(21) Questioning & Self-Knowledge in Secular & Religious Classrooms

Questioning and Self-Knowledge in Secular and Religious Classrooms

Self-examination has been a part of a general humanities education for centuries in the West, and has emerged in the sage traditions of all cultures. Though for many reasons such examination is now strained in some educational institutions and cultures, I assume that new discoveries in the philosophy of education will continue to be welcome as a part of the ongoing dialogue in secular or religious institutions.

I suggest, however, that some aspects of our discoveries may have some difficulties passing unscathed through the minds of some secular educators. The problem is not self-examination or even self-knowledge, but rather the deeper and perhaps darker question of just what knowledge, truth, and reality are, as well as the deeply personal aspects of such discoveries. And if we are going to construct a theory of knowledge, then it might be good to match it with how people in history have always gone about knowing, rather than to leave it with arbitrary roots or, worse, floating around with no roots at all. Hence, again, I devote an entire chapter to a working and historically evident theory of knowledge.

Also, some educators may find it problematic that the unfolding of the theories and our pedagogy will show clearly that children and adults at every level of schooling, whether secular or religious, grapple with questions of ultimate concern as a general, pervasive and often unstated undertow. Traditional humanities programs in secular academies assume such an undertow and address it by including at least surveys of history that give treatment to religious themes, or by including some sort of theological or religious and philosophical studies, where at least the question of one's own death is examined, in their curriculum. It seems that to be a human being in history, however, is to raise the religious question, however that question might be expressed.

Such an undertow, of course, is expressed in many different ways, and differently at different ages, in different parts of the world, and in many different cultures (Coles, 1990). However, a secular academy that has come to focus on speed for its own sake, quantity over quality, technical training over full personal development, and on career development over the demands of ethical-political-spiritual awareness, cannot adequately address or set the conditions to address such deeper human needs. Such an institution will find self-examination, and the reality of a spiritual and religious undertow, unimportant, diversionary, merely psychological, and problematic, if not prohibitive, to the general thrust of their actual curriculum, or even their stated mission.

Further, secular teachers may or may not recognize that all children grapple with questions of ultimate concern from very early on; and, again, teachers often hold strong religious and doctrinal positions of our own that we have not taken up seriously in reflection. However, commonly in secular classrooms those recognitions and doctrinal positions are mediated well-or-not through a politics of bracketing, removal, or of a distanced regard. Such regard is for teachers’ own and their students’ diverse familial, ethnic, cultural and religious background. Thus, in secular institutions both teacher and student may differ greatly in their cultural and religious foundations, and still go forward with a general education with little or no conflict. And commonly both teacher and student enter the classroom with such background-meaning circumscribed by the concern of distancing regard, and subordinated to empirical studies and student development in a civil-secular and albeit-variable democratic context.

Such secular bracketing, distancing and subordination can itself result in a kind of desiccation of spirit or of a "deculturation" of the student and of education itself (Voegelin, 1974, p. 196). Also, the student may sense but not be fully aware of such subordination. Such a distancing regard for the familial, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of our students, however, if not thought through and if taken too far, can drain our students’ education of its vitality and leave them to experience school as a kind of Eliotic wasteland, or Sartre-like spiritual enclosure devoid of exit, or a kind of concrete playground with no swings, slides, climbing bars, or trees.

Moreover, our studies in diversity have shown that in a vibrant, constitutionally-democratic political milieu, a student’s familial-ethnic-religious background must itself, first, be mediated and integrated into the general tenets of empirical studies and democracy without, at the same time, denigrating the student’s own familial-cultural background or their home-first language (Nieto, 2000; & Darling-Hammond, 1997). Getting a "good education" must not mean that the student must reject all they know and love as their own. Education should develop and transform the person-child who enters the classroom, and not deny but rather celebrate who that child happens to be.

Second, our students’ development, if it occurs in a democratic political setting, must be overseen by educating towards a high regard for humans as individuals--not as divorced from our various group identities, but politically as humans--first, before, and as foundational to other group-identities. In this way, education in such climes requires a respect for human rights and a modicum of social skills, the rule of law, civic culture, and a plurality-of-thought that regards the intellectual, social, political, and religious freedoms and responsibilities of self and other.

Such oversight may or may not be a part of our students’ culture of origin. For instance, students may not have experienced the political equality of women in their home culture, or the writ of habeas corpus, or the notions of “innocent until proven guilty” or religious freedoms. Indeed, such cultural regard constitutes a difficult set of tensions for educators to walk through in their daily teaching routines in the presence of children and their parents from other-than-democratic and secular cultures.

However, if a democratic political milieu is to be maintained, educators are called to at least be aware of the inherent conflict between many of our students’ inherited familial-ethnic-religious-cultural traditions, and receiving an education in a secular-plural-democratic milieu. The most difficult charge is to celebrate what we can of the child’s culture without “selling the farm” of an education towards living in a democratic political culture.

Further, some religious educators may be disappointed that the present work does not endorse a particular religious institution and set of doctrines. To those educators I say: The present work gives you an empirical basis for considering the religious quest as a verifiable part of all human beings, cultures, and history. It also gives you the basic foundations and verifiable ground from which to argue your case in a secular and even anti-religious environment. I must leave it up to you to find your traditional religious meaning in terms of that intention-quest and to enter the arguments from a basis of your own critical understanding.

Thus I raise the question here about our secular and religious educational establishments having lost their conscious connection, first, with their own democratic political milieu that affords many freedoms and, at least, a milieu of religious tolerance. Such freedoms include our freedom to explore and to worship with the given fundament that is our spiritual-religious quest, and that continues to manifest in our selves and in our students. We can raise this question in different religious groups only because we all maintain an inclusive as-human socio-community order, under the rule of law and religious freedom for ourselves and others.

And second, I raise the question of our having lost our conscious connection with hard-won critical-empirical knowledge and its fore-runners, theoretical speculation and empirical method. All continue to feed into the quality of everyone’s existence and into both secular and religious institutions of education.

For vastly different reasons, then, both secular and religious institutions and educators have a stake in recovering these two dimensions of a general humanities education in their students. That is, secular educators stand to recover a view of the student as a whole, spiritual, human being with a religious quest in place and operating, however we or they answer that quest. And we stand to recover a view of ourselves as educating towards the principles of governance that will maintain freedoms and responsibilities for all concerned—assuming that we want to maintain them.

On the other hand, religious educators stand to recover the same. However, for these folks, the emphasis towards empirical concerns (and plurality, critique, and carving out the distinction between secular-political and religious law) are of particular concern. Again, this is so if we want to maintain a secular democracy and avoid fostering the conditions for a return to a one-religion state of affairs; hence a return to a new, but also very old, tribalism.

For teachers in secular institutions, an analysis and verification of basic human consciousness will reveal the broad outlines of the ultimate-religious quest in all of us, including our students, young-and-old. In this way, in this introduction I want only to acknowledge and, if you are a teacher in a secular institution, to help you recover for yourself the depth of purpose and hope that already resides in you and in your students, again, as whole human beings.

Moreover, many students are not yet secular in their thinking, and may talk about many things that, at first glance, seem wholly inappropriate in a secular school setting. However, for our students, and for many adults, the quests that form our internal structure are not yet distinct from one another, or secular. For instance, students may not be able to distinguish between their studies of different fields in the classroom, and the familial, political and the religious dimensions of their lives. Nevertheless, such situations reveal no lack of substance in our students with regard to intellectual, social-ethical, political, or spiritual being. Rather, their substantial wholeness merely lacks distinctions and the language to express such distinctions. As such, our students’ expressions are undifferentiated and often reveal the whole of the entire quest complex, much as a poem might reveal a universe of meaning, or an acorn’s genetics suggest the growth of an entire oak tree, rather than that of a horse or a blade of grass.

In different patterns of growth, such a whole-thrust exists in small children, in continuously developing adults, in our own selves as teachers, and in those for whom we teach (Freire, 1993; & Coles, 1990). Thus, we do not come to ethical and religious questions only after we grow up. As human children, we only come to them in a different way, with a different level of differentiation, and in different language. In other words, human beings of all ages wonder about such things all along, in different ways, and from our various stages of differentiation and historical influence.

For instance, the questions of our birth and death surround and permeate all of our lives; and our analysis suggests that the larger quest for religious meaning becomes remote or distanced from, but still surrounds, encompasses, and infuses the secular world. That world has a differentiated structure that we teach in every day, and where we are often distracted or drawn away to ignore or set aside our other more truly-encompassing developments of heart, mind, and spirit.

In this way, religious ideologies and doctrines, their interpretations, their communications, and their applications in the details of our lives vary enormously, even within the different sub-groups of each major religion, minor cult, corporate enclave, or family. However, the fundamental quest towards ultimate meaning is basic to all human beings in all cultures and is, in this regard, historical and empirical fact. Again, the general intention-quest towards mystery in history is recurrent, factual and singular; whereas the answers, expressions of that quest are traditional, lived, plural, quite diverse, and often conflicting. A brief look at 21st century politics and its relationship to religious ideologies will confirm this fact.

From an empirical point of view that is subject to theoretical analysis and verification, human consciousness has embedded in it a religious quest. In this way, each religious institution, its doctrines, and its ideologies are expressions of one and the same religious quest that is given to all human beings and that emerges in different cultures and histories. From this point of view, the dynamism and unfolding of the religious quest manifests in a plurality of different ways and continues to creatively and-or destructively emerge in the movement of history as it unfolds. If so, then the dynamism of the quest, and again not a singular answer or ideology, is buried within the movement of history as a part of our very existence. In this way, the dynamic thrust behind its myriad expressions carries the potential for bursting through any calcified political, ethical, and religious doctrine, as we struggle to grasp the meaning of the whole mystery of human history, and as we are beings living in the midst of that dynamism. Further, each person, child or adult, is a microcosm of this dynamism.

Also, in distinguishing between formal secular (institutional) and religious domains, then, we can recognize plainly the authentic distinction between federal-state-community schools in a secular democracy on the one hand, and religious schools associated with religious institutions on the other. The latter are often guided by specific theological doctrine, though individual cases vary. Both, however, can benefit from the empirical self-knowledge that the present work affords.

Students in religious institutions will benefit from empirical knowledge of their own cognition and development of the self-reflective processes that I encourage here. If students understand their own conscious structure correctly, they will be able to see their own secular development in the midst of their larger and more encompassing spiritual and religious concerns—for themselves. With such fundamental insights, ethical and religious questions and dialogue need no longer be seen as some sort of adjunct to what is real and meaningful in the sciences, human studies, history, and existence.

Further, our empirically-studied self-reflective processes and their pedagogy for verification can be, and often are, legitimately taken up by any secular institutions regardless of the students’ or the institutions’ stance on theological or religious issues. Exceptions in any case, of course, would include those who advocate for students’ mindlessness and their mindless regard for voices of authority; those who eschew reflection, self-reflection and explorations of human being towards full self-knowledge; or those who fail to take up such activities while still calling themselves “educators.”

Thus, in the present work I hope to provide a dimension of curriculum development for secular and religious academies. I also hope to provide entrance into developing the philosophical foundations for both kinds of institution as we all have a vital stake in maintaining a reflective polity and a secular, plural, democratic, religiously-free, political milieu.[7]