RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Pedagogy of Religious Education in Ireland

Pedagogy of Religious Education in Ireland

Introduction

It is arguable that religious education is both more contested and more regularly denigrated than any other area of the school curriculum across a range of polities in Ireland. This contestation arises as a consequence of much diversity in the conceptualization and the pedagogical realization of religion in Ireland, and because the relationship between religious communities and public policy in late industrial political communities has become fraught as the church and state have become increasingly separated. This study in this connection will review the pedagogy of religious education in Ireland.

Discussion

The work of education via schooling largely concerns socializing a generation into the norms, values, traditions, and practices of a society or culture, and curriculum is a central agent in this work. Many have suggested that education, explicitly religious or not, reflects what a people deem to be sacred. In Ireland, too, the curriculum, in addressing what knowledge is of most worth, must be recognized as ever ideologically laden: endorsing and inculcating specific, normative ways of knowing and acting in the world in relation to self and others, however tacitly or overtly (Wexler, 1996). Because of this, strengthened by the existence of conflicting values and aims, ideology is an important and ongoing object of address in the field of curriculum studies. Moreover, nowhere is this address more critical perhaps than where matters of religion are concerned; thus, in Elliot Eisner's analysis of current leading curriculum ideologies, he begins with religious orthodoxy. Issuing from the conviction that education is responsible for initiating children into a faith community and belief system deemed to be true and sanctioned by divine authority, this position compels curriculum scholars to confront questions of ultimate and enduring concern regarding the meaning and purpose of human life and how it ought to be lived, and the role of education in asking and answering such questions (Gaustad, 1999). This selection continues, through Eisner's work, with a discussion of religious orthodoxy, considering its central claims and challenges, its historical influences, and its abiding implications for contemporary curriculum concerns.

Religious orthodoxy is one of six curriculum ideologies that Eisner posits direct current thought and practice in the field, including rational humanism, progressivism, critical theory, re-conceptualism, and cognitive pluralism. Religious orthodoxy is distinctive in its central belief in the existence of God and understanding of education rooted in “his” authority in directing human affairs, largely through divine commandment as interpreted via a sacred text or texts by a faith community. Education works in the service of attending this divine call upon humans by inculcating the young into such a particular value system, way of living, embraced as right and true, even as the path to eternal life (Eisner, 1992). Curricular decisions are made with respect to and reflect this higher address; that is, examples of Eisner: the Jewish devotion to the study and interpretation of religious texts; the Jesuit Catholic tradition of activism for social justice via education; and the anthroposophic ...