Sacrificing Cinderella: will giving up Religious Education help to establish a more promising successor?

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the recent report of the Commission on Religious Education on “Religion and Worldviews“. While it praises the report for its honest critical evaluation of the current situation of Religious Education in England as well as for the effort of improving this situation by suggesting far-reaching amendments at a systemic level, the article also raises a number of critical questions. These questions refer to the relationship between state and religion, to problems arising from the ill-defined term ‘worldview’, to unresolved problems concerning teacher education in the area of worldviews as well as to the lack of attention to research on Religious Education in the report. Altogether it does not appear necessary to give up the subject of Religious Education in order to improve the situation and not enough good reasons have been presented for switching to a new subject which, in other countries, has in fact created many new problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious Education
• worldview
• state and church

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Friedrich Schweitzer

Friedrich Schweitzer holds the chair of Religious Education / Practical Theology at the Protestant Faculty of Theology, University of Tuebingen, Germany. His research interests refer to religious education in different fields of formal and non-formal education, moral education and inter-religious education. In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from the Uniiversity of Helsinki. He recently co-edited the book Researching Religious Education: Classroom Processes and Outcomes (Waxmann, 2018) and co-authored the book The Future of Protestant Religious Education in an Age of Globalization (Waxmann, 2018).