Moral Development: whose ethics in the teaching of religious education?

Abstract

Will British education in general, and religious education specifically, foster a nationalistic or global ethic in the coming millennium? Since the 1988 Education Reform Act, the British state has centralised its control over what is taught through the national curriculum. The Chief Executive of the government's School Curriculum and Assessment Authority has been consistently articulating the importance of national consciousness and identity. These developments suggest a worrying trend towards a more nationalistic ethic. Religious education, by contrast, is now mandatory multi‐faith, part of the basic school curriculum and remains locally controlled. While the historic and present importance of Christianity in the United Kingdom is acknowledged, it is a secularised non‐conformity rather than establishment Christianity that is used by the author to develop a child‐centred, non‐authoritarian and communitarian model for fostering moral development through the teaching of multi‐faith religious education in state schools.