Keywords

Introduction

In a world disposed towards division and the inevitable conflicts that go with it, misunderstanding and misrepresentation are rife. When these things occur in relation to religious and/or values differences, a sound and effective religious and/or values education will respond with a content and pedagogy aimed at enhancing knowledge, understanding and proper representation. In the case of Islam, misunderstanding and misrepresentation are persistent, both within and beyond the Muslim world, increasingly putting at risk the fabric and security of our civilization. The task before religious and values education of dealing with this reality in a constructive and beneficial way is therefore particularly urgent. These areas of the curriculum cannot however carry the burden for such education alone. Especially if the dominant epistemology (or knowledge emphasis) in the school or system is indisposed to dealing with these sorts of content, even the best laid religious or values education programme will struggle to achieve its goals for want of support and effective pedagogy. Ensuring that an appropriate epistemology and attached pedagogy are in place is therefore our first consideration.

The Epistemological and Pedagogical Imperative

Dewey (1964) and Habermas (1972, 1974), two giant intellects of the twentieth century whose work has enlightened educational thinking, spoke of the importance of epistemology in our understanding of reality and, logically therefore, in the directions set by a school curriculum. Dewey spoke of the overarching need for a way of knowing that was about the cultivation of a mindset on the part of teachers that was, at one and the same time, self-reflective and directed towards instilling reflectivity, inquiry and a capacity for moral judiciousness on the part of students. In his work lay an implicit (sometimes explicit) criticism of the dominant curriculum directions of his time. Over-attention to low-level cognitive matter (often referred to as the ‘basics’) would be fatal to the best interests of public education, in his view.

Similarly, Habermas, himself not an educationist, wished to temper society’s natural inclinations towards overly instrumental approaches to learning. Habermas’s theory of knowing (1972; 1974; 1984; 1987; 1990) has been a significant influence in attempts by educationists to deepen the understanding of learning and, in turn, in stretching conceptions of the role of the teacher and the school. Beyond the importance of technical knowing (the knowing and understanding of facts and figures), Habermas spoke of the more challenging and authentic learning of what he described as historical-hermeneutic or ‘communicative knowledge’ (the knowing and understanding that results from engagement and interrelationship with others) and, moreover, of ‘critical knowing’ or ‘self-reflectivity’ (the knowing and understanding that comes from critique of all one’s sources of knowledge and ultimately from critique of one’s own self or, in Habermas’s terms, from knowing oneself, perhaps for the first time). For Habermas, this latter was the supreme knowledge that marked a point of one’s having arrived as a human being. One might caricature him as saying ‘There is no knowing without knowing the knower’, and the knower is oneself. In a sense, the ultimate point of the learning game is to be found in knowing oneself and the consequent owning of beliefs and values that inevitably follows.

Building on this, Habermas spoke of ‘communicative capacity’, which is when the self-reflective knower comes to see his or her own life-world as just one that needs to function in a myriad of life-worlds, and of ‘communicative action’, where the self-reflective knower takes a step beyond mere tolerance of other beliefs and values to take a stand both for justice and for oneself because one’s new-found self, one’s own integrity, is at stake. This is a concept about personal commitment, reliability and trustworthiness that spills over into practical action that makes a difference, or what Habermas describes as ‘praxis’. This is the kind of education that aims to transform thought and practice, to truly make a difference.

Deweyian and Habermasian thought between them would seem to provide a conceptual framework for an education intention that is quite beyond, though not exclusive of, the basics. It is an education intention that is directed towards schools undertaking more encompassing roles for society than has often dominated educational thinking. It is an education intention that accepts and applauds the notion that teaching and schooling are wide-ranging social agencies with charters to deal with the intellectual, social, emotional, moral and spiritual good of their clientele. It is an education intention that is directed towards teachers and schools playing a role in the forming of individuals who understand integrity and apply it to their practical decision-making and furthermore assist in the cohering of those individuals into functional and beneficent societies. An implication of this education intention is around the removal of any artificial division between knowing and values, since all knowing has an ethical component and is related in some way to human action. With this understanding, Dewey and Habermas, in their own slightly different ways, challenge contemporary education to deal with the essentials rather than mere basics of learning. Between them, they offer an epistemology that impels a holistic and comprehensive pedagogy that engages with the full array of real-life issues. In our own time, their thinking leads, among many other things, to the inevitability of dealing with Islam and its relations with the West.

Implications for Religious and Values Education

Clearly, these are challenging thoughts for educators of any kind, but for religious and values educators in particular, whose objectives and intentions would seem to be about ‘making a difference’ through pedagogy and practical curriculum goals. While indoctrination and freedom-denying forms of enculturation should always be avoided, it is nonetheless possible that one can become so obsessed with the dangers of privacy invasion that the educational process becomes overly cognitive and bare of passion, so negating the potential to make a practical difference. The thesis underlying this chapter is that the current situation with Islam demands much more in terms of an educational response. The religious and values education required for Westerners, and especially those of direct Jewish and Christian origin, to truly understand Islam is one that must make a difference, not only a difference to head knowledge but, in true Habermasian fashion, a difference in the way these Westerners ultimately act towards their fellow ‘People of the Book’. Concomitantly, the religious and values education required for Muslims, especially in Western environments, are ones that engage them in the fullness of learning about the verifiable facts of their own religious history, in contrast with the increasing attempts by Islamist commentary to skew these facts, and to bring the beliefs and values of Islam into the marketplace where they can be negotiated and evaluated along with all other beliefs and values of a polyglot society that is functioning for the benefit of all its participants.

Islam has clearly become one of the globe’s most potent forces with the capa-city to reshape human society as we know it, and so our motivation to understand it is naturally enhanced. Our sources of knowledge are much improved on the past, with new and friendlier translations and explanations of the Qur’an, as well as a rash of scholarship among Western educators attempting to understand Islam (cf. Nettler, 1995; Kramer, 1999; Armstrong, 1991, 2000; Rippin, 2001; Peters, 2003; Rogerson, 2003; Doogue & Kirkwood, 2005; Lovat, 2005, 2006; Cooper, 2006; Grieve, 2006; Penney, 2006; O’Shea, 2006). Of even greater significance, however, is the fact that we now have available to us a renewed Islamic scholarship, sometimes in stand-alone form and in other cases where Muslims and non-Muslims have united in a common cause, directed at understanding and/or re-interpreting Islam’s origins, including its relationship with the broader world of religion and especially with Judaism and Christianity (cf. al-Ashmawi [in Nettler, 1995]; Talbi, 1995; Tantawi & al-Fattah Tabbara [in Nettler & Taji-Farouki, 1998]; Khalidi, 2001; Nasr, 2002; Nettler, 1999; Yahya, 2002; Ozalp, 2004; Akbarzadeh & Yasmeen, 2005; El Droubie, 2006; Hirsi Ali, 2006; Lovat & Samarayi, 2008). This work cuts both ways in terms of building or destroying bridges between Islam and non-Islam but, either way, it is vital work for the global community to know. In either case, there is potential for all, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to engage in the kind of self-reflectivity that leads to the enhanced communal effects of people who know themselves better, in the ways connoted by Habermas. In Australia, there are several school-based ventures in religious and values education that are worth highlighting in this context.

Religious Education

In the band of subjects that are offered in the New South Wales (NSW) Higher School Certificate, there are two that include potential for an adequate to thoroughgoing study of Islam. Society and Culture, a modern sociologically oriented subject, includes a depth study, Belief Systems, as one of three options that need to be chosen for study duration of approximately 14 weeks each. The birth of this subject in 1985, complete with the option of an in-depth study of religion, originally titled Religion and Belief, marked the beginning of a new era for the public curriculum in NSW, one in which there would be a progressive return to the possibility of those explicit religious curricula envisaged in the Public Instruction Act (1880) that set out the charter for public education in NSW. This turn in the curriculum of a system, so clearly indisposed to religious attention for most of the twentieth century, might ultimately be judged to be of enduring value to a generation faced with the challenge of education in an increasingly multicultural and multi-faith society. For the first time in NSW, a syllabus was designed that included an explicit goal to enhance cross-cultural tolerance of religious difference and to be primarily for its social rather than merely individual benefit. Hence, the original aims of the depth study, as constructed in the 1985 syllabus, read as follows:

…to provide students with a better understanding of the part played by religion and belief in their own lives and those of others. It aims to arouse in students an awareness of the importance of religion and belief in shaping human behaviour, both individually and collectively, and to enable them, irrespective of their own religious beliefs (or lack of them) to identify and assess sympathetically the nature and consequences of belief in others (NSW, 1985, p. 33).

The popularity of the depth study in question justified the development of a discrete HSC subject focused on religion and belief, with similar though expanded intentions. In 1991, the original Studies of Religion syllabus was unveiled with the following objective:

… to promote an awareness, understanding and appreciation of the nature of religion and the influence of religious traditions, beliefs and practices on societies and on the individual, with an emphasis on the Australian context (NSW, 1991, p. 7).

Beyond the obvious emphasis on Aboriginal spirituality and Christianity on the development of Australian spirituality, the new syllabus was explicit in dealing with the more recent influences of other major religious traditions, ‘new’ spiritualities and the growing statistics around non-belief that were progressively showing up in the national census data.

The updated syllabus (NSW, 2005) reveals a development of thought around the subject and its potential to contribute to harmony and understanding in a multicultural setting. In the rationale, it states:

The Studies of Religion syllabus … enables students who live in a multi-faith and multicultural society to progress from a broad understanding of religious traditions to specific studies within these traditions. (It) enables students to come to an understanding that each religious tradition has its own integrity and contributes to a well-ordered society (p. 6).

Both of these syllabi continue to provide good opportunities for students to make a study of Islam, both as a general instance of the kinds of new religious influences that characterize Australia since the 1970s and, moreover, as a specialized study in itself. Both syllabi include the notion of a ‘depth’ or ‘focus’ study that allows for more intense study of a particular instance. In the case of Studies of Religion, Islam is one of five major religious traditions recommended for intense study and, especially in recent years, it has become common to find schools choosing this option. In the case of Society and Culture, there are two ways in which Islam can be stu-died intensively. The Belief Systems depth study has its own focus study built in, and Islam is recommended as a high priority and particularly topical option for intensive study. Additionally, Society and Culture includes a ‘Personal Interest Project’ that is worth 15% of the final combined mark for the subject. This project comprises a ‘4,000–6,000 word’ minor research dissertation that the student works on in the last 2 years of school. It is intended that the project will demonstrate the development of sound research skills and their application to a contemporary societal issue. Again, no doubt because of the issues of the day, it has become more common of late to find this project being directed towards some aspect of Islam.

The template for a focus study on Islam in Society and Culture is provided in Donnelly et al. (2008). It follows a generally recommended pattern for focus studies, attending to items that include its history and contemporary status, its main theologi-cal emphases around key people, places and texts, issues of power and dissent, gender, technological impact, issues of continuity and change, likely and possible futures and, finally, a section on peace and conflict.

The opening historical section places the birth of Islam squarely at the centre of Muhammad’s inspiration by Judaism and Christianity amidst the essentially Arabic world of his birth. It identifies monotheism as essential to this inspiration and emphasizes Islam’s intersection with its fellow ‘religions of the Book’ in developing its own account of monotheism. In spite of this intersection, it characterizes Islam as an outgrowth and development of its sibling religions. It pays particular attention to the ways in which Muhammad contrasted the beliefs and contribution of Moses and Jesus with the religious practices of the Jewish and Christian establishments of his day. The study focuses on the testimony provided by the Qur’an in clarifying the distinction between these holy founders and the traditions that had grown up in their names and of the Ummah, or ‘community’, that developed as the Muslim version of the ‘People of God’ promised by God since the time of Abraham. In managing the content in this way, Islam is presented to the student as a natural and essential outgrowth of the major Western religions but as one that has its own distinctive focus and inbuilt critique of them. This approach helps the student to understand where Islam fits in the wider scheme of the world’s belief systems while, at the same time, establishing the grounds for understanding some of the inevitable conflict surrounding Islam’s relationship with the West.

The study builds on the opening content to explore the major people, places and texts of Islam. The majority of its foundational heroes, apart from Muhammad himself, are seen to be shared with Judaism and Christianity. Abraham is depicted as the most common link, so justifying the expression of the ‘religions of the Book’ as being collectively the ‘Abrahamic Tradition’. In this sense, Abraham can be characterized as being Muslim and Christian, as much as he is Jewish (or Hebrew). However, Moses is also characterized as being authentically Muslim because it was he who mediated the ‘Torah’ which sits at the foundation of the Muslim ‘Pillars of Faith’. At the same time, the image of Moses to be found in the Qur’an might be said to be more Muslim than Jewish, and his encounter with God to be more clearly a divine directive to establish a community of faith than in any way a kingdom of the sort that the Jews would eventually establish after their conquest of the land of the Canaanites (effectively Palestine, an Arabic precursor to a Muslim state). In this way, the original Islam is seen to build on, yet to be critical of, the old Jewish order.

Jesus (‘Isa’) was a special hero in early Islam who was honoured for his distinctive role as a fulfilment of the prophetic tradition. Indeed, Jesus can be seen to be the most important of the prophets who preceded Muhammad’s own (greatest) prophetic role. Research by Adang (1996) and Khalidi (2001) has shown, however, that the Jesus who inspired Muhammad in his establishment of Islam, and who would go on to become a hero in early Islam, was not so much the Jesus of Christianity’s canonical gospels as a Jesus of the ‘apocryphal canon’. In many ways, this Jesus is heard to be critical of the way in which the Christian church had turned him into a God, whereas a truly theological understanding of the Christ event would have always maintained his status as a prophet rather than a God. Again, this content serves to highlight the firm link between Islam and its fellow ‘religions of the Book’ yet to be, at the same time, an original critique of those same sources and therefore to be inevitably contentious in its relationship with them.

The contentiousness theme is taken up through an exploration of continuity and change in Islam, where issues of gender relations, the impact of technology and Islam as a global force are dealt with in some depth. The syllabus encourages the grounding of these themes in live and contemporary events that have some relevance to the students. Media analyses, debates, excursions and guest speakers representing a range of views are standard pedagogical tools in dealing with these themes. This section of the syllabus culminates with a dedicated focus on the future of Islam where a ‘scenario planning’ approach is encouraged. By this means, students are challenged to consider the possible ways in which Islam might develop, depending on an array of independent variables, such as its ongoing relationship with the West, the control or otherwise of radical Islamism, the success or otherwise of vari-ous moves by women to claim increased rights in their religion, true unifying or otherwise of Islam across sectarian and ethnic boundaries, and the role that education might or might not play in developing better understanding by Muslims and non-Muslims of Islam’s authentically verifiable heritage.

Whether through Society and Culture or Studies of Religion, students in NSW have much increased opportunity on those in former years to come to a fairly sophisticated knowledge and understanding of Islam. This knowledge and understanding is beyond descriptive knowing of the details about Islam’s history, creeds and mora-lity. The pedagogy, impelled by an explicit epistemology that distinguishes between technical, interpretive and reflective knowing, aims to engage students in learning that challenges their own beliefs and life-worlds and that can therefore make a difference in the way they approach Islam, either as their own faith or as the faith of the other.

Values Education

The Deweyian and Habermasian epistemologies cited above are, if anything, even more explicitly relevant to the tenor of the values education efforts being pursued across Australian education systems. As noted above, their epistemologies render the notion of values neutrality in education a nonsense and non-viable. They bring to modern approaches to values education the pedagogical imperative it lacked in earlier manifestations. In other words, Deweyian and Habermasian epistemologies demand a values-laden pedagogy that saturates the learning experience both in a values-filled environment and in explicit teaching that transacts about values, and so works towards induction of students into personal empowerment over their own stated and lived-out values. In earlier times, values education was conceived of as a moral option among various approaches to education. It was often seen therefore to be more relevant to religious schooling and, conversely, shunned by public systems on the basis of their purported ‘values-neutrality’. This is now coming to be seen widely as a dated perspective.

The demands of Dewey and Habermas have been vindicated by modern research into quality teaching and effective pedagogy. In a variety of ways and across vastly different research regimes, it has been demonstrated that a values approach to education is no mere option if the fullest effects of learning are to be achieved, including but not limited to academic learning. It was the Carnegie Corporation’s 1994 Task Force on Learning (Carnegie Corporation, 1996) that in many ways impelled the modern era of quality teaching. It represented a turning point in the dominant conceptions placed on the role of the school and, in turn, on the power of teaching to effect change in student achievement. It utilized an amassing body of research knowledge that showed flaws in earlier conceptions around the limited power of schooling to impact positively on student development, on the basis that heritage and especially disadvantage were its most powerful determinants (Parsons & Bales, 1955; Coleman et al., 1966; Plowden, 1967; Jencks et al., 1972; Reynolds, Hargreaves, & Blackstone, 1980). While student achievement in this context was largely defined in academic terms, similar conclusions had been reached regarding all manner of personal and social education. Indeed, if research seemed to reveal the fragile nature of optimism that teachers and schools could influence change in academic prowess, the only conclusion to be drawn about attempts to influence personal, moral or character development was that it was on even more fragile grounds (Leming, 1993; Lickona, 1993). This resulted in a de facto values-neutral stance being taken by schools. This stance was based on the belief that educational interventions in values were both ethically inappropriate and educationally doomed.

In recent times, these forms of pessimism regarding the power of educational interventions, both on students’ academic achievement and on their moral formation, have been challenged by the seemingly powerful effects of quality teaching, and by an attached recognition of the implausibility and inadequacy of a values-neutral approach being taken to such an inherently values-filled endeavour as education. In this regard, the Carnegie Task Force was also crucial in its definition of the range of learning skills that should be seen as constituting student achievement. By this, it began to blur the boundaries between what would normally be regarded as academic achievement and other core learning pertinent to education. Beyond the more predictable aspects of intellectual development, the Task Force report introduced, for the modern era, notions of learning concerned with communication, empathy, reflection and self-management. It was also explicit in making the point that while heritage and upbringing could make a difference to the ease with which these forms of learning could be attained, they were in no way certain predictors of success. Consistent with the era of quality teaching which the report in some ways ushered in, the final onus was placed on the school and the teacher to make the difference.

Pointing to the inadequacy of surface learning, the Carnegie Report emphasized that effective learning unleashes within the learner the cognitive, affective and moral energies that engage, empower and effect learning of genuine depth. The nature of such a learning experience was elaborated by Newmann and associates (1996; Newmann, Marks, & Gamoran, 1996) whose work focused on the pedago-gical dynamics needed to engage students at sufficient ‘intellectual depth’ in order to motivate and empower their learning. This would mean restructuring the whole learning environment for the benefit of student achievement and would involve the following: pedagogical strategies and techniques used by teachers; catering for the diverse needs of students; organizing of schools for the express purpose of student achievement (school coherence); professional development of teachers; and the creation of a trustful, supportive ambience in the school. In a word, effective pedagogy entailed a range of teacher knowledge and skills and was essentially, inherently and inextricably associated with a values approach to learning.

Extensive evidence-based research, literature searches and meta-analyses over the last decade have repeatedly demonstrated that the quality of the teaching and learning environment has huge potential to overturn the effects of disadvantage related to an array of variables, including family background, socio-economic status and even disability of sorts (e.g. Scheerens, Vermeulen, & Pelgrum, 1989; Darling-Hammond, 1996; Avery, 1999; King, Schroeder, & Chawszczewski, 2001; Alton-Lee, 2003; Hattie, 2004; Rowe, 2004). Furthermore, allied research like that of Noddings (1997), Willms (2000), Deakin-Crick & Wilson (2005), Carr (2005, 2006), Hawkes (2005, 2007), Clement (2007) and Deakin-Crick & Joldersma (2007) has shown what power a quality teaching and learning environment, embedded in an explicit values framework and pedagogy, can have in matters of self-esteem, security and well-being. Hence, evidence is building that indicates that the potency of quality teaching is not restricted to pedagogical techniques solely concerned with subject content and academic processes, but that its efficacy also lies in attending to the affective and moral dimensions of teaching and learning, and to all the attachments to this concerned with the coherence, ambience and relationships that characterize the learning environment.

It is this array of research on which the Australian Values Education Program (DEST, 2005) is based. It is explicitly premised on the link between values education and best practice pedagogy, and the various projects that have emanated from it have demonstrated the link even further (Lovat & Toomey, 2007, 2009). Within the key project named Values Education Good Practice Schools (VEGPS), 316 schools organized into 51 clusters across the country have engaged in a variety of approaches to values education, all based on the central premise that values education and best practice pedagogy are inextricably interrelated. Findings from stages 1 and 2 of VEGPS (DEST, 2006; DEEWR, 2008) have shown that a sound values education can be a powerful ally in the development of best practice pedagogy, including in purely academic terms. Many of the reports from the cluster projects identified improved academic diligence, strengthened intellectual engagement and settling into work more readily and calmly as routine effects of the ambience created by values education. Moreover, the wider categories of learning enumerated by Carnegie were also seen to be enhanced. Many reports identified improved communicative capacity between teachers, students and each other as common outcomes. Similarly, reports spoke of students broadening their sense of social justice issues, within and beyond the school, and setting out to address these in practical ways, so showing a clear development of empathic character. Other reports spoke of demonstrable outcomes that connoted greater reflectivity, self-management and self-knowing, in ways characteristic of both the Carnegie categories and Deweyian and Habermasian epistemology.

The schools in the clusters were drawn from across the various systems, public, private and religious. Among the latter were a number of Muslim schools conjoined in clusters with public and other religious schools. Some of these schools engaged in values education projects that had as their central focus a broadening of understanding between Muslim and non-Muslim cultures, and included schools that were representative of the divide. Beyond learning targeted at understanding the ‘other’ within the school, these clusters engaged in an array of organized excursions that took students out of their own environment and placed them in the environment of the other, complete with pedagogical attachment that ensured engagement with the other. The clusters in question attracted considerable public interest because the array of schools was not only representative of the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim but were also connotative of a particular event in 2005 that saw the forces of the divide pitted against each other in a summer-time riot on one of Sydney’s better-known holiday destinations. This event served as a focus for the values education projects in question, providing a particularly sharp example of what can transpire when the goals of the project are not attempted, and a mixed community is left without communicative capacity, empathic character, self-reflectivity and the like.

The Australian Government has been active in organizing events and projects relevant to addressing the pressing issues around Islam and its integration or otherwise in Western societies (DEST, 2007; 2007a). As in many Western societies, Islam is now a major religious force in Australia, being significantly larger than a number of traditional Christian denominations and growing exponentially faster than any Christian denomination (Trewin, 2007). One initiative related to Islam and Australian schooling, spurred directly by the London bombing of 2005 but indirectly also from the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005 and even less directly from ‘9/11’ and other acts of major notability emanating from Islamist (as opposed to Islamic) terrorism. Because profiling done on the London bombers showed the drift to a radical cleric or mosque as being significant, sometimes preceded by an unhappy school experience or at least one ineffective in enhancing social integration, the Government initiated a project designed to examine the experiences of young Muslims in Australian schools, with a view to improving them wherever possible. Findings from the project were disseminated in the form of a showcase wherein the project investigators outlined key findings and teachers and pupils involved in the education of Muslim youth, in public, religious and specifically Muslim schools, conveyed their experiences.

Among those conveying personal experiences was a young Muslim pupil who spoke of some of her earlier unhappy experiences in a school that had not been so sensitive to intercultural issues, least of all to dealing with them. She contrasted these experiences with more recent ones in a school that set out to address her needs as a young Muslim in a polyglot society and used the National Framework in Values Education (DEST, 2005) to do this work. Hence, values concerned with acceptance, respect, care, integrity and social responsibility were targeted for attention by way of modelling and transacting, and the issue of Muslim/non-Muslim dialogue was managed in this context. The result for her was an increased sense that her culture was respected and she as an individual had something distinctive and of value to add to her polyglot society. In a word, she had no need of radical Islamism to provide a security or identity that was not guaranteed by her wider society. The words that summarized the role that the school might play in providing such a guarantee were around the notion that schools are places where individual and societal futures are rehearsed. They are, among other things, ‘engine rooms’ of multiculturalism and integration, sites where we learn not only the grammar of formal literacy but also the ‘grammar’ of respect and cooperation.

Words such as these provide the perfect counter view to those earlier beliefs that the school was inherently limited in what it could achieve owing to the overwhelming power of heritage and disadvantage. In contrast, these words match the findings of updated educational research about the power of quality teaching, school ambience and especially values education to make a difference in the lives of all student cohorts, including those suffering the negative effects of being from a minority and often misunderstood religious culture. Among other things, they are words that illustrate the potential of values education, like religious education, to be crafted to address effectively some of the major and most relevant issues of learning that confront our schools.

Conclusion

The chapter set out to show how religious and values education can be utilized in addressing a major social issue like that of the integration or otherwise of Islam in a society like Australia. The chapter has illustrated through live examples ways in which religious and values education is being used for this wider social purpose. It has also attempted to demonstrate that religious and values education, and indeed any education, can only play this role when impelled by and grounded in the most comprehensive epistemology and updated pedagogy.