Critical thinking and Catholic religious education: an empirical research report from the Philippines

Abstract

While critical rationality is an explicit goal of Catholic education, its practice in confessional Catholic religious education can be problematic for epistemological reasons: the prevailing Catholic religious epistemology may not be conducive to critical thinking in the RE classroom. A survey among 1068 teachers conducted in fifteen Catholic schools in the Philippines confirmed that a significant percentage of the respondents – especially religious educators – exhibited epistemologies considered incompatible with critical thinking specifically in the domains of religious beliefs and value judgements – the two areas covered by the Philippine Catholic RE curriculum. An examination of Catholic religious and moral epistemologies is recommended to determine the possibility and necessity of critical thinking in matters of faith and morals.

Keywords:

• critical thinking
• Catholic
• religious education
• epistemology
• epistemic cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

J. C. Go completed his Doctorate in Education at the UCL Institute of Education (London, United Kingdom) and the Singapore National Institute of Education of the Nanyang Techno- logical University. Currently the coordinator for the Asia Pacific network of Jesuit schools, he teaches at the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines. He is also the Director of the Ateneo Institute for the Science and Art of Learning and Teaching (Ateneo SALT Institute). His professional experience includes serving multiple terms as President of Jesuit K-12 schools (Philippines) and conducting various leadership development and teacher training workshops in Asia Pacific. His primary research interests are Catholic religious education, critical thinking, teacher education, teacher epistemologies, digital media, and critical realism.

ORCID

J. C. Go, SJ http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9894-3255

Notes

1. Fides et Ratio calls faith and reason the ‘two wings’ that raise the human spirit to the contemplation of truth. This encyclical offers a concise history of this tradition (John Paul II, 1998, §36–44).

2. A study of Canadian Catholic schools observed a similar discrepancy between the pedagogy employed in religious education and those in other subjects. Whereas students are taught to apply a critical method in the other disciplines, they are expected in their religious education classes merely to receive ‘factual knowledge’ about Church teaching and are offered little academic guidance, if any, on how to think critically about Church positions on such controversial issues as female ordination and same-sex marriage (McDonough 2009, 189; 2015).

3. The network of Catholic schools is called Jesuit Basic Education Commission, consisting of seven primary schools and eight secondary schools.

4. In addition to economic challenges, Catholic schools in the Philippines are also confronted with increasing secularism and relativism, leading not only to an apparent decrease in the appeal of Catholic education, but even more fundamentally, a diminishing regard from Catholic families for the Gospel and its values (CBCP 2011).

5. Kuhn (2000) has a similar tripartite model of cognitive processing – later synthesized by Hofer (2001, 364) with Kitchener’s – which identifies what she calls ‘epistemic meta-knowing’ as providing the rationale for the practice and valuing of critical thinking. Two types of metacognition are distinguished: (a) metacognitive knowing (pertaining to declarative knowing), which refers to the executive management of one’s base of declarative knowledge (one’s ability to monitor what one knows and how one knows it), (b) meta-strategic knowing (pertaining to procedural knowing), which refers to one’s management of available strategies applied in knowing (Kuhn 1999).

6. King and Kitchener (2002) identified epistemic cognition as the foundation of critical thinking although the term in their research is restricted to the solution of ill-structured problems (‘problems that reasonable people can reasonably disagree about’).

7. Other terms used for epistemic cognition are epistemic understanding (Kuhn, Cheney, and Weinstock 2000), epistemic reflection (Baxter Magolda 2004), epistemic postures (Chandler, Boyes, and Ball 1990), epistemological worldviews (Schraw and Olafson 2002), epistemological positions (Mansfield and Clinchy 2002), and epistemic orientations (Gottlieb 2007).

8. Kuhn (1999) adds a pre-epistemological level labeled ‘realist’ found among children below the age of 4, for whom assertions are considered mere representations of realities, neither generated by human activity nor requiring evaluation. Only beginning with the absolutist level is there an insight into the interpretive role of knowers in the construction of assertions.

9. Kuhn and Weinstock (2002) cite how the values of social tolerance/acceptance (‘Live and let live’) prevalent in contemporary society eclipse the value of reasoned argument and informed understanding and are detrimental to full epistemic development.

10. The schools, which are located in different parts of the Philippines and which belong to a network owned and managed by a Catholic religious congregation, have been selected because these are the schools that I collaborate with in my professional practice, and for whom the results of this study are primarily – but not exclusively – intended. Only one primary school did not participate due to a conflict in schedule.

11. The original instrument included the judgement domain of ‘personal taste’, which Kuhn, Cheney, and Weinstock (2000) did not analyze. Given the purpose of this study, it has been replaced here with ‘religious beliefs’.

12. Given this study’s focus, a separate category was created for religious and values education.

13. The confessional curriculum, the ecclesial nature of the schools, and the generally lower ecclesial status and limited agency of lay people – to name a few possible topics for further study.

14. Significantly, the epistemic cognitions of these religious educators in other domains exhibit no difference from their colleagues, indicating that they are no less sophisticated in domains other than religious beliefs.