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Religious education

About: Religious education is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9554 publications have been published within this topic receiving 65331 citations. The topic is also known as: faith-based education & RE.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors discusses contemporary issues that surround faith-based schooling within a pluralistic society and includes arguments for and against the views that exclusivity and divisiveness are fostered in faith based schools.
Abstract: This article discusses some contemporary issues that surround faith-based schooling within a pluralistic society and includes arguments for and against the views that exclusivity and divisiveness are fostered in faith-based schools. The article also considers the educational aims of such schools and the rights of the child, examining notions of selectiveness, autonomy, indoctrination, and encapsulation. The distinctiveness of religious education and the inclusion of citizenship education within the curriculum of faith-based schools is discussed and the implications of this curricular relationship are considered, as is the possibility of an inherent contradiction in such a relationship. The theological reasoning regarding educational provision within faith schools unfolds throughout the article. Final comments include considerations for the future expansion of faith-based schools in system-driven educational environments.

18 citations

Dissertation
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: For example, this paper found that older pupils express a strong love of the family, a trust in education, a leaning towards a value-rational work ethic, developed and reflective thought processes on existential questions, a clearly articulated foundation of values, and a belief in the future which generates an ambition to act accordingly.
Abstract: This dissertation makes up the first report based on data collected during the project "Teenagers: aspects of their life style and attitudes" (Tonaringens livssituation och livstolkning) in the subject Religious Studies taken by pupils attending Year 9 during the 1993/94 school year. The general aim of the study is to discover the central values of life which pupils hold, as expressed in an essay on what is worth striving for in life. The focus for the study is to (1) show the direction and character of the pupils’ central values of life, (2) investigate how consistent or diverse these ideas are amongst the pupils, and (3) develop a form of teaching designed to stimulate pupils to reflect on questions of an existential nature, and subsequently to use their reflections in the teaching of the subject Religious Studies. The investigation shows: (i) That older pupils express a strong love of the family, a trust in education, a leaning towards a value-rational work ethic, developed and reflective thought processes on existential questions, a clearly articulated foundation of values, and a belief in the future which generates an ambition to act accordingly. The pupils do, however, find it easier to approach such problems from an anthropological rather than ontological perspective. (ii) That girls often write longer and more emotionally in their essays than boys. The investigation shows a consensus on common ideas, but also a diversity which creates a demand for teaching adapted to the individual. The pupils’ alternative viewpoints also hint at a possible future change of values on existential questions. The study shows that the pupils means of expressing their ideas is dependent on their age, but it also reveals much in common with earlier studies on younger children. One can, however, note a difference in quality in older pupils in this study, owing to the fact that they possess a greater ability to express their reflective thinking. (iii) That a consistently followed programme of teaching based on the pupils’ own ideas gives rise to good possibilities of knowledge acquisition in the compulsory-school subject Religious Studies, and that a democratic and pupil-active method of teaching increases pupils’ involvement in and motivation for the subject.

18 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: Ethical considerations, a perception of one's importance to the local congregation, and peer influence also played a part in the stepwise regression package, which accounted for half of the variance in commitment scores.
Abstract: INTRODUCTION According to Wieting (1975), "A recurrent focus of social philosophy since Plato's Republic has been the threat posed by the possibility that the young might not adopt the essential wisdom and values of that society. . . . If a society is to continue its existence beyond one generation, the members must transmit what they consider to be necessary knowledge and values. The continuity of a social system by definition requires transmission between generations." Applying this to institutional religion, churches and other religious communities must be vitally concerned with retaining the children from member families--in other words, preventing youth dropout is a major consideration for any religious group that desires a future. In a major quantitative, ecumenical study of church disengagement and reentry, based on the 1978 Gallup survey of unchurched Americans, Roozen (1980) estimated that about 46% of Americans drop out of church participation at some time in their lives, with the peak occurring during the teenage years. Probable causes for the increase at this stage were lessening of parental influence as peer pressure and the emancipation process increased, plus the feeling that the church had little to offer that was relevant or interesting. Yet many teenagers remain committed to their childhood religion. In a study of 3,000 evangelical teenagers, Zuck and Getz (1968) found that religious values were of significance to 88% of them. Four out of five attended church every week, two out of three prayed daily, and six out of ten professed belief in key evangelical doctrines. What factors, then, predict retention or dropout? Dudley and Laurent (1989) found that among Wesleyan, United Methodist, and American Baptist young people, alienation from the church was best predicted by unpleasant experiences with the church, lack of involvement, uninteresting sermons, deficient devotional life, and religious restrictions on lifestyle. Among Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Methodists, Hoge and Petrillo (1978) found that church attendance and participation were most influenced by the attendance of parents, peer pressure, type of youth leader, and quality of religious education. In a study of over 33,000 college graduates, Caplovitz and Sherrow (1977) reported that disaffiliation was related to rebellion against the status quo, secularization, and achievement orientation. Dudley (1978) found that alienation from religion among a group of 400 Seventh-day Adventists in parochial schools was highly correlated with perceptions of the quality of their relationships with religious authority figures. The present paper is an attempt to refine our understanding of those factors which influence church retention or dropout by analyzing data from two years of a longitudinal study of Seventh-day Adventist teenagers. METHOD In 1987, the Seventh-day Adventist church in the United States and Canada began a ten-year study of youth retention and dropout. The aim of the project was to select a group of middle adolescents who were already members of the church and to survey them each year for ten years in order to determine the factors that were related to staying or leaving. The first step was to pick 695 churches by a stratified random sampling method so that they were geographically representative of all Adventist churches in North America. The clerks of these churches were then requested to send the names and addresses of all members who were 15 or 16 years of age. Clerks of 659 churches responded (95%), and a six-page questionnaire was mailed to each teenager. Usable instruments were received from 1,523 (64% response rate), and each year follow-up surveys have been mailed. The youth are distributed across the United States and Canada, roughly in the same proportion as the geographic distribution of the adult membership. Detailed findings for the first three years have been reported elsewhere (Dudley & Kangas, 1990; Dudley, 1991). …

18 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the main reason for resistance is reformers' failure to closely examine the cultural context of their chosen setting and work with existing tools and local institutions.
Abstract: Following the events of 9/11, many misconceptions entered the policy-making platform with regard to the need for education reforms in the Muslim world. Based upon Western cultural and societal norms and increased scepticism of the role of religion in violence, these assumptions have triggered a strong wave of calls for a top-down approach to reform formal state schools in predominantly Muslim countries, These calls often meet with resistance at national and community levels. This article seeks to examine these misconceptions and investigate why educational reform efforts through top-down frameworks which are especially motivated by countering violent extremism or terrorism have had only limited success. Many major international intergovernmental organisations, non-governmental organisations and governments have invested time and effort into education measures aiming to build peace and coexistence in Muslim countries, but they have been unable to build a relationship of trust with community leaders and school authorities. The authors argue that the main reason for defiance is reformers’ failure to closely examine the cultural context of their chosen setting and work with existing tools and local institutions. Illustrating their point with a case study of an intervention carried out in informal Qur’anic schools in Niger, West Africa, the authors offer an alternative method which fosters changes from within. They argue that this model has a better chance of sustainability and could thus be used as the basis for future interventions.

18 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023206
2022447
2021407
2020591
2019550
2018512