are alike in their intrinsic properties and qualities, but it does not follow that they are numerically identical. To give an example, Charles Dodgson and Lewis Carroll are numerically identical, whereas Lewis Carroll and Bertrand Russell are qualitatively identical in virtue of each of them being a logician.
Numerical identity itself admits of another bifurcation: namely, synchronic in contrast to diachronic identity. If x and y are synchronically identical, then they are numerically identical (i.e. one and the same thing) at any given time t; whereas, if x and y are diachronically identical, then the relation of numerical identity obtains between them over time: that is, they are stages or time-slices of the same temporally-enduring object. For example, on the first day of January 1960 Eric Blair was synchronically identical with George Orwell, while Eric Blair as a toddler is diachronically identical with Eric Blair as an adolescent.
Now, returning to the earlier question, there seems to be a whiff of paradox lurking there, if not a full-blown one. The paradox appears to emerge from an underlying assumption: namely, a statement of identity asserts a relation. Now, if that is the case, then the assumption must assert either that this relation holds between one thing and something else, or that it holds between a thing and itself. If it is the former, what it asserts must be necessarily false since nothing can be the same thing as something other than it. If it is the latter, it must be necessarily true and the most trivial of all tautologies. Yet, there are identity statements that are either false but only contingently so or true but neither trivially nor tautologically. Thus, one is left with the task of finding a way of reconciling these features of identity statements together. It is indeed in the same vein that one of Wittgenstein's remarks in his early philosophical phase classically captures this sense of paradox about identity: 'Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.'
John Locke, however, added a new dimension to the question by applying the notion of identity to individual human beings and thereby seeking an account of what constitutes the sameness of a self. What Locke articulated for the first time as the problem of personal identity and his own pioneering effort to elucidate the notion of personal identity have exercised remarkable influence on later students of the subject. It is possibly in this context that the theme of religion and identity could be placed. In dealing with the issue of personal identity, Locke canvassed two possible sources of explication: namely, physical and psychological criteria. The physical features range over body and bodily organs and the psychological ones cover mind and mental characteristics. Locke himself opted for a psychological explanation of personal identity in terms of conscious memory. However, in the psychological domain there are also states and events like beliefs and experiences that could be called on to characterise, for example, a particular religious stance or affiliation and in this way they could bestow some identity on their bearers. Thus, "you are what you believe".
Now, what is philosophically very important about any explanatory account, whether of personal identity or any other concept, is that it must be rationally justifiable. The significance of this condition of rationality lies in the normative or prescriptive constraint that it places on any explanatory model. To see the impact of this observation, a contrast with a socio-anthropological approach to identity, for instance, would be poignant. Prima facie, a socio-anthropological perspective is essentially phenomenological in orientation in the sense that the primary target is to offer the most accurate description of the phenomenon in question. And, indeed, in such studies every caution is taken not to contaminate the description with any latent or blatant normative evaluation. Thus, it is a commonplace to note that from a socio-anthropological point of view it is a fact that individuals do identify themselves in terms of their religious proclivities. Yet, is that identification rationally justifiable? The rhetorical import of the question is that the rationality informed prescriptivity of philosophy cannot rest content with a phenomenologically inspired account of identity.
There might, however, be a sense of uneasiness about the above characterisation of philosophy. The misgiving might surface either as an accusation of presumptuousness on the part of philosophy or, less confrontationally, as a demand for a justification of the claim in question. Either way, the doubt could be assuaged by noting that what underlies the foregoing feature of philosophy stems from an understanding of human nature: namely, its essential rationality. Aristotle's approach in an attempt to articulate and argue for this conception of human nature in his Politics is paradigmatic when he remarks that
Nature... does nothing in vain, and human beings, alone of the animals, have logos. (1253a8)
where the contrast between humans and animals and the corresponding concept of logos are elaborated in the following terms
Animals lead for the most part a life of nature ... Man, and only man, has in addition rational principle. (1332b4)
The reasoning that underwrites this conception of human nature is partly based on the idea that to deny rationality to humans is ipso fact to deny human autonomy where without autonomy there cannot be any attribution of responsibility and its attendant consequences of blame and praise. The very notion of human agency depends on human rationality as an essential constituent.
Now, this recognition of the centrality of rationality to human nature ties in quite well with the central issue of this paper, viz. the role of revelation in religion and its authentication vis-à-vis the question of identity.
Revelation in Religion
Revelation as a concept and an event plays a pivotal role in religion - or more accurately in the Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition. Indeed, in all three, an episode of revelation formed the initial inception of the new path, and the subsequent articulation of the message was informed by a stream of revelatory incidents. Thus, revelation is construed as some kind of divine disclosure towards which the human response of acceptance and submission is referred to as faith.
Now, if religion can provide some sort of basis for identity and the notion of religious identity can make sense, then revelation would occupy an important focal point for such an exercise. Therefore, the question of whether religion can inform identity could be narrowed down to the possibility or otherwise of revelation functioning as a fulcrum for identity. The objective is to show by a process of epistemic deconstruction that revelation is incapable of offering any grounds for identity. That is, the concept of revelation "suppresses an opposite" concept which it presupposes and derives its privileged position and primacy from it. A fortiori, religion strictly speaking cannot contribute towards the identity of individuals. If the argument succeeds, the privileged position and primacy attributed to revelation/religion should be assigned to the presupposed concept which probably, if at all, would be the one responsible for furnishing our individual identities. The concept in question is reason and the accompanying argument is predicated on the issue of the authentication of revelation.
To set the scene, a few preliminary points are in order. First, the notion of revelation is understood in its traditional sense as a communicational relationship between a person and a divine being. Schematically, revelation could be represented as
(S) A reveals c to R by means of m,
where A, c, R and m stand respectively for the revelatory agent, the content of revelation, the recipient of content, and the mode or means of transmission. Obviously, the schema cannot be claimed to be complete and exhaustive as it does not include variables like place and time, yet it incorporates elements that appear to be the most significant ones in the notion of revelation.
The second point to note is that whatever one's conception of revelation is, it has to conform to a twofold constraint which may be referred to as diachronic intersubjectivity. The rationale for this condition is as follows: on the one hand, the conception has to take into account not only the individual but also the corporate significance of revelation, because a notion of revelation construed solely in terms of a purely personal phenomenon would be incapable of creating a communal convergence. This is for the intersubjectivity part of the constraint. On the other hand, the conception must be able to secure the relevance of past revelation to the present, since without such a guarantee religion loses its universality and incidents of revelation would be consigned to the realm of historical irrelevancies. This counts towards the diachronic qualification of the constraint.
But, it seems that the only way to ensure diachronic intersubjectivity for revelation is to appeal to reason, the very faculty which is also simultaneously responsible for its authentication. In a nutshell, the claim could be justified by noting that what is revealed, even if complete, will be unaviodably both structured by the world-view of a particular human recipient and applicable only to some specific historical context. Without reasoning, one could not escape the individual and historical specificity of revelation, and reasoning becomes an insperable element of the very content of revelation. Therefore, we can accept divine revelation insofar as it can be purified and seen to coincide with our rational nature. Our acceptance is based not on the fact that it has been revealed but on the fact that we can discover its truth.
This is how the argument works in detail. An event of revelation could be analysed in two ways: either in terms of its character or in terms of its content. First the character: an examination of the character of revelation shows that not only it fails to command any intersubjectivity but also that its very intrasubjective plausibility is indebted to something outside itself. This is due to the fact that the character of revelation is experiential and as such consists in the phenomenal or subjective state of the person undergoing the experience of revelation. Now, in virtue of this qualitative feature of revelation that renders it singular and one of a kind, it is not accessible to any other person than the recipient of revelation. This obviously indicates that the character side of revelation is not a suitable foundation for intersubjectivity.
This problem of objective accessibility, or rather the lack of it, is further accentuated when one notes that there are other features of revelation that apparently prevent it, in contrast to most other experiences, from attaining intersubjectivity forever. Revelation as an experience, unlike ordinary experiential events, is spontaneous, sporadic, unique, and involuntary. These qualities themselves stem from the fact that revelation is a unidirectional process over which the recipient can exert absolutely no influence. The purse strings of revelation, so to speak, are held solely by the revelatory agent.
It was also contended that the character of revelation falters even in fostering intrasubjective credibility under its own steam for the recipient of revelation. This issue could, however, be approached in at least two different ways. One approach is to recognise that experiences by themselves cannot vouchsafe for their own veracity. The problem is basically that an experience qua experience is neither veridical nor delusive. In the specific context of revelation, the problem is: How does a prophet as a recipient of revelation know that his or her experience of revelation is genuine or hallucinatory? The worry here is that the experience of revelation may not be anything other than machinations of the mind, and thus the experience itself is incapable of making any inroads for adjudication either way.
The second approach broaches the issue by assuming the experience to be veridical but asking: How does one recognise the object of revelatory experience? Presumably, the object of experience is a divine being, and even if one adopts the most minimalist understanding of divinity, still it is unclear as to how that conception is conveyed in the experience. In other words, what is it about the revelatory experience which warrants that minimalist understanding rather than any other one about the divinity? Patently, the question becomes more intractable and recalcitrant if one thinks of the object of revelatory experience in some richer ways, for example thinking of it as omnipotent and omniscient. To generalise the issue, the contention is that there are no pure or raw experiences: experience always comes in some sort of conceptualisation. There is no pre-conceptual level at which experiences can be identified. The character of revelatory experiences is moulded by concepts and what wears the trousers, so to speak, is the concept. But concepts are part of the content.
This observation ushers the discussion nicely into the second way of analysing revelation: viz., the content of revelation. Now, what is content? The basic point here is that content is essentially a semantic notion and as such is a matter of truth and justification. Applying this to the case of revelation entails that what is revealed through the process of revelation, i.e. the content of revelation, could stand on its ground only if it tallies with, or more accurately conforms to, the rational means of epistemic acceptability. It is only through this that one may be able to secure diachronic intersubjectivity for revelation. It is indeed in response to such an epistemic vetting that one theologian, amongst others, feels compelled to delineate a set of seven standards by which genuine cases of revelation could be sifted from spurious ones. The precepts for putative cases of revelation are proposed to be:
1. cognitive, moral and spiritual character of the recipient;
2. conative consequences of revelation for the recipient;
3. conviction and certainty of the recipient as to the origin of revelation;
4. consistency and coherence of the content of revelation;
5. continuity and consistency of the revelation with previous understandings of God;
6. capacity of the revelation to illuminate and deepen what is arrived at independently;
7. coherence of the content of revelation with its context of occurrence.
And, a further eighth condition is suggested by another theistic philosopher which is for its very severity rarely used in ordinary contexts of epistemic validation. It stipulates that,
8. A single falsity suffices to invalidate the whole of a revelation.
Now, what is very remarkable about all these criteria is their highly rationalistic orientation. One way to appreciate this emphasis on rationality is to envision a situation where one is required to judge between various competing claims of revelation. Other than some kind of rational assessment, what can one invoke here that is not already indebted to reason for its own rectitude?
To round off the discussion about the nature of revelation, one may conclude in a rather lofty Hegelian style that revelation is a type of religious consciousness that characteristically grasps truth in the form of sensory experiences, and it is the office of rational philosophy to translate these sensations into concepts, purging them of their merely experiential character and thus conducting humanity to an exact form of knowledge.
Religious Identity
The foregoing discussion has been trading on a contrast between phenomenological and philosophical senses of identity and suggesting thereby that the latter be seen as the fundamental category. Now, if religion is indebted to reason for its authentication, it would transpire that religion cannot be regarded as presenting a philosophical account of identity as it had to conform to the prior rule of rationality vis-à-vis its foundational notion of revelation. This priority of reason over religion undercuts any definition of identity in terms of religion, and any attempt to deny the priority is too dear to be of any real value to its defenders. Indeed, a denial of priority of reason would consign religions to the realm of irrationalities.
It should also be noted that although it could be argued that religion is primarily an ontological model of explanation than ethical and in fact ontology precedes and underpins all other explanatory frameworks, the above argument is impartial in its understanding of religion in this respect. Whatever the content of a particular revelation turns out to be, whether ontological or ethical, it needs to be subjected to the principle of rationality for achieving diachronic intersubjectivity.
Concluding in a Kantian turn of expression, if revelation has any objective validity at all, it must be completely translatable without remainder into the concepts and expressions of rationality. Should the argument succeed, religion and identity have to be detached and strictly speaking identity cannot be constituted by religion.
Religious Education and Autonomous Agency
The issue of what should be the aim and objective of education is quite a moot point. There is, however, a consensus that the purpose of education cannot be primarily to present pupils with facts and descriptions of relevant kinds, but to develop an ability in them to discern and discriminate, deliberate, and decide on appropriate courses of actions for themselves. This is one way of elaborating what was alluded to above as the autonomy of agency. Indeed, even for the policy of imparting information as an element of education to succeed, the induction of this ability is an essential prerequisite.
To approach the same issue from a different angle, the autonomy in question could also be described in terms of cognitive responsibility. This means that a cognitively responsible agent is one who is able to appraise the situation for himself or herself independently and act accordingly. In turn, this implies that cognitive agents are responsible insofar as they have independent access to and assessment of the evidence on which they base their courses of commission or, for that matter, omission. One may then expect cognitive responsibility only if the agent is allowed complete confirmational reign or freedom over the content of beliefs and other cognitions. In other words, to retain or reject a belief is entirely dependent on the agent's own cognitive means and wherewithals.
To flesh this out for the domain of ethics, for example, one would be committing oneself to the idea that acting morally is acting according to what we truly are, i.e. rational agents. That is, the law of morality is not imposed from outside, but it is rather dictated by the very nature of reason itself. To be an autonomous moral agent is to act for reasons.
Now, the relevance of this observation to the current discussion is that what autonomous agency entails goes against the grain of religious education. To set the scene, one needs to look into the nature of religion, albeit very briefly, to see the tension between engendering autonomy of agency into pupils, on the one hand, and instructing them in religious education, on the other. It was indicated earlier that religions generally revolve around two interconnected fundamental notions: namely, the sacred/profane dichotomy and the divine command. One way of understanding the sacred/profane bifurcation in this context is that there are certain beliefs, viz. the sacred ones, that not only are not but also must not be subject to human cognitive evaluation; otherwise, one would be treading into the territory of profanity. Similarly, the doctrine of divine command could be construed as a command to subscribe to certain beliefs, mostly ethical though not exclusively, whose confirmational or evidential support is entirely derived from the divinity, and humans are not and must not seek any sanctions beyond the deity's word and authority.
What both doctrines share is their postulation of certain prescriptive and proscriptive precepts vis-à-vis some particular cognitive states - cognitive states that are deemed to be epistemically sanctioned solely by the divine being and to be absolutely beyond the scope of human cognitive capability for their justification. Yet, they seem to be in breach of the conditions set by the autonomy of agency in the shape of cognitive responsibility. Cognitive responsibility demands full accessibility to the evidential grounds of epistemic claims, whereas these two religious doctrines expressly deny it and forbid such an exercise. Even if we had the ability to judge the justifiability of such a privileged class of beliefs, we are prohibited form indulging in such an activity and counselled not to cross certain cognitive contours.
Obviously, there is a clear conflict of contentions here and a reconciliation does not seem sustainable. However, should the argument adduced in the second section seem suasive, autonomy of agency would have the priority and the ultimate word would be with reason.
Notes
 |
 |