CHAPTER SIX Understanding Our World and Ourselves One of the most important reasons for being educated

is for people to have a good understanding of themselves and the world within which they live and are a part of. The curriculum plays an important role in achieving this, so consideration needs to be given to what should be selected from the culture to achieve this goal. Ontology The very first thing to think about is what, in general terms, do we and the world consist of. The world is as it is, however it may be at the time. Our ontology is what we say the world consists of, and here people agree on some things and disagree on what else exists in the world. At its most basic level, does the world, ourselves included, consist solely of physical entities and nothing else, or are there also metaphysical entities beyond the physical? In other words, are the only things in the world physical things or is there more to the world than this which we must take into account? There are probably few who would rationally deny that the world is filled with physical entities. First and foremost are physical objects about which we can have sensory experience. There are rivers and mountains, sticks and stones, tables and chairs as well as the bodies of ourselves and other creatures. They are the ordinary everyday things which we come into contact with at a very early age and learn about through experience. The question is whether the physical is all there is to the world or whether there are also things in the world beyond the physical. Are there, for example, such things such metaphysical things as minds, souls, gods and the like? Before we proceed to giving an answer to the question, we would do well to consider Occams razor. In contemplating what there is, we should not multiply entities beyond that required to explain or account for our experience. If the physical is all that we need in order to spell out what exists then there is no need to go beyond these and posit metaphysical entities. For example, if we can explain human behaviour solely by reference to brains and brain states then there is no need to invoke minds and mental states. If we can explain human conduct in terms of human interests alone then there is no need to posit gods or God. On brains and brain states and the need for minds and mental states to explain human behaviour, there is little dissent that brains and brain states are a necessary requirement; whether they are sufficient is another and more controversial matter. That we have brains and

brain states are not usually disputed even though most of assume this to be so rather than having direct evidence of their existence. It is likely that few of us will see our own brains although a few others, such as neurosurgeons, might see our brains. Headaches are often taken to be evidence that we have brains which at the time are in a certain, somewhat abnormal and unpleasant, state for which we take pain relief to ease the discomfort. The brain is an organ consisting of neurons, or neural cells, usually possessing an axon and any number of dendrites, with the later connecting to the former of other neurons in ways which form a vast neural network. Information received via the senses is transmitted across the network, not in single-file serial form but in parallel across the network as a whole. Simultaneously, a huge number of computations occur which allow complex operations to take place. New connections are formed by the growth of additional dendrites and further connections of dendrites with axons while existing connections may be pruned. In which case the disconnection halts further information processing along this route. This plasticity of the brain allows new learning to occur, for learning to be held in memory for later recall, or for learning to be lost from memory altogether. Increasingly we are discovering new things about the human brain which allow us to explain our conduct in physical terms alone. There is a view, widely held, that more is required than the brain alone to account for human conduct. Hence, minds with their mental states are posited as being essential to explanations of our own behaviour and the behaviour of others. We talk of I cannot make up my mind, What is on your mind?, I am in two minds about that and so on. Minds are not physical things; quite what they are, where they are located, and how they connect with physical things such as brains and bodies are particular problems for those who posit minds and mental states. On one account, minds and bodies are very different things made of different sorts of stuff; bodies are physical entities which exist in time and space while minds are mental entities which exist in time alone. Minds possess certain characteristics such as the ability to form propositional attitudes about things, such as I believe, I hope, I intend, I wish, I want and so on. Quite what these are is never really all that clear, nor is their functioning well explained. What, for example, is an intention, what is it to form an intention and how does having an intention to do something bring about the doing of it; for example, if I say to a friend that I intend going to the theatre tonight, how does having an intention to go to the theatre, which is a mental thing, make my body, which is a physical thing, go to the theatre? Another account identity - avoids this problem but raises another difficulty. Two different meanings may refer to the same thing, as with the two expressions morning star and evening star and the planet Venus. Now, with this example the different meanings pick out different locations of the same planet, it being the first star to appear in the evening and the last to disappear in the morning, so to speak. Nothing about the planet changes; what changes is our perception of it under different circumstances. But this does not fit so well with brain/mind talk. If mind and brain are like two sides of the same coin then we are back with a variant of the dualism problem, for this way of putting it fails to tell us what the mental is and how it interacts with the physical. And if talk of the mind and talk of the brain is talk of the

same thing, as with the identity theory, then we might as well dispense with mental talk and just focus on refining out brain talk. Other metaphysical entities, appealing as they are, are just as problematic. Talk of souls and gods is fraught with difficulty. What souls are, what they are for, what they do and why, are puzzling questions which have generated a host of novel responses, such as people in the form of their soul outlive their physical body and may return in the shape of another body, hence reincarnation, or the body is earthly and of a short duration but the soul (or spirit) is everlasting and goes to heaven. Comforting as this may from a religious point of view, philosophically the existence of souls is far less secure. The question, Does God exist? has been around for a long time and continues to vex us. Theoretical arguments for the existence of God abound, some of which are particularly creative while others are little more than articles of faith. Two key arguments are that the universe could not just come from nowhere so there had to be a first cause, God; and the universe is ordered so who ordered it God. Empirical evidence that God exists relies on dreams, personal testimony, miracles and the like, the reliability of which is a matter of public debate. As for the character of God, how is it possible for a deity who is all loving, all knowing and all powerful, to allow such pain, misery and evil in the universe God created? In the end, do we require God in order to live good lives, and the answer is no. But this is not to leave God impotent in the lives of people, for many act in accordance with their understanding of Gods will, not always with good outcomes for themselves and others. Finally, there are the mythical creatures which various societies posit to explain experience for which they have no other reasonable explanation. In many cases, what were once held to be real entities are now regarded as myths, having been replaced by more compelling explanations. They continue to have cultural value, for one reason or another, but their existence is no longer seriously entertained. And they enter into the curriculum as such. But where certain creatures are deemed to be real, even though there is no or little direct sensory evidence for their existence, then there is more of a problem insofar as the curriculum is concerned. If their existence is taught as being certain and beyond dispute, even where the evidence for their existence is untrustworthy, then there is a very real danger that the teaching of such content will be indoctrinatory rather than having educational value, insofar as children will come to have a closed and uncritical attitude rather taking an open and evaluative stance. So, from the culture should metaphysical entities be included in the curriculum? Minds and mental states are, for many, hard to resist but their inclusion must be on the basis of critical scepticism and a willingness to entertain the neural alternative. If church schools have some grounds for promoting the existence of God, then public schools with a duty to accommodate all views, including agnostic and atheistic positions, can favour none: all they can do is, in a secular way, support religious education which introduces children to an understanding of

different religions while avoiding religious instruction which initiates children into a particular faith. On mythical creatures, they can have a valuable educational purpose as part of literature or history but if taken literally run the risk of indoctrination.

Constructivism or Realism One feature of the culture which is the subject of some controversy is whether the world exists independently of us, waiting to be discovered or whether we create the world, thus having no independent reality. In simple terms, the debate is between realism and constructivism. But the problem is not quite as clear-cut as this. An important distinction to make is between the world as it is and the world as we see it. The world is as it is, however or whatever it might be. On this account, the rest of the world would exist even if humans did not. There would still be rivers and mountains, cats and dogs, jungles and deserts, and so on. Presumably this was so prior to human existence on earth. But humans now inhabit this planet and, through our senses, are able to experience it. What we observe is not given to us directly, like the image of a landscape on the film taken through the camera lens. There is, so to speak, more to seeing than meets the eyeball. What we see (or hear, etc) is given to us by the concepts we bring to bear and of the same thing observed different concepts can lead to different understandings of what we see. This point is well illustrated by various perceptual illusions such as the duck/rabbit, old lady/young woman and candle stick/two faces images. First we see the old lady and then we see the young woman, but not the two at the same time. While these examples underscore the point that all observation is theory laden, they also support the idea that that since there is no external vantage point then we have no way of determining which account is the true one with these images, both interpretations are. But from these images we need not conclude that the same applies to many of our observations of the world. If two people with normal sensory mechanisms look out of a window and one says it is day and the other that it is night or one says it is raining heavily and the other says it is not raining at all, then we would not be inclined to say that both are right and leave it at that. We would say that what they said was contradictory, in which case one could be right and the other wrong but both cannot be telling the truth. Either it is day or it is night at this particular time at this particular location but not both, and likewise with the rain. And we have no difficulty reaching a conclusion one way or the other. If it were dark but someone said what a bright sunny day it was or if it is raining heavily but someone said it was not raining at all, in the face of a fact of the matter we would be very puzzled indeed by why they made such obviously false claims. So, we can conceive of the world any way we like but not all conceptions of the world are equally true. Part of the world exists independently of us and there is nothing we can do about it. Earthquakes, heavy rainfall, tornados, and many other natural events happen, come what may and about which we can do nothing to prevent. In a sense we have to learn to live with them

and including an understanding of them in the curriculum has both intrinsic educational value as well as being prudent if we live in zones where such events occur. Other natural events take place over which we do have some control, such as building stop banks to reduce flooding, managing some drought-stricken regions with irrigation schemes and building bridges of impassable rivers and ravines. Then there are the things we create out of materials in the world around us. We take iron ore and turn it into steel to make pots and pans, trains and their tracks, and all the other things we are so familiar with. We combine, refine and process various materials to create new materials such as plastics. We also work with unobservables, such as magnetism, radio waves and electrical impulses to construct new products, including television, computers and digital devices. Finally, we create purely social things, such as language, customs, habits, mores, values, promises, personal relationships and the like. While different in many respects, some being given in nature through to others socially constructed, they all have one thing in common they are all physically constituted, so regardless of their origin and the way they came to be, they are all bound by the same reality at the most basic level of existence. There is but one world and it is a physical world. Creation Science Before moving on from the natural world to the social world it is worth briefly considering a topic which, in a way, bridges the two. There are two questions which have puzzled people for a very long time: how did the universe come into being and how did humans make it onto the scene. For both questions there are two answers, one from science and the other from religion. On how the universe came into being, science offers the big ban g theory to explain the origin of the universe. From the point of the bang onwards, science tells quite a powerful story about matter being strewn around from which suns and planets were formed and assumed certain trajectories of motion. But bangs do not happen out of nothing something prior to the bang must have existed to cause the bang, and science struggles with what this something was. Religion fills the void by positing God but, creative as this is as a solution to the problem, for the non-religious person this has no credibility. Since humans were not around to witness the event then it will forever remain a matter of speculation. How humans came to be on this earth is a matter of more personal interest to many people. Science, since Darwin, has favoured the theory of evolution, that the earliest species, in adapting to their environment in order to survive as well as accommodating genetic mishaps, changed in various ways or spawned new species such that at some time in the past creatures like humans evolved and humans duly emerged such that we are what we are today. Putting aside the problem of explaining how the first life form could arise from non-living material, evolution has considerable explanatory force in a general way but has difficulty explaining some of the particular evolutionary changes. The mechanism of evolution does not seem to be able to explain exactly how or why it was that apes, monkeys, gorillas and ape-men primates evolved as separate species nor how from this genetic family did humans develop to

become what we are today. Again, religion comes to the rescue, thanks to God. Once the world was brought into existence then God populated it with flora and fauna, including humans. Simple with certain elegance to it, but new questions arise. Why did God create humans rather than leave it at the lesser primates? Did God create us in Gods image (why should we think God looks like us?) or was their some mischief in God creating us the way we are? Are we Gods plaything (like a zoo or circus) or are we just part of a big experiment designed by God? In the past, the divide was reasonably clear: science versus religion. Evolution was taught in science classes while creation was confined to religious instruction classes. But the clear water has become muddied with the rise of creation science and the push for its inclusion in the school curriculum. Compared with evolution, creation has had a bad press. Science has a far higher status than religion. So if creation is recast as a science then it should be accorded the same respect as the other sciences. Now, if we accept the view that all of our theory is part of a system or web then it is not too difficult to accept that, as theory, creation is on a par with evolution. But this does not mean that the two theories have equal merit. First, as a theory evolution coheres much better with the rest of our theory than does creation. Second, evolution does seem to provide a far more powerful explanatory mechanism to account for various changes in species even if it is incapable of giving a persuasive answer to the question of how life first began. Third, one mark of scientific theory is its refutability proponents of evolution seem far more willing to accept that, as a science, evolution may turn out to be false and be replaced by another more powerful empirical theory in a way that those committed to creation as a science appear far more unwilling to do. It is hard to see what could possibly falsify creation as a theory; being privileged in this way and quarantining creation from possibly refutation puts it well outside of the realms of science. The claim that since evolution and creation are both sciences they should be accorded equal teaching time in the curriculum seems to be unwarranted. Cultural Pluralism Humans live in a social world where their lives are shaped by the culture they are embedded in. The new-born baby arrives in a pre-existing social world created by others; an adult has the opportunity to change that world in any of many ways. The leader of a superpower is capable of changing the course of human history on a global scale, the head of a small nation can influence the lives of its citizens, a teacher is in a position to affect the lives of the children in the class, and a parent has the capacity to alter the lives of a child in the family. Over the course of human history, these and other forces have lead to a variety of cultural forms, composed of some common elements (rejection of family incest) and many divergent practices (sexual habits). Such cultural pluralism has the virtue of creating considerable human interest (often met by travelling or living overseas) but for the school curriculum it also generates some problems.

Cultural pluralism recognises that there is considerable cultural diversity different languages, different art forms across music, painting, dance and artefacts, different values, different religious practices, different health and medical traditions, different clothing, different foods and so on. Now, accepting that these divergent cultural practices do, as a matter of empirical fact, exist is one thing; agreeing that they ought to exist is quite another. On some things people tend to agree. There is a general aversion to the gratuitous torture of other humans, there is general agreement that no human should be the slave of another person, most humans prefer pleasure over pain, that overall it is better to tell the truth rather than tell lies and keep promises rather than break them, while most people value sex for reproduction of the species (as well as the pleasure it brings) over abstinence by all and the demise of the human species. So, there is a common core of shared cultural commitments required for the continuing existence of any form of advanced social life. Of the things which diverge across cultures, we can do one of two things. We may disapprove of certain things and not wish to engage in them but, being tolerant, accept that they fall within the sphere of the acceptable for others to engage in them if they wish. So, it is plausible for a man to disapprove of male homosexual relationships between consenting adults and so not enter into such relationships but accept that other men may do so and he would take no steps to prevent them but not encourage it either. This is to be tolerant of those things we tend to disapprove of. Or a cultural practice may fall outside of what can be tolerated and so is condemned. The practice of female genital mutilation is illustrative. In certain countries it is permissible. On matters such as these there is a view that what is done in these countries is their concern and however much we might be repulsed by the practice we have no right to criticise those who practice infibulation nor prevent them from engaging in such a practice. Well meaning as this attitude may be from a liberal, tolerance point of view, it is nonetheless mistaken. It is not a matter of each to their own or live and let live; it runs far deeper than this. The question is, Should any human being ever be treated in this way? If the answer is yes, then what is the moral justification for some young girls in certain countries being treated in this way while similarly aged girls in other countries are not? And if the answer is no, then this applies to all girls of a particular age regardless of the country they live in. One of the difficulties with tolerance is where to draw the line between what one will tolerate and what one will not. A critical question about tolerance is this: How tolerant ought a tolerant person to be of those who are intolerant? Probably enough to hear the point of view, but sooner or later the intolerance prevents any rational dialogue. In short, there is much to be said of the value of cultural pluralism but it need not come at the price of cultural relativism. We need not and ought not to be bound by the view that we should accept other cultures traditions and practices as being beyond criticism and even rejection; rather, where there are rational and moral grounds to do so then do so we should. And such a stand should be deeply embedded in the curriculum.

Political Correctness One of the things about ourselves which has come to the fore in recent times, and which impacts significantly on making a selection from the culture for purposes of the school curriculum, is political correctness. This is characterised as the way in which ideas, policies, language and practices are shaped to reduce individual and organisational offence to particular cultural, religious, disability, sexuality, ethnic and age groups. While it is wrong to set out to deliberately offend others for no other reason than merely to cause offence, it is also the case that some people take offence at the smallest things at the drop of a hat. Some things are likely, at one time or another, to be offensive to others to a greater or lesser degree. Being offended may not be pleasant for individuals and groups but taking offence is an insufficient reason for preventing others from doing or saying certain things. If we excluded everything from the curriculum to which someone at some time had objected to (even on the most frivolous grounds), then the curriculum would probably be close to empty. The grounds for objection due to offence need to be considered and weighed up on a case by case basis. Some offence might well be justified, and should be acted upon by politicians, policy makers and teachers. But some offence may be misplaced, inappropriate or based on misunderstanding and where this occurs then schools need to be wary about acting in ways that have serious effects on childrens education. The right of a child to be educated, to be able to make their own informed and rational judgement on ideas and practices, should not be denied them simply because others, parents included, object to its inclusion in the curriculum. The arguments for and against must be carefully weighed and critically assessed for their merits.

People Not Like Us We tend to feel much more comfortable with people like us, along all sorts of dimensions. Physically, the very tallest and the very shortest of adults attract our attention, as do those who have more severe physical deformities of the face and limbs. Siamese twins, for example, may fascinate us, particularly when they are in the news due to an operation to separate them. We might be repulsed by the less than pleasant sight of disfigurement caused by accidents and diseases. And then there is the advertising fetish to promote the ideal body of super-models as the norm when most of us fall well short of this, especially in an age of famine in some places and obesity in others. Intellectually, people to some extent do separate out on the basis of their differing abilities. Leading intellectuals, whether in science, the arts or other endeavours, tend to interact far more with those like them than with people with limited intellectual talent at the other end of the ability continuum. This is perhaps not surprising given the different interests of those with and without particular gifts and the nature of their linguistic communication. Some do

have a fortunate capacity to bridge the divide, especially those who are intellectually able Albert Einstein could speak to the leading physicists of his time with conceptual sophistication well beyond that of most people yet could address ordinary peoples in terms all could understand. So too could the philosopher Bertrand Russell. But generally the divide is such as to create considerable social disparities in other spheres of life. In most societies, citizens are distinguished by either social class or some similar form of social stratification tied to wealth, income, status of their work, where they live and how they live, and the like. In class-based societies, particularly those characterised as having an upper class or the extremely wealthy, middle class or the moderately wealthy and working class or those who are poor or in great poverty, the separation of one class from another can be particularly acute. While some of the boundaries have been eliminated, a significant level of class separation remains, as evident in, for example, the private schools some children attend, the sports played the cars people drive the location and value of the houses people own or rent the types of occupations people are engaged in, and so on. Given that money is one of the great drivers of peoples lives, such that those with much more of it can do much more and those with much less of it can do much less, that those with much more financial resource can exercise power while those with much less are at the mercy of such power. When those without start to make demands for a share of the wealth from those with it, this is often resisted by the latter and for them it is all boiled down to what they call the politics of envy; however, for those at the bottom envy does not drive them but a sense of social justice and equality does. Ethnicity has been a powerful divider of people. It has lead to strong feelings of racism by one ethnic group towards another, with no ethnic group being immune to giving and receiving racist taunts which all too easily can rapidly generate a violent response by those who are aggrieved by the slurs made against them. More extreme still is the subjugation of one ethnic group by another: Africans shipped to the United States to be sold as slaves to white owners and the extermination of millions of Jews, amongst others, stand as witness to the inhumanity of man to fellow man. Ethnicity is important and is recognised in some countries at least for example, many official documents, such as airport arrival cards and census forms, often list a wide variety of ethnic categories for people to self-select. Ones religion, or lack of, may or may not be a matter of great personal or state concern. Liberal societies tend to allow most religions to exist except in a few cases where these contravene the laws of the land, and within this secular tolerance citizens are free to belong to whatever religion, church or sect they choose or none at all. By and large, peace prevails. But not always. Christians do disagree, sometimes violently so, as with the catholic/protestant troubles of Northern Ireland; Christians and Muslims have a long history of conflict. Where one religion takes upon itself, or is granted by the state, a dominant or the sole role in religious affairs of a nation then trouble is never far away, for those who are persecuted for

their religious faith do not take kindly to such treatment. There have also been times when religion has been crushed by rulers far from sympathetic to its hold on the lives of citizens, as was evident in the communist era of the Soviet Union. Where religious freedom is permitted, as with ethnicity, this is recognised by the state listing on official forms various religions that can be self-selected. Ones gender is a further dimension which separates people. If gender is determined by physical or biological characteristics, then the common classification is a dualism of male and female. Males have a penis while females have breasts and a vagina. All pretty straightforward, at least as far as most documents are concerned: a person is either male or female. But things are rarely as clear-cut as this, for gender, too, falls along a continuum. Consider the following: The line is literal in many schools where students line up outside the classroom door, girls on one side, boys on another. It becomes a propositional truth when people are required to make a statement by ticking a box, male or female, when applying for jobs, university places, medical, tax and insurance claims, even for an airline ticket. I have just returned from the Third International Congress of Sex and Gender at Exeter College, Oxford University and was confronted there by many people that contradicted an easy male/female divide. The Bursar, Susan Marshall, for instance, presented as an elegant and confident woman, but has undergone surgery and hormonal treatment, change of birth certificate to make her female in all but law. There was a hypospadias male who was born with a micropenis and female urethra, but is chromosomally male. There were many men who were indistinguishable in appearance from each other except that some, having been born female, were unable to marry their female partners. There was an androgyne who has a penis and a uterus, had breasts until they were surgically removed and now has a beard and male baldness because of twenty seven years administration of testosterone. There were people whose performativities were neither male nor female, or if you like both male and female gay people, lesbians, bisexuals and transvestites. There were those with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome that is male chromosomes but a feminine morphology, though they would have been unable to bear children. There were women with facial hair and men with narrow shoulders. There were men who dressed as glamorous women (Haynes, 199, p.189). If men and women see themselves differently and treat one another accordingly, then those who are neither often fare much worse. Women may be treated badly in the home and at work and seek solace in the company of other women. Men may be violent to women, deprive them of life and liberty, restrict their movements and require certain home-based duties of them and keep them in financial serfdom. But normal gendered people have a poor record of treating these others as they see them with much in the way of human respect.

Peoples sexuality and the sexual relations they enter into can generate much public debate and social reaction. For some, normalcy is the order of the day. That is, normal heterosexual sexuality between consenting adults of the opposite sex who engage in a defined range of sexual activities. Anything else is unacceptable. This is especially so of homosexual relationships between men or between women. In liberal countries, where homosexuality was once not only not tolerated but also severely punished, now it is tolerated even if many who do tolerate it would not themselves ever seek to enter into such a relationship. Their personal feelings are put to one side in the interests of allowing others, in this respect, to live their lives accordingly. The same level of tolerance is rarely if ever extended to those whose sexual preferences include paedophilia (sex with young children), bestiality (sex with animals) and necrophilia (sex with dead humans). For those opposed to homosexuality, several responses are available. One is to rail against homosexuality and either seek to persuade homosexuals to see the error of their ways and renounce their homosexuality or else seek a change to the law and make homosexuality an illegal activity once more. This may change the overt behaviour but is unlikely to do much good with inner impulses and thoughts. The Muslim world regards homosexuality as both a religious sin and a civil crime which is to be punished. While this may pose a problem for individual Muslims who are also homosexuals, it poses no overt problem for schools in Muslim countries they are required to teach in accordance with religious and civil law. Whether this is morally right remains an open question. But a problem does arise for schools in liberal, pluralistic societies. Even if homosexuality is tolerated should it be promoted as having the same moral status as heterosexuality? And in schools with Muslim students, should homosexuality be taught as being an acceptable sexual practice? Well, people can tolerate something even if they do not approve of it, and they are not duty-bound to treat all that they tolerate with equal standing. So homosexuality can be tolerated even if accorded lesser value than heterosexuality. To accord homosexuality a lesser value than heterosexuality is not, however, to lessen the moral worth as persons of those who are homosexuals. As humans, they are entitled to the same rights as all humans possess. So, in a liberal society, if homosexuality is both legally permissible and morally tolerated then it should be taught as an acceptable form of human life, even if it causes offence to Muslims and others alike, including conservative Christians, who are strongly opposed to homosexuality, for one reason or another. What people wear can on occasions generate a great deal of debate. Those who choose to wear no clothes at all in public places, such as being nude on a family beach, are rightly not tolerated (a beach set aside for nude bathing is a different matter). It is not what people expect and such public displays of nudity, even if humorous (a streaker at a sporting event) are objected to and may even be punished. There is also a time and a place for what one wears. A bikini might be appropriate on the beach but not when visiting a national shrine, and to do so is to invite a very strong reaction from members of the public and a response from the authorities. The wearing of the national dress of ones origin (e.g. Scottish kilt) might be perfectly acceptable on some occasions (e.g. cultural celebrations) but may well be quite

inappropriate in a place of employment which requires the wearing of a company uniform (e.g. airline flight attendant, school uniform). The wearing of a full burka by women, especially Muslim women in Muslim countries, if freely chosen, seems reasonable. Being forced by others, whether by husbands or fathers or by clerics, does not. In liberal societies where the wearing of the burka is a matter of personal choice, wearing of them in public should be permitted even if it attracts the stares of others who find it hard to understand why women would choose to wear such clothing. But the right to wear a burka in public is not an absolute right. There will be times when the identity of a person can only be established by facial recognition and the request by particular authorities acceded to. For example, a policeman seeking to establish the identity of an arrested person, the witness in a court of law, the student sitting a university examination, and so on. Otherwise, the wearing of a full facial veil is permissible even if unnerving to others who are used to seeing the face of those with whom they have face to face conversations. Finally, body jewellery. Those items on parts of the body hidden from view are of no consequence; rings on ear lobes and eyes lids, studs on tongue and nose, are a bit more of a problem for those for whom beauty is in the eye of the beholder they are likely to see such body adornments as anything but beautiful. But, be this as it may, generally tolerance prevails although parents and employers may be far less accommodating. The school response has to weigh up the educational argument that the wearing of such adornments is likely to have little or no negative causal impact on student learning and the social control argument that allowing students to wear such jewellery is not only to invite student anarchy but also lowers the public perception of the school. The educational argument might be the stronger of the two but the social control argument is the one most likely to prevail. So it is that in these and other ways do we come to understand both the world and ourselves. References Haynes, F. (1999) More sexes please? Educational Philosophy and Theory. 31)2), 189-203.