ABSTRACT
Proponents of ‘Religion and Worldviews Education’ claim it heralds a new paradigm shift in religious education – necessary to make the subject relevant to the contemporary world. Yet to date relatively little engagement has been made to relate these proposals to a body of theoretical and empirical inquiry about religious education pedagogy stretching back to the 1960s. Major figures in the development of religious education identified and attempted to resolve several issues in the development of pedagogical models suitable for pupils of all faiths and those of none. The principal problematic for all these thinkers was how to reconcile what they saw as the claims of religions on the one hand, and the aims of secular education on the other. Related to this central tension, they set out to tackle a series of issues such as: ‘How can young people learn from religion if they do not believe in it?’; ‘How can the reification of religious traditions be avoided?’; and ‘How can teachers deal with conflicting truth claims in the classroom?’ In this chapter, it is argued that the proposed worldviews paradigm offers little in the way of new solutions to them: changing the name or legal status of the curriculum subject to ‘Religion and Worldview Education’ offers no significant new insights but potentially puts the coherence and integrity of the subject at risk.
