Abstract
It is still surprisingly common to hear advocates of Catholic education refer to ‘Catholic’ Religious Education. This article will identify the issues bound up with the concept of ‘Catholic Religious Education’. It will be argued that at the very least using this concept is akin to a category mistake, and at worst it skews our understanding of Religious Education in Catholic schools and as such inevitably triggers off some problematical debates. The nature and scope of Religious Education in Catholic schools is in many respects contested in relation to whether it is catechesis or Confessional education. Much of this is to do with the way in which it is framed or aligned with being ‘Catholic’. An important priority now is to stop referring to this part of the curriculum as Catholic Religious Education.
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Notes
See for example the double volume ‘Global Perspectives on Catholic Religious Education in Schools’ (Springer 2015 & 2019) edited by Buchanan and Gellel. This double volume brings together a staggering 77 chapters specifically under the banner of Catholic Religious Education.
This is The religious dimension of education in a Catholic school, the Congregation for Catholic Education at the Vatican.
In fact a strong case can be made for there being at best only a precarious case for theology in Religious Education, see Whittle (2021c).
For a fuller discussion of how the use of piety and slogan has had a stifling effect on the development of the philosophy and theology of Catholic education see Whittle (2021a, pp. 5–15).
Carmody (2017) has argued in support of a Confessional account of Catholic education, arguing against the idea of non-Confessional Catholic education. He maintains that if the Catholic school is to be distinctive as the terms depicted by Church leaders in the various Education documents, it needs to be viewed as confessional. As such it has to respect the integrity of all its students and staff—Catholic and non-Catholic. Unfortunately Carmody’s defence of Confessional Catholic education does not engage with the concerns Hirst raises about primitive forms of education.
see McKinney and McClusky (2019) for a careful historical analysis of Scottish Catholics in relation to education.
In effect the use of Catholic Religious Education was used to serve as way of demarcating what was going on in Catholic schools from the alternative of what was perceived to be Protestant (Reformed) Religious Education. It might be possible to suggest that, in the current historical reality, the demarcation is between the sort of Religious Education that happens in Catholic schools as opposed to a secular approach to the subject in many schools. However, if this is more than just the amount of curriculum time and resources devoted to the subject in Catholic schools, far more research would be need to substantiate this claim.
This is broadly equivalent to what philosophers of Education, such as R.S.Peters advocated for in terms of ‘education for its own sake’.
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Whittle, S. Why is it time to stop referring to ‘Catholic Religious Education’?. j. relig. educ. 69, 401–410 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-021-00145-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-021-00145-7