Religious orthodoxy Curriculum Ideology

The work of education via schooling largely concerns socializing a generation into the norms, values, traditions, and practices of a society or culture, and curriculum is a central agent in this work. Many have suggested that education, explicitly religious or not, reflects what a people deem to be sacred. Here, too, the curriculum, in addressing what knowledge is of most worth, must be recognized as ever ideologically laden: endorsing and inculcating specific, normative ways of knowing and acting in the world in relation to self and others, however tacitly or overtly. Because of this, strengthened by the existence of conflicting values and aims, ideology is an important and ongoing object of address in the field of curriculum studies. Moreover, nowhere is this address more critical perhaps than where matters of religion are concerned; thus, in Elliot Eisner's analysis of current leading curriculum ideologies, he begins with religious orthodoxy. Issuing from the conviction that education is responsible for initiating children into a faith community and belief system deemed to be true and sanctioned by divine authority, this position compels curriculum scholars to confront questions of ultimate and enduring concern regarding the meaning and purpose of human life and how it ought to be lived, and the role of education in asking and answering such questions. This selection continues, through Eisner's work, with a discussion of religious orthodoxy, considering its central claims and challenges, its historical influences, and its abiding implications for contemporary curriculum concerns.

Religious orthodoxy is one of six curriculum ideologies that Eisner posits direct current thought and practice in the field, including rational humanism, progressivism, critical theory, reconceptual-ism, and cognitive pluralism. Religious orthodoxy is distinctive in its central belief in the existence of God and understanding of education rooted in “his” authority in directing human affairs, largely through divine commandment as interpreted via a sacred text or texts by a faith community. Education works in the service of attending this divine call upon humans by inculcating the young into sucha particular value system, way of living, embraced as right and true, even as the path to eternal life. Curricular decisions are made with respect to and reflect this higher address; that is, examples of Eisner: the Jewish devotion to the study and interpretation of religious texts; the Jesuit Catholic tradition of activism for social justice via education; and the anthroposophic commitment of the Waldorf schooling to the cultivation of spiritual cognition in the young.

Proponents of religious orthodoxy acknowledge the ideological underpinnings to any conception of knowledge and values inherent in any educational purpose, explicitly endorsing their own as truth and avidly working to realize such truth via educational policy and pedagogical practice. The capacity of religious orthodoxy to enact its philosophy is an enviable strength aspired to by nearly all other curriculum orientations. A position on the rise and of increasing political influence in the United States, advocates also ground their claims in humanistic and democratic commitmentsthose to which few would objectto religious freedom and pluralism that guarantees them the right to the practice of religion, and to affirm their own cultures, traditions, and values to their children via education.

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