University of Sydney

Graduate Student, Department of Gender & Cultural Studies

Thesis Title: Schooling Faith: Religious education and neo-liberal hegemony in neo-Calvinist "parent-controlled" schooling

About

* I am a graduate of the Universities of Sydney (twice - tarrying with political economy and government/law), New South Wales (in education) and Morling Theological College, Sydney (participant research exploring the intersection of theology and psychoanalysis in an educational context). I have also worked also worked as a social science and legal studies teacher, a sessional tutor in education, gender and cultural studies, and a community advocate for youth and housing issues

* My PhD research is concerned broadly with the relationship between religion and secularity in liberal societies, and specifically with religious education within a neo-liberal regime. In Australia, there has been a period of sustained growth in religious schooling and with it, an intense and at times polemical dispute has swirled. In the face of the present polemics, I seek through my thesis to critically interrogate the terms of the debate, which is at present can be chiefly characterised by a tendency toward reciprocal anathema amongst belligerents along secular versus religious and public versus private lines. I enter the fray of the debate by asking several broad questions that form the basis for this thesis: How are the categories of secular/religious and public/private understood and what are the effects of such understandings? What actual commonalities and differences are there between schooling categorised in one or other categories and, more importantly, what commonalities and differences are produced through schooling so categorised? And consequently, what does the current debate obscure about religion and the present social order?

In his magisterial account of religion and secularity in the West - 'A Secular Age' - Charles Taylor (2007: 90-95) has cautioned against the “straight path account” of modern secularity as a linear, progressive realisation of a rational and scientifically ordered world, where an autonomous nature is freed from a religious outlook. Following Taylor’s advice for my own, far humbler thesis project, I address the question of how religious schooling is related to the neo-liberal regime in the present by taking what hermeneutic scholar Paul Ricoeur (1991: 24-25)  calls the ‘long route of detours’ through traditions. I do this by putting forward a genealogical account of how religion and religious education vis-à-vis the secular came to be politically constituted by such contemporaneously commonsense distinctions as belief/practice, other-worldly/this-worldly and private/public respectively.

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