Schooling Faith: Religious discourse, neo-liberal hegemony and the neo-Calvinist ‘parent-controlled’ schooling movement

Abstract

This thesis brings the questions surrounding the new public visibility of religion to bear specifically on the issue of religious schooling in Australia. In the first half, I offer an extended genealogical account of how education in such schools has come to be officially defined as concerned with the transmission of private beliefs in supernatural objects alongside the delivery of state-mandated training requirements. The antecedents for this definition lie in the nominalist, Protestant and Anglo-liberal inheritance of the present neo-liberal regime.

On the basis of this, I consider the effects of such a definition of religious schooling with reference to the case of the Neo-Calvinist ‘Parent-Controlled’ schooling movement in the latter half of this thesis. This religious schooling movement was initiated in the 1950s in explicit opposition to the mainstream education system in Australia, advancing instead an expansive view of religious discourse as affecting all educational practices. The movement remains insistent on its religiously distinctive ‘foundational values’ despite its present integration into the mainstream education system today. I examine how this is negotiated in the discourse of the NCPC schooling movement within the present conjuncture.

Through this specific example, I submit that the new visibility of religious schooling in Australia is predicated on two conditions of acceptability defined by the hegemonic discourse of neo-liberalism: firstly, that religious schooling is able to conform to a broad consensus on the purpose of schooling as a means of training worker-citizens; and secondly, religion of the sort articulated by such religious schooling adopts a form marketable to consumers, who are free to choose schools on the basis of their private preferences. This has implications not only for the way religion is conceived in religious schools that are currently operant, but also for those whose religious discourses are less amenable to such articulations.