Abstract:The article draws upon the work of two people, Lawrence Stenhouse and Derek Morrell, who in the 1960s offered a vision of education based upon, first, the moral conviction that a liberal and humane education was essential for all and for society, second, the belief in a curriculum agenda in which such moral conviction might be reconciled with moral uncertainty, and, third, the recognition of the indispensability of a democratic approach to making that reconciliation possible. The article shows how that (...) vision has been dimmed by a prevailing social philosophy and political practice, sadly abetted by some in universities who should know better. (shrink)

In recent times, questions of religious education—about the place and significance of knowledge and understanding of religious belief and practice in the general educational development of children and young people—seem to have been largely overshadowed or overtaken by controversies concerning the relative merits and shortcomings of common and faith schools. However, in as much as such controversies have also turned upon questions of the relative merits of so-called confessional and non-confessional conceptions of religious education, they have mostly served to obscure (...) the inadequacies of both these approaches to religious education. The present paper maintains that the real question of religious education—as a key element in the educational formation of all children—is that of how the great religious narratives of diverse cultural inheritance might be meaningfully understood and taught in a broadly liberal educational spirit. To this end, it is argued that a form of religious literacy—avoiding the errors of both confessional and non-confessional approaches—can and should be promoted in common schools as not just compatible with but indispensable to liberal education. (shrink)