The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religious Education in the Global South

Yonah Hisbon Matemba, Bruce A. Collet, Yonah Hisbon Matemba, Bruce A. Collet

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350105836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religious Education in the Global South presents new comparative perspectives on Religious Education (RE) across the Global South. Including 23 chapters written by scholars from the Global North and South, this is the first authoritative reference work on the subject. The handbook is thematically organised into seven sections. The first three sections deal with provision, response to changes in contemporary society, and decolonizing RE. The next four sections explore young people and RE, perspectives on teachers, RE in higher education, and finally, challenges and opportunities for RE. The term 'Global South' is used here primarily to signify the deep economic divide with the Global North, but the concept is also examined in historical, geographical, political, social and cultural terms, including the indelible influence of religion in all four broadly defined regions. Exploring RE from local, cross-national as well as regional and sub-regional perspectives, the handbook examines RE from its diverse past, present realities, and envisioned future revealing not only tensions, contestations, injustices and inequalities of power, but importantly, how inclusive forms of RE can help solve these problems.

PART I

State, Status and Provision of Religious Education

Chapter 1

Non-state Actors in Education and the Provision of Religious Education in Kenya

Malini Sivasubramaniam

Introduction

Despite arguments within secular democracies for the separation of Church and State, Religious Education (RE) in the school curriculum has gained importance as societies become more religiously pluralistic. Response to this pluralism however has been contested and problematic. Some sub-Saharan African countries have attempted to appropriate RE from a multi-faith perspective, despite strong opposition to replacing its historically Christian curriculum (e.g. Botswana and Malawi). Other countries, while espousing the ideals of multi-faith instruction, have been more resistant to adopting a similar approach and have preferred a particularist form of RE, maintaining confessional RE syllabuses (e.g. Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya (Matemba, 2005, 2009, 2021a). Nonetheless, increased globalization has created a pressing need to re-examine the role of RE in the public sphere, to nurture religious understanding of diverse religions to enhance cross-cultural understanding, and avert extremism (Matemba, 2009; Kamat and Mathew, 2010; Sivasubramaniam and Hayhoe, 2018; Matemba and Addai-Mununkum, 2019). The assumption here is that avoiding teaching about religions only serves to deepen existing cultural and national schisms, and thus engaging with religion in schools is necessary if we are to promote social cohesion and build a tolerant society.

However, schools are not a neutral terrain. As Thiessen (2001) contends, ‘schooling, no matter how liberal, no matter to what extent it incorporates the ideal of liberal education, nevertheless involves the transmission of culture. Schooling never was, never is, and never can be value-free’ (Thiessen, 2001, 242). Consequently, it is important to distinguish between ‘religion education’ where the goal is ‘to encourage respect for diverse religions, appreciating the commonalities between different religions and promoting tolerance of different faiths’ (Kamat and Mathew, 2010, 359) and ‘religious instruction’ where the goal is about ‘propagating a particular faith’ (Kamat and Mathew, 2010, 359). Similarly, Matemba and Addai-Mununkum (2019), from their work in examining the teaching of RE in Malawi and Ghana, caution that the mis/representation of RE in the classroom discourse can be counterproductive because it fails to inculcate pro-social values that enhance citizenship in a religiously diverse society.

The Kenyan constitution views RE as one vehicle to instil religious and moral values in young people (Itolondo, 2013; Githaiga, 2017). Consequently, the teaching of RE is mandated within the national curriculum and is offered in all public schools. While pluralistic RE is espoused in principle, there is resistance to making the subject ‘truly’ multi-faith. Instead, as Matemba (2021) contends, what is adopted is a particularist form of RE where each of the selected religions for study has their own confessional syllabuses, e.g. CRE (Christian RE), HRE (Hindu RE) and IRE (Islamic RE). Amidst this particularist paradigm of RE adopted in the current curriculum in the government schools, an increasingly market-based approach to education has seen an expansion of private actors in education with non-state actors becoming increasingly prominent within the education sector (LaRose, n.d.; Rose, 2010; Menashy, 2013, 2014). Yet, very little is known about how these non-state actors perceive, promote and provide RE in the schools they work in. Further, it is not clear how responsive these transnational networks of non-state providers are to averting indoctrination and fundamentalism, and to promoting RE that impacts equity, enhances cross-cultural understanding, and is rooted in the religious context and diversity of the countries they work in.

The goal of this chapter is to examine the role of non-state actors in the provision of RE in Kenya, and how the schools they support contribute (or not) to religious literacy and primarily social cohesion. Conceptually, I draw upon Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which provides a useful theoretical framework for a more meaningful and nuanced understanding of issues relating to social policy contexts in education. This chapter builds and extends on the work of Menashy (2013) and Robeyns (2006) on proposing the use of Sen’s capabilities approach as an alternative paradigm to move beyond the human capital and human rights-based conceptualizations of education. Specifically, Menashy (2013) suggests that the capabilities approach is a suitable model to theorize private sector engagement in education, given the limitation of the two other dominant theories. I concur and propose that this approach can also be extended to examine the provision of RE by non-state actors.

To illustrate how non-state providers are promoting RE in the Global South, I examine the programming of two distinct non-state actors in Kenya: the Aga Khan Educational Services (AKES), a non-profit educational network, with longstanding involvement in the education sector, and Bridge International Academies (BIA), a more recently emerged for-profit social enterprise investing in the burgeoning low-fee private schooling sector. It is important to highlight firstly that the non-state sector is not homogeneous, and nor are the actors within it. This heterogeneity must be acknowledged in any discussion around non-state provision. Secondly, the two non-state actors discussed in this chapter serve very different populations and concomitantly have very different philosophical underpinnings and motivations. Thus, the purpose in this chapter is not to compare these two non-state actors as organizations, but rather to scrutinize how they engage with the provision of RE and to analyse whether they extend the capabilities of learners they work with, within the specific contexts they work in. Methodologically, this chapter draws largely from a review of literature, and an analysis of the discourse on related organizational websites, newsletters, media interviews and annual reports of Aga Khan Educational Services and Bridge International Academies, as well as personal communication with the two non-state actors to verify particularities of their programming in Kenya.

Contextualizing Non-state Engagement and RE in Kenya

Country Context

Kenya is one of East Africa’s more stable economies, with a population of 51.39 million and land area of 582.646 sq. km. (UIS, 2018). Kenya’s political context has been historically shaped by tensions around post-election violence, high levels of corruption, and issues around the struggle for land and power that are ethnically driven. Table 1.1 provides some of its other key economic indicators.

Table 1.1 Kenya basic statistics

Key indicators
Government	Presidential republic independent since 1963
Population (millions)	51.39
Religion	Christians (84.5%), Muslims (10.5%), Buddhists (<1%), Hindus (<1%), Jews (<1%), African/Folk religions (1.5%), Other (1.1%) and Unaffiliated (2.3%)
GDP (PPP $ billions)	237
Urban population growth (annual %)	4.1
Primary school enrolment (% gross)	103.2
Secondary school enrolment (% gross)	NA
Government expenditure on education (% of GDP)	5.51

Source: Pew Research Centre (2015).

Religion and ethnicity are deeply entwined in Kenyan society. Kenya’s religious landscape is shaped by its complex history, resulting in diverse religious communities, with over seventy distinct ethnic groups, and thirty different language and dialect clusters (Marshall, 2018). These ethnic divisions are factious. Religion is ubiquitous in the public space, although constitutionally, there is no state religion and Kenya prohibits religious discrimination. Given its colonial history, Christianity remains the dominant religion, with large Muslim populations also residing in the Coastal and North Eastern regions. There are also a small number of adherents of Hindu, Buddhist and Baha’i faith in Nairobi and other urban centres. A number of Kenya’s tribal groups adhere exclusively to African traditional religion. Religious extremist group violence, however, continues to dominate the country’s landscape, largely because of Kenya’s military intervention in neighbouring Somalia. In recent years, several attacks of terrorism have been reported. These include the following: in January 2019, Al-Shabaab (AS) attacked the Dusit D2 hotel complex in Nairobi, killing twenty-one people; and on 16 February 2019 AS killed three Christian teachers at a primary school in Wajir County, a predominantly Muslim region (US State Government, n.d.).

Kenya’s national development strategy is articulated in its Vision 2030 and espouses aspirations for Kenya to be an upper-middle-income country with a high quality of life for all citizens by the year 2030. According to the Kenyan National Goals of Education, education in Kenya should:

1. Foster nationalism and patriotism and promote national unity;

2. Promote the social, economic, technological and industrial needs for national development;

3. Promote individual development and self-fulfilment;

4. Promote sound moral and religious values;

5. Promote social equality and responsibility;

6. Promote respect for and development of Kenya’s rich and varied culture;

7. Promote international consciousness and foster positive attitudes towards other nations; and

8. Promote positive attitudes towards good health and environmental protection (KICD, 2017).

Despite increased access to education, especially with the introduction of Free Primary Education (2003) and Free Secondary Education (2008), there have been widespread concerns with dismal transition rates to tertiary education and a failure to acquire competencies needed to thrive in the twenty-first-century workplace and to respond to global economic demands. In response, in 2017, the Kenyan government embarked on an extensive structural educational reform, revising its formal school curriculum, departing from its 8-4-4 system (eight years in primary, four years in secondary and four years in tertiary), first introduced in 1985 to a 2-6-6-3 structure (two years in pre-primary, six years in primary, three years in junior secondary, three years in senior secondary and three years in tertiary). More importantly, the core curriculum itself was substantially revamped to be more aligned to the Kenya 2030 vision for development. The new Competency Based Curriculum (CBC), intended to replace the older outcome-based curriculum, was promoted as being key to improving educational quality and was to be introduced in stages, with pre-primary to grade 3 in 2019 and grade 4 in 2020. Critics (e.g. Klune, 2019) however contend that the new curriculum was rolled out without much stakeholder collaboration or training of teachers. Additionally, a report from the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) (2020) points out that the pedagogical requirements for a CBC were not adequately planned, leaving teachers unprepared for the transition.

Religious Education in Kenya

Similar to other sub-Saharan African countries, Christian missionaries started Kenya’s first formal education programming in the colonial era in the 1800s. Missionaries introduced Christian Religious Education (CRE) for evangelical purposes. People were taught how to read and write using the Bible as the main reference book, and CRE formed the core of the whole school curriculum. After independence, the Ominde Commission in 1964 determined that CRE was to be taught as an academic subject. The National Committee on Educational Objectives and Policies (NCEOP) of 1976 (popularly known as the Gachathi Report) recommended that CRE should be instituted in the education system for morals and for improvement in the quality of life. RE continued to be a prominent part of the national curriculum. In 1999, the Koech report recommended that CRE continue being taught because it would contribute to the inculcation of religious, social and ethical values to the youth (Itolondo, 2013).

Unlike the multi-faith RE that has been adopted to varying degrees in several other countries (e.g. Malawi, Ghana, Zambia), RE in Kenya, however, continues to have a particularist focus, with confessional CRE taught in schools alongside Islamic Religious Education (IRE) and Hindu Religious Education (HRE) (Matemba, 2005). In Kenya, RE is compulsory at primary and lower secondary levels, and confessional with students having the option to choose the RE of their confession, but they may not opt out. Matemba (2021) points to how this resistance to shift to a more multi-faith RE persuasion is a vestige of the colonial mindset and is typical in a number of other sub-Saharan African countries. This resistance to change is evidenced, for example, in the 2017 major revision of curriculum to the CBC, the existing RE curriculum was not changed in any substantial way (see Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 RE in the Kenyan curriculum at the upper primary level

Grades

New curriculum

Upper primary grades 4–6

At upper primary level, Religious Education (CRE/IRE/HRE) serves to impart morals, ethics and values at a deeper level. This subject builds on the competencies introduced in lower primary in the integrated subject of moral, religious and life skills activities. (a) Islamic Religious Education (IRE) at upper primary level serves to impart morals, ethics and values at a deeper level. The subject builds on the competencies introduced in lower primary in the integrated subject of moral, religious and life skills activities. The knowledge, skills and attitudes acquired are expected to help the learner to cope with the challenges of life. Emphasis should be on aspects of religion that help learners appreciate their own and other’s religious beliefs and values. (b) Christian Religious Education (CRE) at upper primary level serves to impart moral and ethical values at a deeper level. This subject builds on the competencies introduced in lower primary, which focus on God’s self-revelation through Jesus Christ. The knowledge, skills and attitudes learned and fostered here will help the learner to think critically and make appropriate decisions. (c) Hindu Religious Education (HRE) will also be an option in upper primary. The subject allows the learner to explore the history and development of the Hindu philosophy and religion. It encourages pupils to develop their sense of identity and belonging. It enables them to flourish individually within their communities and as citizens in a pluralistic society and global community.

Source: Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), 39.

There has been much criticism around both the content of RE in Kenya (Itolondo, 2012; Partington, 2017) and the textbooks used, and the teaching pedagogy employed. As Bunyi (2013, 12) asserts, ‘the teaching of religious education subjects – Christian religious education and Islamic religious education – have been taught through teacher centred methodologies which do not encourage students’ engagement with moral and ethical issues. Consequently, learning these subjects and indeed passing examinations in the subjects has not led to positive moral and ethical changes in the learners.’ Partington (2017) in his criticism of the RE asserts that it is not inclusive and does not promote critical thinking. With the current confessional incarnation of RE, ‘drilling and indoctrination’ is the norm, instead of it being engaging and relevant (Partington, n.d., 2). Researchers concluded that CRE failed to encourage critical thinking and does not encourage the asking of moral questions (Bunyi, 2013; Githaiga, 2017). Similarly, other studies have found that pupils think CRE is ‘boring’ and ‘useless in life’, and many in the secondary school level only opt fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Title Page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Religious Education in the Global South
• PART I STATE, STATUS AND PROVISION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
• PART II RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND CHANGES IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
• PART III TOWARDS DECOLONIZING RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
• PART IV YOUNG PEOPLE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
• PART V PERSPECTIVES ON TEACHERS OF RELIGIOUS AND VALUES EDUCATION
• PART VI RELIGIOUS AND MORAL EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION
• PART VII CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint