Introduction to Section One: Philosophical/Theoretical Discourses on the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions of Education

Abstract

The essays in this section require the reader to think very carefully about what it means to educate. They assert that it is the responsibility of educators to continually face this demand. This requires that educators be active and critical, taking nothing simply on authority but insisting on testing every theory by references to human experience. As John Dewey (1997; 1910) put it, 'While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach every possible item of infor-mation, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discrimi-nating tested beliefs…and to ingrain into the individual's working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves' (pp. 27–28). Dewey claimed that unless one had such attitudes and habits, she or he was not intellectually educated. For Dewey, the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. Philosophical inquiry helps to clarify and augment responses to issues and concerns on the religious moral and spiritual dimensions of education. As Jeff Astley (1994) writes, 'Philosophy as a method is primarily an attempt to think clearly: to clarify concepts and to examine arguments' (p. 2). Sound educational practice is grounded on the foundation of theory either inten-tionally or unintentionally. And good theories of education are clearly thought through and empirically grounded. While some would argue that there are teachers who can come to teach very effectively without ever being consciously aware of what they are doing, this is accidental. Teachers who do not understand the models on which their methods are based, are confined to doing what their unexamined habits direct them to do. Thus, they are not the authors of their actions. Marc Belth (1965) asserts that if teachers are to comprehend the grounds for their M. de Souza et al. (eds.), International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education, 3–8.