The Religious Education Council's (REC) 2013 "Review of Religious Education in England" consists of a National Curriculum Framework for RE (NCFRE) designed to unite the RE community around a shared programme of study for pupils aged 4-14, and a set of six policy recommendations for the consideration of the RE community and…

This article researches work by four pupils in a diachronic collection of Norwegian primary school workbooks. Given signs of a variety of voices and perspectives in chosen representations of central tenets and/or practices in religions and philosophical traditions, how can an analysis and discussion of a few chosen texts shed light on their…

Recent studies have increasingly favoured contextualisation of religious education (RE) to pupils' home faith background in spite of current assessment methods that might hinder this. For a multi-religious, multi-ethnic sample of 369 London school pupils aged from 13 to 15 years, this study found that the participatory, transformative and…

This article describes the way in which religious education (RE) has been organised in Flanders and Belgium, and gives attention to the problems and challenges that arise these days. We argue that the "Schoolpact" of 1958 which implies separate RE in different religions in public schools needs a revision. Therefore, we propose an alternative…

The 2004 "National Framework for Religious Education" (NFRE) innovatively recommended that secular philosophies such as humanism, or secular worldviews, be included in locally agreed syllabuses for religious education (RE) in England. However, the NFRE is a non-statutory document, and Agreed Syllabus Conferences (ASCs) and Standing Advisory…

The new National Framework for Religious Education (RE) suggests, for the first time in national advice on agreed syllabuses, that atheism can be included in the curriculum alongside world religions. This article counters objections to the inclusion of atheism in RE and argues that children and young people can learn from atheistic beliefs and…

This article contains the results of how a selected group of Finnish upper secondary students understand Lutheranism. The data consisted of 63 students' responses to a writing task together with complementary interviews of 11 students. The outcomes of phenomenographic analysis of variation in the students' understanding of Lutheranism are…

Although well documented from a British perspective, empirical research exploring the spiritual lives of primary school children in the Australian context is a field in which scholarship is beginning to emerge. This article reports on one particular finding which emerged from an Australian study seeking to identify some characteristics of…

Although inter-religious conflicts have not yet surfaced as major social problems in Japan, religious education for peace and tolerance is needed in the country as much as in other countries. This article aims to disclose that, in light of political contexts, supposedly neutral "teaching about religion" can be as problematic as history education…

Educators seek to nurture in the hearts and minds of students a sense of moral thinking, action and behaviour. What these constitute is dependent on one's perspective, or worldview. Moral thinking and action emerge from worldviews or visions of life--religious or secular. In the history of common or public schools educators have linked moral…

A nine-country survey of the life orientations, values and institutional trust of 8948 young people at the upper end of the secondary school age range was set up at the University of Wurzburg in the year 2000. Key findings demonstrate that these young people value personal autonomy and are orientated to success in their professional lives and that…

Christian knowledge used to be taught in the Norwegian state school as a compulsory subject for members of Lutheran churches. In 1997 this was replaced by a subject that is compulsory for all pupils, where both Christianity, other religions and secular world views are taught on an equal basis, although more time should be used on Christianity than…

In this article, the author comments on Professor White's response to his criticisms of White's attack on compulsory religious education (White, 2004). Religious education, the author contends, raises questions of fundamental importance and complexity that compulsion is necessary if people are to create anything resembling a religiously literate…

This paper discusses aspects of Andrew Wright's version of a liberal, critical religious education and his criticisms of some other views of modern religious education. This is attempted not by examining these "other views" as such but by concentrating on the work of John Hick. The reason for this is that Wright, like Cooling (in his book "A…

Though religion continues to enjoy a global significance for humankind, any justification of the compulsory status of religious education must be made on the basis of reason rather than public consensus. We live in a pluralistic world in which contrasting world views, grounded in radically conflicting ontological assumptions, vie for our…