ABSTRACT
Curriculum in this chapter is taken to mean everything that goes on in school and not only a content list to be ‘known and understood’. It recognises that where education is ‘theorised’ as a ‘space of emergence’ curriculum cannot be focussed on bringing about the convergence of individual perspectives. Where plurality is the condition of action, and interested in the emergence of unique individuals (rather than a collection of objects all belonging to the same class or category) children and young people must be able to emerge as subjects of their own lives and not seen as objects who have ‘to achieve’ all the same kinds of things. Religious education curriculum in this sense will no longer be understood as a means by which children and young people reach predetermined outcomes, nor as a place where they demonstrate that they have ‘learned’ or in some way ‘know and understand’ a set of predetermined knowledge or predetermined set of questions. Instead it will secure the conditions for each child to make her beginnings in the world.
In concluding the book Chapter 8 proposes a need to rediscover the role of the teacher as the guide to formation of curricula for religious education. The ‘pearls’, as it were, have turned out to be the lost or perhaps forgotten constituent elements of religious education; namely education and religion. The cost of not taking action on this will be great. It would mean the loss of the possibility of the new coming into the world and ultimately the loss of the public sphere at all.
