ABSTRACT
Many authors from the early 1960s onwards have been trying to alert teachers in particular to the real meaning of such mistakes with regard to religious education. Children have been making such errors because they have been misunderstanding. Religious education conveniently provides a neat model of what can happen when children cannot make sense of what they are being taught. Generations of children who were taught a didactic form of religious education that introduced them to abstract notions before they could possibly understand them, demonstrated the outcome in a highly measurable way that is sometimes difficult with other school subjects. In classroom terms and in terms of a nationally tested curriculum it is fairly evident that motivation by competition will be attractive only to the few and the casualties will not only be the less able in school or societal terms, but even learning itself.
