A critical evaluation of the South African policy on religion and education (2003)

Abstract

In this critical evaluation of the National Policy on Religion and Education (Republic of South Africa 2003) , I will invite a multiplicity of voices and opinions from various disciplines and discourses - a Bakhtinian carnival of heteroglossic play . As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchal rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalised and completed (Bakhtin 1984:10).

In this time of postmodern carnival, official 'Truth' is constantly questioned and treated with suspicion and replaced by new and unofficial truths (Scott 1986; Hiebert 2003). God (if not religion) has been proclaimed dead and yet at the same time seems to be more alive than ever. This is a time when 'all the conventional norms and protocols are suspended, as the common life is invaded by a great wave of riotous antinomianism which makes everywhere for bizarre mésalliances' (Scott 1986:6). And the presiding spirit of blasphemy finds its quintessential expression in the ritual of the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king - who is the very antithesis of a real king, since he is in fact often a slave or a jester. In short, everything is topsy-turvy, and the disarray thus engenders an uproarious kind of laughter (Scott 1986:6).

In his presidential address to the American Academy of Religion in 1986 titled 'The house of intellect in an age of carnival: some hermeneutical reflections', Scott (1986:7) explores the impact of the "multiplicity and fragmentation and diversity" facing 'the house of intellect', and identifies the challenge of not resorting to the safety of 'any sort of reductionism, [but] how to understand and interpret the multitudinous messages and voices that press in upon us, each clamouring for attention and for pride of place'.

After acknowledging the polyphony surrounding Religionswissenschaft on the one hand and on the other hand rejecting any hermeneutical attempts at a 'totalistic' synthesis, Scott proposes moving among the different 'modalities' of interanimation between [the various] modes of discourse' (Ricoeur quoted by Scott 1986:11). Scott (1986:15) closes his address by appealing for continued conversations and dialogue among discourses and 'scatterings' of truth (1986:15) as a hermeneutical method that would take the plurality and heteroglossia of this time in history seriously.

This thesis is an attempt - a personal but also a scholarly and academically responsible attempt - to plot many of the voices and contexts that would help to evaluate the specific understanding of the role of the study of religion in the broader contexts of citizenship in a postmodern age where nationalities, nation states and allegiances are constantly in flux and complex.

This thesis is also submitted as proof of the validity of my own voice as one of many voices in and surrounding the house of intellect in an age of carnival.