The Routledge International Handbook of the Place of Religion in Early Childhood Education and Care

Professor Arniika Kuusisto and her colleague authors address in this handbook one of the burning questions that educators everywhere in this age of rationalisation – and the persistent testing and measuring that accompany it – need to answer. Has education lost something vital to the human condition, including the role of imagination and wonder? Has the belief in the rationalistic creed of evidential learning and the empirical verification that is seen to deliver it, alongside the consequent quest for achieving ever greater international literacy and numeracy rates, resulted in a loss to education? Have we lost an element of knowing and learning that speaks to what is best about the human condition? Jurgen Habermas thinks so and so, it seems, do Kuusisto and her colleagues who speak to this within this volume of collected essays. Professor Kuusisto asks whether we have reserved ‘. . . too narrow a space for children’s life questions, wonder and awe? Do we also provide a place for children’s meaning-making, philosophising, construction of personal view of the world (worldview) and reflections on their place in it?’ (519). If we have indeed reserved overly narrow space for these things, it is because we have assumed – like many of our nineteenth-century ancestor scientists and social scientists – that religion, and hence religious and theological knowing, constitute nothing more important than options for those who choose the path of religious faith. As such, religious and theological knowing is a pseudo knowing reserved for indoctrination and not for the serious business of modern education. Kuusisto positions against this view as she proffers as follows: