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.
Abstract: Interpreting culture as symbols, stories, rituals and values, the thesis explores the culture of a Jewish and a Catholic secondary school in a dialogical way. The survey of the literature in Chapter 1 identifies relevant school-based research and locates the chosen case-study schools within the context of the British 'dual system'. Chapter 2 draws on the theoretical and methodological literatures of inter-faith dialogue and ethnography to develop and defend a paradigm for the research defined as open-inclusivist and constructivist. The main body of the thesis (Chapters 3-5), based on field-work undertaken in 1996 and 1997, presents the two schools in parallel with each other. Chapter 3 describes the details of the case studies at 'St. Margaret's' and 'Mount Sinai' and my developing research relationship with each school. In Chapter 4 many different voices from each school are woven into two 'tales' about the schools' cultures. This central chapter has a deliberately narrative style. Chapter 5 amplifies the cultural tales through the analysis of broadly quantitative data gained from an extensive questionnaire administered to a sample of senior students in each school. It is the only place in the thesis where views and values from the two schools are directly compared. The final two chapters widen the horizon of the study. Chapter 6 presents voices which were not part of the original case studies but which relate, in different ways, to the culture of the two schools. Chapter 7, with theoretical ideas about Jewish schools and education, and Catholic schools and education, provides resources for further dialogue about culture within Judaism and Catholicism and for Jewish-Christian dialogue. The thesis ends with some reflections on possible implications of the two cultures for discussions about the common good in education.
Abstract: This philosophy addresses the complex educational issues arising in
Anglo-Jewish education catering for a community which is rooted in two
cultures: the Jewish-Orthodox and the Western-liberal, a community that
incorporates all aspects of Western culture that do not conflict with Jewish law
or its value system.
Underpinned by diverse ontologies and epistemologies these cultures
differ in many aspects, most significantly for educators, in their value systems
and therefore in the hermeneutic understanding of the "excellences" to be
designated as ultimate and proximate aims for the education. Whereas the
liberal Western culture endorses anti-authoritarian, individual autonomy, the
Jewish thesis endorses such only in areas for which Jewish law has not
legislated. For all other, free choices are to be exercised against the divinely
commanded value system.
The National Curriculum, through which secular subjects are delivered, and
Judaism both require holism in education. In both, all knowledge is to serve
also as a vehicle for pupils' overall personal and social growth: the
cognitive/intellectual, ethical, spiritual and physical. Since holism necessarily
has to be governed by an overall organic quality of wholeness, in which all the
educational aims permeate every area of education, it is axiomatic that
contradictions in the aims cannot be accommodated within any specific
educational structure.
This unitary philosophy responds to the requirements of holism by
establishing an educational structure which, in itself, is free of conflict. This is
achievable due to the liberal National Curriculum's acceptance, qua being
liberal, of non-public values to overlay the statutory political ones in the entire
school's curriculum — which, for Jewish education is the Halakhic value system.
A conflict-free philosophy, however, does not guarantee conflict-free
development of pupils who live their lives within both the Jewish thesis and the
all pervasive, multi-media imposed Western culture. The unitary philosophy
sets out strategies for dealing with these conflicts within carefully structured programmes.
