ABSTRACT
The position we have so far reached is that, at the basis of educational practice, where that is identified with ‘development of persons’ or (as said by the college principal) with ‘making our children more human’, are foundational premises expressing what it means to be human – whether they are embodied, for example, in the liberal ideal of autonomy, or in a purely naturalistic account of, say, the molecular biologist, or in religious understandings of what it means to be human and to become more so. A problem, however, lies in the justification for such foundational premises. If they are without rational justification, does not their assumption in subsequent educational practice and teaching constitute indoctrination – which would seem to be the one ‘mortal sin’ in the secular ethics?
