Abstract
Education, and its formal counterpart, schooling, seem at times to be at the center of political or cultural debates, arguments, and controversies. In the USA, for instance, education has, at various times, been at the center of the so-called “culture wars” (Anderson and Herr 1999; Waite 2002; Waite et al. 2001). One of the battlegrounds in these culture wars, again using the USA as an example, have been the interplay, the role of religion, and religious beliefs in schooling, with interest in the science curriculum shown by, roughly speaking, those who believe in a more literal interpretation of the Christian Bible and those who push for a conventional scientifically informed curriculum. Across the globe, other issues dominate or inflect educational considerations – for example, immigration, national history, and/or language can be divisive issues in national educational considerations, and this is particularly the case in Ireland, for example, where very recent economic progress led to a major influx of immigrants, challenging an educational system that is almost exclusively denominational.
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- 1.
These are the so-called creationists; so called because they believe the Christian god created the universe, according to the biblical text, in 6 days. They then believe in a global chronology that would follow from and support that belief about the genesis of the world/universe. They reject other theories (e.g., Darwinian evolution) as inconsistent with their beliefs or what they perceive to be the “facts” of the case.
- 2.
As an example, the current cultural conditions in much of Continental Europe (e.g., Denmark), are such that the second author holds that business/commerce and the government/state are influential, but suggested that civil society be placed in a superordinate position relative to the church/religion in our model. The implication is that Denmark is a much more secular society than some. This seems to corroborate Inglehart’s (2003) work (Fig. 4.3).
- 3.
“In a general sense wherever the governments do not provide general education to a common citizen, private religious establishments have taken the lead to fill this gap and run the educational system of the country on their own, although in Ireland, all teachers, regardless of school type are paid on a common basis scale. In this context, a madrasah is referred to as an Islamic school for the Muslims, just as a parochial school for the Catholics or yeshiva for the orthodox Jews. Although these institutions are academically assigned to provide general education among children, they also have the obligation of teaching children about the fundamentals of their religion. In the case of the madrasahs, Islam” (p. 1). Wikipedia (2005), downloaded September 19, 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrasa
- 4.
It is interesting to note, however, that a relatively small percentage of businesses account for the largest share of professional development expenditures for their employees, and those monies go disproportionately for the training and education of the highest paid, salaried executives, seldom for the wage or line workers.
- 5.
In deference to the authors cited, we present the weaker version of their argument. The stronger version would insist that education causes a society’s inequalities.
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Waite, D., Moos, L., Sugrue, C., Liu, C. (2010). Framing Education for the Future: A Conceptual Synthesis of the Major Social Institutional Forces Affecting Education. In: Zajda, J. (eds) Global Pedagogies. Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3617-9_4
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