Does the Worldviews Approach Provide a New Paradigm for Religious Education?

The concept of a worldviews approach as a new paradigm of religious education has gradually come to characterise and to give unified form to the Commission on Religious Education’s (2018) proposals. Such usage connects to ongoing debates about how best to describe and interpret the ongoing history of developments in religious education as well as setting it in a wider intellectual context where the language of ‘theoretical models,’ ‘paradigms,’ ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘revolutions’ is used by various disciplines to describe the emergence and development of new disciplinary frameworks; and it is one such that CoRE believes it is initiating in religious education. These terms go back to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; enlarged 2nd edition, 1970). The critical question is whether the proposed worldviews approach does provide a new paradigm for religious education, as its supporters believe. Both descriptive terms, new and paradigm are important. Are CoRE’s proposals new and do they collectively constitute a paradigm? A new paradigm must provide a comprehensive and integrated vision of beliefs and values to direct religious education and offer hope that it will overcome current weaknesses and be able chart a different direction for the subject. It is concluded that CoRE’s worldviews approach is neither new nor should it be regarded as a paradigm.