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Foundering on diversity and strangeness
Didactic problems in religious education 1. Religious education differs from initiation into a belief 2. Religions differ from philosophies of life 3. Religions differ from one another 4. Versions of one religion differ
Didactic problems in religious education As complex and diffuse as religion is and as intricate, manysided and varied as religions are, religious education is every bit as complicated and precarious. I would like to call attention to several problems which cause me to doubt the feasibility of religious education that is adequate from the didactic point of view, (I mean) religious education that cares over the formal as well as the material aspects of education. The educational task of doing justice to both the learning child and the subjectmatter to be learned is seriously impeded in the case of religious education - more seriously so than elsewhere - by the notorious duo: strangeness and diversity - a wellknown pair of didactic obstacles. I wonder if there is a cure for this. Current remedies seems to me to be insufficient. In my opinion they even let things go from bad to worse. In paragraph 1 I shall begin by recalling the distinction between teaching and preaching, that is: between religious education and initiation into a belief. Next I shall show how troublesome the strangeness and the diversity of religion and religions are in any serious educational undertaking. The problems are grouped around three statements - in three paragraphs.
When, for formal didactic reasons insufficient attention is paid to these differences, the material aspects of education are at risk. Misconstruction of religion then readily takes over from veracious description and proper clarification of religion. And religious education rapidly goes on to achieve the opposite to what it should intend: ignorance, misunderstan-ding, mutual miscomprehension and bias. Whether or not this is avoidable remains a moot question. 1. Religious education differs from initiation into a belief The aim of religious education is for children to acquire knowledge and understanding on the subject of religion and religions. This has nothing to do with initiation into a belief. Religious education attempts to make children knowledgeable, while initiation into a belief aims at turning children into believers. The first is a mere educational activity: it contributes to knowledge and understanding of religion. The second is mainly, and above all a religious activity: it attempts to cultivate and to inculcate religion. It is doubtful whether initiation into a belief may be considered a task of schools in a pluralistic democracy. But that religious education is a must, is beyond dispute, at least as long as religions have a part to play in politics, society and culture. Why? If only because without knowledge of religion something will always be missing in our understanding of what moves and inspires other people. Indeed, knowledge of others' beliefs, of the traditions and backgrounds, their standards and values, et cetera is a necessary prerequisite, (not a sufficient one, of course) for sincere respect - that is another matter than noncommittal tolerance -, meaningful criticism - which is something different than premature rejection - and solidarity - which is something other than living side by side. Religious education is a must. But is it practicable? 2. Religions differ from philosophies of life How are we to cope with strangeness and diversity? A widespread method of tackling both obstacles in one go is (what I call) the existential questions procedure. 'Existential questions' is an umbrella term for ultimate and moral concerns, fundamental and profound anxieties, questions about the meaning of life, the meaning of suffering, questions concerning the whys and wherefores of our existence, and suchlike. Well then, existential questions seem to form an ideal starting point for religious education. Children are familiar with existential questions: they are part of the children's day to day world, because everyone wrestles with them. Moreover, existential questions allow one to penetrate the subject, as religions, all religions, are comprehensive answers to such questions. Strangeness is apparently surmountable. Dealing with existential questions opens up the possibility of connecting the familiar world of children (source of questions) to the domain of religion (the answers). Further, this would take place at a level of abstraction at which religions are comparable: as comprehensive answers to existential questions - that is: as philosophies of life - they have a lot in common. So dealing with existential questions neutralizes the diversity too. There you are, both the first and the second obstacle - strangeness and diversity - can be overcome. This line of reasoning justifies and inspires methods of thematic teaching, working topically on the basis of existential questions - the existential questions procedure. In my opinion this approach promises more than it can fulfill. The shortcomings may be summarized under two headings. It is wrongly assumed that certain existential questions are universally human or even that there are universal children's questions. On top of this a defective characteristic of religion is employed. Let me explain. The rationale of the existential questions procedure is the assumption that certain existential questions are universal: they are supposed to concern everyone. This assumption is a problematic one. Of course, almost every human being will, at some time or another, find occasion to ask himself an existential question. But this by no means implies that all people, irrespective the conditions and course of their life, their sex, class, culture, et cetera, regularly ponder on particular questions A, B and C. And this is the very suggestion the existential questions procedure makes. Certain existential questions are assumed to be universal and to crop up frequently in everyone's life. I, for one, cannot think of an existential question answering to this description. The questions which figure in these methods, as such, certainly do not. Even the broadest of themes are - at least as far as their urgency is concerned - specific to a certain class, culture or time. Speaking of the majority of children, we need not foster any high hopes of their really being worried by existential questions, let alone certain existential questions. I cannot imagine that the average child seriously ponders, from time to time, on - for example - the meaning of his life. The existential questions procedure, in spite of its aspirations and pretensions, does not link up easily to the average child's world. There is also something wrong with the connection to the other side, the domain of religion. Like I said: the existential questions procedure employs a defective characteristic of religion. Although religions may be characterized as comprehensive answers to existential questions, such a typification is nevertheless: (1) exceedingly abstract, (2) very limited and (3) not solely applicable to religions. Within the scope of this article I shall not go into the third difficulty, to save time and space. But I would like to go into the first and second drawbacks with some detail. Religion as a comprehensive answer to existential questions is (ad 1) rather an abstract characterization. Sometimes an abstract typification is in line, for instance when a theorist attempts to explain the existence or continued existence of religion (e.g. Spiro, 1966) or tries to determine more precisely the nature of religion as a cultural system (e.g. Geertz, 1973). However, when the purpose is to didactically overcome strangeness and diversity an abstraction like that is useless. Take such diverse phenomena as the sharia and the sacrificial feast of the muslims, the hindu sadhana and pranam, the jewish mezuzah and the Simchat Tora, the easternorthodox worship of icons, the roman-catholic confession of sins, and the protestant communion. In the end each one of these phenomena can certainly be deduced to expressions of answers to existential questions. But this brings them no nearer to the world of children. And the fact that they are comparable at such an abstract level hardly effects the enormous religious diversity. The concept of religion in the existential questions procedure is, apart from this (ad 2) much to limited. Religious beliefs and practices are often concerned with other than existential problems and motives, mostly more commonplace, but no less urgent. On the one hand we might think of concrete, down-to-earth worries, anxieties and deprivations and on the other hand traditional habits and social pressure. The connection with concrete concerns, uncertainties and needs is obvious: people pray for peace or prosperity, make sacrifices for a good harvest, dance and make music for rain or healing, consecrate weapons prior to combat, undertake a pilgrimage for the favorable outcome of something or other, burn a candle to keep a vow or to avert misfortune, ask the blessing of the priest before undertaking a journey, consult religious experts (shaman, exorcist, magician, astrologist) in the case of illness or mental health problems and in determining favourable names (for their children), dates (for instance to be married or to leave) or places (to build on). When such commonplace or trivial aspects of religions are either ignored or disguised, religious education is not doing justice to the subject-matter. I shall return to this point later on when I consider the difference between 'great' and 'little' traditions (par. 4). The connection to traditional customs and social pressure is obvious. Contrary to the assumption of the existential questions procedure, religious beliefs and practices are usually not in the first place welcome answers to pressing existential questions, but unasked for ingredients of cultural heritage of which the meaning and value is constantly socially realized, affirmed, and reaffirmed, comparable to all sorts of other traditional, conventional habits and opinions. Religion is even often inextricably entangled with the cultural heritage as a whole. Sometimes the interwovenness is so extensive that the religious domain can hardly be distinguished - try it in India or Iran. Identification of religion with philosophy of life indicates a biased experience and view, peculiar to up-to-date citizens of strongly secularized worlds. This definition of religion (religion = philosophy of life) is a twentieth century, north-western european, urban construction, the product of a culture used to laicization and functional specialization, a culture in which the role of religion actually is confined to contemplation and ultimate concerns. The definition is far too limited to uphold education that is comprehensive and instructive enough to offer adequate knowledge and understanding of religion in general and existing religions. With this the existential questions procedure is sufficiently critisized. The crucial objection may be clear by now: religion commonly is something more and something else than philosophy of life. 3. Religions differ from one another In the anthology The World's Religions Peter Byrne defines 'religion' as follows: "an institution with a complex of theoretical (e.g. beliefs, myths and doctrines), practical (e.g. rites, prayers and moral codes), sociological (e.g. churches, leaders and functionaries) and experiential (e.g. emotions, visions and sentiments of all kinds) dimensions, which is distinguished by characteristic objects (gods or sacred things), goals (salvation or ultimate good) and functions (giving an overall meaning to life or providing the identity or cohesion of a social group)" (1988, p. 7). In my opinion Byrne is rather sparing with his specification of aims and functions. Nevertheless even this definition shows the diversity of religious phenomena. Moreover, religion must be understood here in the most inclusive sense of the word: Byrne stresses that "a religion need not clearly show all four dimensions in developed form" (ibidem, p. 8). Further, according to Byrne religion is actually a "family-resemblance term" (ibidem, p. 10), which means approximately that "the various examples of religion will be related to one another not ... by them all sharing a single set of features but through a series of significant overlaps in the features they possess; there will be a network of relationships but no one set of things they all share" (ibidem, p. 11). The elasticity of the term reflects the diversity of the phenomenon. As elastic as the concept of 'religion' is, every bit as heterogeneous is the subjectmatter of religious education. This frequently goes unrecognized or is not done sufficient justice. Sometimes one is blinded to differences between religions by a striving towards neutrality. The desire not to show preference for any religion leads to the fading of differences. An example. My younger daughter was a pupil at a public primary school which was favourably disposed towards immigrant pupils of islamic background. A few weeks before Christmas the parents received a letter on the plans for the Christmas celebrations: it was asked whether anyone could inform the school management on how muslims celebrate Christmas and whether anyone could supply them with a characteristic islamic Christmas tale. Often differences between religions collaps as a result of didactically inspired attempts to induce order. The desire to render a number of religions simultaneously accessible, by neatly arranging them in an attractive educational model, is given priority to the aspiration to remain true to the subjectmatter at hand. Thematical teaching, for instance, is apt to sacrifice religious diversity for the sake of formal didactic simplicity. Take the dealing with holy books in topical education. How often are the Koran, the Bible, the Tenach or the Tora and the Veda's or the Bhagavad Gita not lumped together? Hence it is easily forgotten that these books fundamentally differ in function and the place they hold within the doctrine, rituals, belief, experience and practice, and also qua form, nature and content. (Education failing to differentiate leads to inaccuracies such as those of a student a while ago. She asked herself - as a trainee - why, in a proposal for multireligious education, it was not suggested to read stories to children from the Koran, analogous to children's Bible stories.) Or take another theme: purity. However crucial the contrast pureimpure may be in many religions, in thematical methods of religious education it is generally not discussed. 'Our' christianity after all has nothing comparable. This illustrates a serious handicap of thematical teaching: it is based upon similarities and tends to neglect those aspects in which religions can be distinguished from one another. Apart from this, a topical organization of the religious education curriculum seems anyhow not well suited to dealing with purity. When purityrules and -rituals of for instance jews, muslims and hindus are brought into line with one another, profound differences of character, scope, subtlety and meaning inevitably fade into the background, certainly when a limited number of lessons is available. In 'our' culture the 'strangeness' is an extra impediment: we can hardly complain when children are able to grasp merely in a general sense the relationship between religious purity and profane cleanliness and progress but a little further than astonishment and disbelief when they learn of the purifying effect of cow urine and cow dung. Sometimes diversity is not purposely but accidentally reduced, for instance as the result of insufficient knowledge on the part of the teacher or the curriculum maker. An example. Last year an educational studycentre asked advice on the first part of an educationproject. The project is organized along topical lines and the first theme is 'Starting anew'. The story of Jonah 'represents' christianity and a lesson on the ramadan, islam. Introspection, penance and forgiveness are central themes in both instances. The projectstaff sought further information on hinduism, especially on the doctrine of reincarnation. In reincarnation they believed to have found a suitable link: hindu's believe that they may start anew, time and time again. The curriculum designers, however, failed to realize that reincarnation has a completely different meaning to hindus than it does to christians. For hindus it is not a joyful 'we may be reborn' but a miserable fate. People are doomed to be perpetually reincarnated: constant rebirth is a heavy load; redemption would mean a liberation from this eternal cycle. Reduction of diversity in topical education may also be an expression of a preconceived idea about religion or of a certain religious conviction. I select an example of this from an educational method that systematically compares the world's religions, including the socalled 'primitive religions'. On the subject of 'the divine' the pupil's workbook reads: "Imagine that you experience that there is something like God ... Such an experience always has two sides to it. You might wish God would reveal himself totally to you, but on the other hand that is a rather a frightening, horrifying idea. Like Moses, when he experiences God's presence in the burning bush. Or the warrior Arjuna, who meets the Lord of the Universe Krishna in the Indian didactic poem the Bhagavad Gita ... Religious experiences, of course, do not occur on a daily basis. Perhaps you have never experienced anything to make you suspect there is anything greater than your-self. But if you for a moment suppose that 'something greater' does exist, the question arises as to how to approach that 'something'. God, Allah, Brahman: if 'something' or 'someone' indeed exists, how does one handle that? Should one just talk to it, as one would to a human being? But at the moment you do that, you would at the same time experience how inadequate words are. God, after all, is no human being: he literally resembles no other thing, so that every image of him falls short. God is neither father, nor old, nor mother, nor masculine, nor neuter. You really cannot say much about him." No need to illuminate further why, in my opinion, in this example three religions are slotted together in a manner that disguises and reduces diversity, while in passing a specific view of God is propagated. 4. Versions of one religion differ A thematical method of reli-gious education easily works out at the expense of diversity, while in the meantime disguising the strangeness of foreign religious practices and beliefs. Is the - what I call - 'separate' method better? Treating each religion separately might seem an attractive alternative following the preceding argument, but this approach gives no comfort either. At best it entails a shift of the problem, because the different religions are themselves heterogeneous. An example. Our own method contrived for use in secondary education- deals with four world religions separately. Part 1 concentrates on concrete everyday practices and related beliefs. In the case of hinduism it is impossible to do this without discussing rules and ideas concerning purity and the caste system. Many everyday customs are closely related to these. Which is why we pay due attention to the contrast pureimpure and the castes. In the meantime, however, we realize that the version of hinduism of by far the most hindus living in the Netherlands is one without rules and ideas concerning purity and castes. I am referring to immigrants from Surinam in South America, descendants of indians who, towards the end of the nineteenth century, after the abolishment of slavery, were brought from northern India to do contract labour on the plantations of Surinam. On their way to the other side of the world and during their stay there these hindus developed their own version of hinduism. It is still called Sanatana Dharma, 'the eternal order', while deviating on fundamental points from the Indian tradition it originates from. The Surinamese hindus consider their alterations as improvements. The disappearence of the castes is seen as an advancement (Khargi, 1986, p. 71). And so is the evaporation of purity-rules - "the great cultural obsession (sic) with pureimpure oppositions has been pushed to the background" (Van der Burg & Van der Veer, 1986, p. 30). While the standard on which our description is based is everyday hinduism, our texts actually have little to say about hinduism in the Netherlands. But what alternatives are open to us? Surinamese hinduism can, in spite of its particularities, hardly be fathomed without prior knowledge of the more traditional, Indian hinduism - including purity and castes. As a consequence giving priority to the mainstreamdoxa and the mainstreampraxis is unavoidable. We shall just have to put up with the distortions this causes. Only if time were unlimited and the pupil's capabilities were boundless, would we be able to do justice to every detail. One might be under the impression that, by and large, the situation is not quite so bad because no religion is as heterogeneous as hinduism, and that my example is therefore farfetched. Indeed, hinduism is noted for this. A sympathizing Dutch expert calls hinduism "a proliferation of religious communities, each with its own religious scriptures, gods, saints, religious leaders, monastic congragations and communities of priests, doctrines, philosophies and religious customs" (Van der Burg, 1991, p. 9; cf. for an identical characterization: Staal, 1988). This is the standard picture. According to Byrne 'hinduism' is even just like 'religion' a 'family resemblance term': "an umbrella term which refers to a mass of phenomena which does not aspire to be a unity and which is not united by any single item of belief, mode of worship, etc." (1988, p. 11). Does this alleviate my problem? No, it does not. Byrne justly remarks that hinduism is no exception: "this lack of unity (is not) simply a feature of the religious traditions of India" (ibidem). He points to the heterogeneity of christianity: "the actual forms of religion to which we attach the label of 'Christianity' have shown, and continue to show, the most astonishing variety" (ibidem). And Byrne is right: take the differences between the christianity of the peasants in Latin-America to that of orthodox calvinists in some regions of Western-Europe. Calvinists disapprove of patron saints, pilgrimages, statues, processions, promesa's, miracles, veneration of the Virgin Mary, et cetera; the Europeans fail to understand why the resurrection of Christ is a matter of indifference to Latin-American peasants, while the suffering of Christ fascinates them immensely, almost to the point of becoming an obsession (cf. Tennekes, 1986). Or take the differences between eastern-orthodox Russians and American baptists or between white Vatican-loyalists and the descendants of black African converts. The fact that many a denomination believes or pretends to embody true christianity, does not mean that, per implication, something like true christianity exists and can be conveyed by religious education through subject-matter just like that. The same applies to buddhism. Significant is the following remark by Kloppenborg - a Dutch expert: "The term Buddhism has been designed by western reseachers as an easily manageable concept for the multitude of religious forms which developed in Asia, inspired by the ideas of Buddha and their acculturation with the different national cultures" (1991, p. 101). Buddhism, indeed, varies from country to country: it is completely different in India than it is in China, different again from that in Japan and different still from that in Thailand and so forth (cf. Robinson & Johnson, 1977). It is not only the national cultural variety which is responsible for the diversity. Differences between monastic buddhism and lay buddhism serve to multiply this diversity once again. Thus, the daily religious customs of the Thai monk and those of the average Thai differ enormously. In the monestary, for example, there is no place for magic, the devotion of forbears, a bhumi-alter, oral contact with spirits and gods, and suchlike, while -outside the monestary all these are inextricably intertwined with buddhism (cf. Terwiel, 1977, pp. 63-77). Even islam, with its reputation for being homogeneous (Clarke, 1988, p. 307), is in fact everything but a unity. Well-known is the discord between Sunnites and Shi'ites. This began with controversies concerning the succession of the prophet Mohammed and since then the rift has only become harsher and deeper. The history of islam explains the early conflicts and the later, progressive divergence. However, it is hardly feasible to write up this history, due to the very divergence and conflicting nature of the diverse perspectives, especially when it comes to the interpretation of history itself. There are at least two versions of the history of Islam. This we experienced when we were compiling the third part of our method, the part that deals with the histories of the four world religions. It is a 'tour de force' at any rate to construct a suitable guideline and to choose standards for the - for didactic reasons necessary - selection and condensation of history. In the case of islam this is almost impossible, because a crucial split concerns historiography itself. Besides this division between Shi'ites versus Sunnites there are also many other variations within is-lam. In the case of islam, too, there are large regional variations, again multiplied by the considerable differences between the official, authorized versions and the 'lived' religious doxa and praxis of the people. Gellner call the latter the distinction between 'high islam' and 'low islam', respectively the islam of the learned and the islam of the people (Gellner, 1992, pp. 9 ff.); others speak of 'pure islam' as opposed to 'popular islam' (e.g. Clarke, 1988, p. 308) and others still, following Redfield (1956, pp. 41 ff.), speak of 'the great tradition' versus 'the little tradition' (e.g. Tennekes, 1986, pp. 33 ff.; Driessen, 1985, pp. 13 ff.). An example of 'low islam' is the popular version of islam in North-Africa, with its magic and veneration of saints and its marabouts (saints), hadra's (extatic dances), -quba's (shrines of marabouts), and suchlike (cf. Driessen, 1985; Geertz, 1968). Together with regional diversity the differences between 'high islam' and 'low islam' make it preferable to use the plural form: the islam does not exist - there are islams (El Zein, 1977; Jansen, 1985). A 'separate' method - treatment per religion - is therefore confronted with the same problem as other methods. How may such religious education handle internal diversity and stran-geness? Sometimes the criteria of proximity and relevance are used as limiting factors in the choice of subject-matter. Startingpoint in these cases is the form in which a religion presents itself in the children's living environment. This specific form is then taken as a yardstick in the representation of the religion in question. Such an approach does not offer a solution, because, for particular pupils, it is difficult to predict what is nearby and relevant. Let me explain. Thanks to modern media and the growing political, economical and cultural interdependencies on a global scale, the world is becoming progressively smaller, and there is not much that can still rightly be considered remote and irrelevant. Everything is near and relevant. Nothing gained: the diversity within religions still presents a problem. Simply taking the pupils' actual, present environment as a point of departure, also tends to be a rather fruitless approach. To illustrate this, let us consider the case of islam in our Dutch situation. Muslims in the Netherlands are of very diverse origin: they come from Turkey, Marocco and Surinam. The Surinamese muslims are in turn also from different extraction: some are the descendents of Indian muslims, others of Javanese. And to complicate matters: both the Indian and the Javanese traditions are divided into three currents (cf. Vernooy & VanderBurg, 1986, pp. 47 ff.). That alone yields six currents of Surinamese muslims, alongside who knows how many kinds of Turkish and Maroccan. A limiting criterion cannot be found in proximity and relevance. Another procedure meant to secure the reduction of internal heterogeneity is to seek the restriction in 'purity', which would entail teaching the official, authorized, 'unadulterated' doxa and praxis. But this approach is not satisfactory either. In the curriculum the 'great tradition' of each religion is followed, for example in the case of Islam that of 'high islam', the purpose being to abstract from the internal differences and to zoom in on the common ground. The fundamental presupposition of this method is that the official line stands for that which the various versions substantially have in common. This is nonetheless a mistake: the 'great tradition' is a formal ideal, a complex of standards to which - in the opinion of religious authorities - the doxa and the praxis of every religious community and believer ought to comply. When a curriculum concentrates on the 'great traditions' it would, generally speaking, be offering a distorted picture. The 'lived' realities just may not correspond with prescribed idealities, they probably rarely do. Moreover, as a rule it is difficult to ascertain with enough precision what the 'great tradition' would look like. It is often a matter of controversy as to what and who are a part of it and what and who are not, what its distinctive features are, et cetera. A certain choice in this matter leads to onesidedness and nearsightedness. And prejudice is something to be prevented in religious education. My conclusion should be obvious: the 'separate' method is confronted with the same problems as other methods - diversity and strangeness - and is just as unable to overcome them. In religious education the educational task to do justice to both the learning child and the subject-matter to be learned, is seriously impeded by the strangeness and diversity of religion and religions. I have explained why not much can be done about this. Three current remedies prove insufficient. They don't help; problems even go from bad to worse. The existential questions procedu-re (par. 2) underestimates the differences between religions and philosophies of life. The thematical approach (par. 3) underestimates the differences between religions. The 'separate' approach (par. 4) doesn't bring relief, because no religion is internally uniform and monochrome. None of these methods take diversity into account in a satisfactory manner nor can they cope adequately with strangeness. And so fiction and distortion can prevail and displace veracious description and proper clarification. For the sake of didactic simplicity and unity religion is and religions are misconstructed. This cannot be the intention of education striving to contribute to knowledge and understanding of religions and religion. I do not know of a practicable alternative and I am afraid there might not be one. Bibliography
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