Transformation of the goals and content of religious education in England during the late 19th — early 21st centuries

Abstract

The article offers an overview of the grounds on which the importance of the religious component in secular education in the United Kingdom, a country with a mature system of religious education, is based. These include, in particular, a change in the political situation, social expectations, the religious landscape, formed by the rivalry of various denominations and the spiritual state of the society.The features of social dialogue and reactions to modern pan-European transformations are taken into account. Observations are made about the relationship between the value of religious education and the status of the subject, which, in turn, affects all aspects of the organization of religious education at school, including expanding or narrowing the list of religions studied, changing teaching approaches, rethinking the content and others.The purpose of the article is to trace how the status of the subject, goals and attitudes towards the value of religious education have changed in a historical perspective over the course of the 20th-21st centuries.It is concluded that by now there has been a transition from confessional to liberal approaches, in which indoctrination and religious socialization have been replaced by more distant and objective ways of studying religion, as well as increased attention to social goals, such as tolerance and respect for differences and formation of individual religiosity.All these changes led to the fact that the original foundation on which British society was laid and which constituted the Christian faith was gradually washed away. The new recommendations of religious commissions propose to replace the dogmas of traditional religions with an individual set of different beliefs and secular and near-religious views, arbitrarily selected from the entire array of religious knowledge, for each student.