RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND SECULAR EDUCATION: A DIALOGUE

Abstract

The religious conflicts of the past have left educational systems in the western world frozen into various attitudes, attitudes that seem incapable of accommodating the inescapable involvement of everyone in education with issues of right and wrong. That there is a necessary form of knowledge that is distinctively religious, though generally acknowledged by private individuals, is generally rejected in public educational practice. The present alternatives of indoctrination and near-total neglect are equally unacceptable; and yet the path between them is fraught with all manner of ancient anxieties and deep distrust. The participants in the dialogue that Donald Weeren has imagined nevertheless find their way gently a good distance along that path, stepping with delicacy, frankness, and a realistic understanding of the perils involved, towards the beginning of a solution that is surely long overdue.