Values and Values Education: Challenges for Faith Schools
Parents often choose faith schools because of their clear values, but it is not necessarily clear what this term means or how far the provision in faith schools is distinctive. This chapter explores key concepts and argues that values and values education represent both a major strength in and a major challenge to faith schools. Because of their consistent ethos and agreed framework of values, faith schools are able to provide sound and authoritative moral guidance to children (‘primary values education’), helping them to understand right and wrong and to behave in line with the shared values of their community. However, if young people are to make the values they learn in faith schools truly their own (‘secondary values education’), they need to learn to question their assumptions, to engage in critical thinking, to develop their moral imaginations, to be open to change and to learn the techniques of critical reflection and rational debate. These things may not come quite so easily to faith schools because of their reliance on authority and a clear, pre-determined framework of values, but without them young people may never attain moral maturity. Teachers in faith schools need to reflect carefully on their approach to values education to make sure they are developing students’ full potential and leading them towards personal and moral autonomy.
Teachers' Perceptions of Islamic Religious Education in Arab High Schools in Israel
In this multiple case study, the authors explore the purposes and significance of Islamic religious education as it is viewed and interpreted by Arab and Muslim teachers in Arab high schools in Israel. It interrogates how the Muslim teachers locate themselves and their pedagogy within a continuum of salafi (conservative) versus liberal conceptions of tarbiyya (the spiritual aspects of Islam) and ta`dib (the moral aspects of Islam) and why they do so. The results show that teachers support the salafi rather than the liberal conceptions of Islamic education. This means that they focus on the naql (the transmission of religious knowledge) rather than aql (rational thinking) in teaching the moral aspects of Islam. Also, teachers avoid the dealing with the intellectual diversity within Islam, the discussion of contemporary issues, and the tenets of other Abrahamic religions. They conclude that this may lead to religious illiteracy and argue that liberal Islamic education with critical and reflective reasoning is much appropriate for living in multicultural and multi-faith society.
Islamic Principles and Methods in the Teaching of Literatur
Summary Following a discussion of the place of literature in a total Islamic world view, the Islamic view of man as imaginative, moral, Vice‐regent, and servant of God becomes the basis for a theory of literary criticism and teaching. Problems of the relations between religion and literature are discussed and the argument concludes with suggestions for curriculum and teacher training. *A paper read at the First World Conference on Muslim Education held at Mecca March 31st to April 8th 1977.