ABSTRACT
When in the 1920s and 1930s the first Agreed Syllabuses of religious education were being devised, the main drive behind their formulation was theology. Teaching through themes has become popular in the last five or six years, since the method was suggested by Ronald Goldman. A theme is a unit of work organized around a topic which is known to the child from first-hand experience. A theme can be tamed by giving careful consideration to the implication for Christian faith of both the method of constructing a theme and also the implications of the content of the theme. The implications of the method need to be carefully distinguished from the implications of the content. Some themes are mainly concerned to familiarize pupils with biblical metaphors, but in the case of those which seek to help the pupil to explore and interpret aspects of his own experience, important problems about the sacred and the secular arise.
