{"title":"Paul Hirst and religious education’s curriculum question; or, how Hirst never thought religion was a form of knowledge at all","authors":"D. Aldridge","doi":"10.1093/jopedu/qhad014","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Hirst consistently listed religion as a form of knowledge. He had numerous chances to revise this position, but did not. However, whenever Hirst actually considered religion and the curriculum in specific detail, either he did so without reference to the curriculum principles of liberal education, or he implicitly or explicitly rejected his own claim that religion was a form of knowledge. In this article I hope to contribute to an appreciation of Hirst’s work by showing how attempting to understand his thinking on religious education against the background of forms of knowledge both adds to confusion about what Hirst intended the forms of knowledge to be, and hinders an understanding of what his explicitly stated curriculum position on religion actually was. I speculate that Hirst included religion as a form of knowledge only as an ‘agnostic placeholder’ acknowledging the possibility that religion might turn out to be a form of knowledge. I then offer a brief assessment of this revised interpretation of Hirst’s position from the perspective of contemporary scholarship in the philosophy of religious education.","PeriodicalId":47223,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION","FirstCategoryId":"95","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad014","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Hirst consistently listed religion as a form of knowledge. He had numerous chances to revise this position, but did not. However, whenever Hirst actually considered religion and the curriculum in specific detail, either he did so without reference to the curriculum principles of liberal education, or he implicitly or explicitly rejected his own claim that religion was a form of knowledge. In this article I hope to contribute to an appreciation of Hirst’s work by showing how attempting to understand his thinking on religious education against the background of forms of knowledge both adds to confusion about what Hirst intended the forms of knowledge to be, and hinders an understanding of what his explicitly stated curriculum position on religion actually was. I speculate that Hirst included religion as a form of knowledge only as an ‘agnostic placeholder’ acknowledging the possibility that religion might turn out to be a form of knowledge. I then offer a brief assessment of this revised interpretation of Hirst’s position from the perspective of contemporary scholarship in the philosophy of religious education.
期刊介绍:
Journal of Philosophy of Education publishes articles representing a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. The journal aims to promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and to identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education. Ethical, political, aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of educational theory are amongst those covered.