فصلنامه روش شناسی علوم انسانی
پیاپی 40 (پاییز 1383)

Extending the special culture of Anglo-American worldwide, the process of globalization has made an unprecedented psychological challenge in the identities of non-westerners. The foregoing social and psychological challenges have had a plethora of teenagers and youths of our country wondering the dilemma of selecting cultural-ancient traditions or new modernism and have made them experience some levels of identity crisis. Therefore, it is essentially important to study how our teenagers and youths view globalization and how their attitude relates to their religious and national identity. With this aim, the scales of religious and national identity and attitude towards globalization, posed in this article, were defined and done on teenage high school and pre-university students. To this end, the pre-devised tools underwent a final revise, while conducting the research project - The study of how Iranian elementary and high school student's attitudes toward globalization affect their values and national-religious identity. Having gathered the data from 4800 samples nationwide, through cluster sampling among high school and pre-university male and female students from the provinces of Tehran, Markazi, Yazd, Khorasan, Mazandaran, and Chahar mahal Bakhtiyari, studies were conducted to determine the validity and reliability of research tools for micro and macro scales of religious identity, national identity and attitude toward globalization.

The human being is extremely vulnerable to crimes and corruption and likely to show immoral behavior when exposed to them, while the education aims to substitute evil and wickedness with good and prosperity. To manage how one behaves himself/herself and others, Islam provides clear and proper plans and norms including "punishment of the violator". The present article attempts to explain the concept of punishment, its conditions and variant types. Considering the issues raised in the article, close adherence to the conditions of punishment based on Islamic decrees can be viewed as one of the most essential and effective means of education to ensure the prosperity and welfare of the society.

The principle of obliging the trainee to adhere to religious duties plays an important role in the process of religious education, although it has been overlooked so far. The present article elaborates on a specific type of obligation (parents obliging their children to adhere to religious duties) and provides explanation for issues, such as the reason of applying this principle, the nature, domains and consequences of adhering or refuting such principle. It is concluded that it is a duty for parents to oblige their children to close adherence to religious duties according to various premises of our religious doctrine. Parents are required to adhere to this principle, proportionate to the significance level of the religious duties in line with their children's religious education.

With a glance at the constant development and progress of knowledge and information in today's world, critical thinking seems to be one of the most extensive concepts essential to any educational system. Western philosophers have always attached great importance to teaching critical thinking, among whom Socrates, Descartes, Kant and Popper are cases in point. Employing linguistic analysis, contemporary philosophers of education consider the critical thinking as a dispositional and episodic phenomenon. The authors believe that critical thinking, if practiced properly, can make a change in the process of learning in future. The article presents three light, gray and dark areas in our thought and culture and maintains that critical thinking has precious effects on the gray area including cognitive, mental, social and scientific effects. Utilizing an analytical style, the article tries to pave the way for training critical thinking in our schools and universities, which allegedly would lead to the betterment of the individual and the society.

The article primarily reviews the old paradigm, nowadays current in undeveloped countries, in brief and it familiarizes us with its presuppositions. It further deals with the advent of contemplating paradigm and the annals of development in attitudes towards education that led to the modern paradigm. Meanwhile, it gets us familiar with some of the principles of the modern paradigm. The article comprises the background of applied philosophy movement, critical thinking and its teaching shortcomings in other parts. "Philosophy for Children and Teenagers", as a step beyond critical thinking, as well as the latest outcome of applied philosophy are fully addressed. Furthermore, it discusses the advent and application of this project, children and teenager's desire toward it, the experiments positive consequences and the skills thought through this project. The latter one; however, utilizes the Matthew Lipman's opinion, who is one of the prominent designers of the latest outcomes on this paradigm.

The article has made an attempt to study the quality of Islamic education; however, it is still open to this question: "Can Islamic education be a science?" Discussing different meanings of education, the following article also examines the aspects where it can be referred to as Islamic education science and it accounts for the major obstacles on the way of each approach. It specifically challenges the inferential approach and maintains that this science, being experimental or narrative, comes across variant religious interpretations, judgments and justifications, lack of a sound methodology, lack of transparency in concepts and hermeneutic issues. The article eventually recommends Islamic education as a process rather than a science where it has a lot to say.