Beyond knowledge-centred versus student-centred RE

There is a long-standing contrast, sometimes described as a battle, in school-based literature between being ‘student-centred’ (or ‘child-centred’ or ‘personal’) and being ‘knowledge-centred’ or ‘subject-centred’ or ‘academic’. This is played out in debates on specific school subjects, including RE. Is RE primarily ‘about’ knowledge of religious and other traditions, or is it primarily ‘for’ the edification of the students and/or the benefit of society? Current debates in the UK related to the Commission on Religious Education (Commission on Religious Education CoRE 2018) report include this contrast, with religious knowledge or ‘literacy’ having a more significant role than the more edificatory elements of the subject – implied by the recommendation to drop ‘education’ from the title of the subject (Commission on Religious Education CoRE 2018, 31). ‘education’ in a subject title is seen as trying to make students something (e.g. religious), rather than teaching them about something. The contrast can be seen in many approaches to schooling and the curriculum, and can sometimes also be seen in the different approaches to the schooling of children (up to the age of eleven or twelve) and the schooling of young people above that age, with the more ‘personal’ elements more likely to be stressed with younger students, and more ‘academic’ elements more likely to be stressed with older students. RE as an ‘E’ subject, like PE, PSHE, Citizenship Education, Driver Education, and a number of other subjects, is at the heart of such debates, so dropping the ‘E’ in the subject name (as recommended by CoRE 2018) is itself a significant move. The ‘E’ is given on the grounds that students of the subject are expected to engage personally in the subject: citizenship education (in the UK) is intended to create better and more active citizens, physical education is expected to help students become physically fitter and/or healthier, personal and social education improves personal and social skills. The E in RE suggests a form of ‘learning from religion’, as Grimmitt describes it, the ‘reflective, interpretive, critical, and evaluative interactions’ (Grimmitt, in Grimmitt 2000, 18). Other jurisdictions have sided more with the ‘personal’ or with the ‘academic’, and this is not just related to promoting religiousness (or an individual religious confession), but, as I say, reflects a wider debate on the purpose of schooling – whether it is about ‘making better people’ or about ‘passing on valuable knowledge and skills’. It is helpful finding out how teachers see this apparent contrast, in their work in RE classrooms. Two recent pieces of research in which I have been involved explored the ways in which teachers of religion saw their role, in schools with Catholic or Jewish foundations (Stern and Buchanan 2021; Stern and Kohn 2022). In both projects, there were indeed some tensions evident: some teachers who found themselves conflicted. However, the majority of respondents found ways to balance the various ‘religious’, the ‘personal’, and the ‘knowledge’ aspects of their roles. What these projects suggested was that teachers are typically placed on a continuum from more ‘personal’ (or ‘religious’) in their intentions and practices, to more ‘knowledge-based’ or ‘academic’ in their practices. This fits with what writers such as Beane says, that all school subjects are personally implicated, and should be seen as distinct from academic disciplines, even though they also make use of similar knowledge: ‘a discipline of knowledge and its representative school subject area are not the same things, even though they may be concerned with similar bodies of knowledge[, as t]hey serve quite different purposes’ (Beane 1995, 617). An even broader claim is that of Polanyi, for whom all academic disciplines, never mind school subjects, are ‘personal’ (Polanyi 1962), related to the position of the BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 45, NO. 3, 225–227 https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2023.2202076