Teachers’ conceptions of Orthodox Jewish education in relation to religious nurture in a liberal society
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Abstract
The indoctrination charge has been levelled at religious studies teachers who teach controversial propositions as fact (see for example Snook, 1972; Hand, 2004). On this view, indoctrination takes place when the process which brings children to believe controversial propositions bypasses their rational autonomy. Taking into account the above argument and the proposed responses, my study goes beyond the arena of normative philosophy and looks at teachers’ conceptions of their role, asking whether they experience tensions between their mission as religious studies teachers and the values of the Western, liberal polity in which they live. I focus on a unique subset of Orthodox Jewish schools, where the schools’ religious ethos appears to be at odds with many of the parent body who are not religiously observant, and I ask to what extent religious studies teachers take parental wishes into account in choosing what and how to teach their subject. Using grounded theory methods in a critical realist paradigm, field work takes the form of in-depth interviews with religious studies teachers in the above group of schools. Working from initial codes to higher levels of theoretical abstraction led to clear findings on teachers’ conceptions of their role and their response to the indoctrination charge. For the purposes of their role at least, religious studies teachers describe religion using the language of the market and getting pupils to “buy-into the product” rather than necessarily to believe its propositions as true. As a corollary to this, participants see autonomy as having to do with choice, rather than with rationality, suggesting that while scholars, in their critique of religious nurture view a rationalist conception of autonomy based on Kant as the dominant paradigm, in the real world (of my research field at least) a more existentialist Millian conception sets the terms of the discourse.
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Main Topic: Education Jewish Teachers Orthodox Judaism Jewish Schools Jewish Studies Jewish Education
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Link to download in university repository, Teachers’ conceptions of Orthodox Jewish education in relation to religious nurture in a liberal society
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Teachers’ conceptions of Orthodox Jewish education in relation to religious nurture in a liberal society. . 2022: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/object-3688
