ABSTRACT
A vision of transformative knowledge as the goal of education and learning will have some fairly tough rivals for the hearts and minds of the next generation. Increasingly, the ideals of liberal pedagogy appear highly counter-cultural: and the principle of education for its own sake or education as an expression of the well-being of the civic realm has been superseded by an altogether more instrumentalist ethos. This chapter discusses the core convictions of liberal theology, partly because Peter C. Hodgson sees that as a vital source for the reconstruction of pedagogy. Liberalism was forged in the conflict between the economic, political and philosophical interests of a nascent industrial social order and the forces of tradition and conservatism. However, the problem for liberalism is that in affirming the particularity of its own truth-claims, it is vulnerable to charges that it simply baptises the status quo; and consequently changing times and circumstances can leave it looking anachronistic.
