Session Information
13 SES 11 B, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
Educational research, and especially philosophy of education, can help to better understand some reasons for educational reforms as a particular form of social reforms. According to Jon Elster, there are, essentially, two types of reasons for social reform. Some are consequentialist (grounded in a belief that the reform will have good or desirable effects); others are deontological (based on the conviction that the reform is a good thing in and of itself).However, the reasons for the educational reforms which I am going to discuss in this paper are above all consequentialist ones. They are the reasons for introducing the teaching about religions in public schools. All of them are grounded in a belief that the educational reform which introduces the teaching about religions will have good or desirable effects: broadening one’s cultural horizons; combating fanaticism; reducing conflicts that are based on lack of understanding for others’ beliefs and of encouraging respect for their rights, etc. Consequently, it seems that the introduction of such a sort of educational reform can be understood on the basis of a special type of teleological explanation, which has the logical form of Practical Syllogism (or practical inference), that is, an explanation that explains the occurrence of an action in terms of the goals and purposes of the agent; it shows that an agent did what it did because it tried to achieve a certain goal and believed that certain means were necessary and/or sufficient for achieving this goal. What should be stressed here is that we do not know if the introduction of an educational reform will enable the achievement of the intended goal, since, for the teleological explanation, it is not important at all whether the means (educational reform) is in causal relation with the goal or not. The only thing which is important is that the Reformers believe that the introduction of the educational reform is necessary for achieving the intended goal. Therefore, it is possible that the introduction of the teaching about religions in schools will not have the intended positive consequences. Even more, it is possible that the introduction of it has negative consequences. In Slovenia, for example, the introduction of “Religions and Ethics” in public schools has been the cause of mistrust and quarrel: for those who do not agree with the introduction of this new subject, it is only a masked or hidden confessional religious instruction; for the Catholic Church, the teaching of this school subject is unacceptable because it is non-confessional.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
G. H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding, New York: Cornell University Press, 1971. G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1963. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Von Wright on Practical Inference”, in: P. A. Schlipp and L. E. Hahn (Eds.), The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, La Salle, Illinois 1989. J. Elster, ‘Comment on van der Veen and Van Parijs’, Theory and Society 1987/15. P. R. Hobson and J. S. Edwards, Religious Education in a Pluralist Society, Woburn Press, London 1999. P. Schreiner, “Religious Education in the European Context”, in: E. Kuyk, R. Jensen, D. Lankshear, E.L. Manna, P. Schreiner (eds.), Religious Education in Europe, IKO, Oslo 2007. J. P. Willaime, “Different Models for Religion and Education in Europe”, in: R. Jackson, S. Miedema, W. Weisse, J.P. Willaime (eds.), Waxmann Verlag, Münster 2007. R. Jackson, Rethinking Religious Education and Plurality, Routledge-Falmer, London 2004. Z. Kodelja and T. Bassler, Religion and Schooling in Open Society, Open Society Institute, Ljubljana 2004. The Toledo Guiding Principles on Teaching about Religions and Beliefs in Public Schools, OSCE/ODIHR, 2007.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.