Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

s idea of Christian communitarianism in which health, work, education, safety, and other earthly needs are integral parts of the salvation project carried out by 4 Ibid., p. 52. New Inspirations and Religious Education in Poland 21 religions. In the light of this, the Church should be the vanguard of the new age, also in the field of economy. Cobb criticises what he views as the neocolonial politics of the West (particularly the United States) toward the rest of the world. Social relationships, so far regulated by the interests of a small group of decision makers, should be based on neighbour solidarity whose model may be found in the Old Testament community of Israel. 5 The process view of education is connected with the chief principles of American pragmatism which, in my opinion, results in the idea of the interpenetration of religious traditions and theological concepts, regarded by Cobb as a necessary catalyst of development, both in the dimension of a single human being and the whole of society. The concepts of reality as a dynamic collection of interactions occurring between the participants, the open (non-determined) world, the relational character of the awareness (soul) and the being (body), the complementariness of apparently mutually exclusive notions and phenomena, and viewing truth in terms of everyday life, seem common to both pragmatism and post-Whiteheadian processualism. From this perspective education is based on intertwining of different perspectives and of a broad spectrum of worldviews. In addition, the legitimacy of the Enlightenment purpose of social progress is questioned. Cobb demonstrates that the replacement of process with progress brings to the contemporary world a growing chaotic fragmentation of social life and alienates man from nature which has its own pace of development. A solution to this problem is seen in the remarriage of science and religion, i.e. the harmony of rational and irrational factors, as postulated by processists. This theory, enabling a simultaneous perception of reality in terms of the general (God) and the specific (fact), should be reflected both in education concepts and school curricula; here, the school is considered as a natural point of encounter (of students, teachers, books, histories, present and potential problems, spaces, etc.) while the role of the teacher is not to pass on ‘ready’ knowledge but to creatively coordinate the mutual influences occurring among the participants of such encounters. As mentioned earlier, process philosophy, as well as related theological and pedagogical reflection, is strongly connected to American pragmatism, represented by Charles S. Peirce, William James, George Flerbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley and - above all - John Dewey. According to these philosophers, knowledge should always be oriented towards the real world characterised by diversity and changeability (using Dewey’s terms, reality is subj