The Enquiring Classroom Academy

In “Making Democracy” we address questions of democracy, liberalism, pluralism and values in an educational way, maintaining the educational commitment to introduce students to our common world, whilst fostering a sense of the pluralism of the human condition and the dangers of a “single vision” both educationally and politically. By not confusing the formal question of democracy with the substantive, if complex, question of values, we invite an understanding that is premised on negotiation, on pluralism and on renewal, avoiding monolithic claims to “our values”, “core values” or “shared values” that suggest that there are those others who have “other values” and who thus cannot be included in the democratic conversation

The religious and the secular are often placed in opposition to one another, as though there is no common ground and no common space in which they might encounter one another. Yet, it is difficult to understand the genesis of even secular liberal values without reference to religious traditions and cultural inheritances. In this project, we refuse to begin with a binary opposition of the religious and the secular, an opposition which increasingly tends towards polarisation, dispute and debate, and which fails to connect with the existential, with stories, with experience, and with the poetic dimension of the human condition. Instead we think about what we hold sacred and what we value, inviting into a space of contiguity a range of positions that might not ordinarily be found alongside one another – the religious, the political, the philosophical, the cultural, the personal. This approach seeks to notice the sacred in everyday life, surveying the long history of humankind, including the faith traditions. It is impossible to understand the history of Europe without a sense of the faith traditions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. We live within traditions and they live in us, even in ways that we do not acknowledge or understand. However, we are not interested in ‘reifying’ traditions, invoking a return to the ‘past’ where the world was aright. We understand traditions to be living. The ‘Rough Guide to the Sacred’, draws in particular upon dialogic pedagogies and practices of silence and listening. It provides strategies for the making of space and structure where a range of different beliefs, identities, perspectives and traditions can be explored.