Caribbean Journal of Education, 19, 227-238 (1997)
We all like to think we make a difference. In an anniversary year, if we cannot point to an impact in the past then it is reassuring and inspiring to offer the promise of important results in the future for our particular speciality. Philosophers, however, have a couple of thousand years of history to suggest that such hopes are futile: a well-argued, comprehensively researched position is not likely to persuade anyone, not even its author for very long. But hope springs eternal, so I offer the following quixotic argument for one important consequence of our taking seriously some fairly widely accepted positions in philosophy and philosophy of education.
The bare bones of the argument are these: (a) educational activity, as against perversions or distortions of education, must leave space for the possibility of there being good reasons for what it presents for acceptance by a learner; (b) necessarily religious views cannot be acquired without a "leap of faith" - i.e. accepting something for which there is no good reason; so (c) if we restricted ourselves to educational activity in bringing up the young we would soon find ourselves in a purely secular world.
Clearly various points need to be made with respect to each of these claims.
With respect to (a), besides spelling it out some more we must make it clear that it is NOT saying that all educational activity involves the giving of good reasons. That would probably lead to a vicious infinite regress, and is anyway quite unfeasible. Much teaching omits the reasons for what it offers. It is still possible to think that we ought to learn multiplication tables by rote. The point is that good reasons are available, whether or not they are mentioned in the teaching.
With respect to (b) we will need to say something more about the structure of accepting that there has been a revelation. The claim concerns religions of a kind we meet with; it is logically possible to describe (as Hanson did in the article that inspired this paper) a sequence of events that falsifies (b) - it's just that these things don't happen. We will need to say something also about the contrast between "natural" religion and revelation, and possibly something on the accounts that can be given, as by John Hick, that try to square a multiplicity of supposed revelations with theistic belief.
With respect to (c), bringing up children is not just a matter of education in the sense used in (a). But the rest can be presented without falsifying frills (though morality and aesthetics are often not so presented) - we can teach them while respecting the kinds of reasons or lack of them that exist to support various practices. But religion is not like that. While, sociologically speaking, it may be mainly a matter of practices, it requires those practices to be seen as supported by the nature of things; and that is where the ungrounded leap of faith is required. This approach clearly rejects interpretations of religion that equate it with atheism, the Robinson, Cupitt line.
Having clarified the main points in the argument we can note that our sad acknowledgement that the conclusion is not likely to be found true (in the short to medium term at least) shows either that the argument is no good, or that education lacks the link with reasonableness we have supposed, or that good reasons can be offered for theistic belief, or that we do not in fact prefer education to its distortions (or any combination of these factors). My own preferred explanation for the falsity of the conclusion is our general failure to educate, to prefer socialisation to the rigours of discovering a disenchanted world.
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