A Critical Reflection on the Commission on Religious Education’s Final Report
In September 2018, the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) published their final report, Religion and Worldviews: The Way Forward . I am late to read this report and have thus missed the initial discussion it has generated. Following the Welsh government’s recent adoption of key aspects of the report's recommendations, however, I wish to make a few, hopefully constructive, comments. Specifically, I wish to focus my remarks on those proposals aimed at renaming RE and repurposing RE. Troubling ‘Worldviews’ At the heart of CoRE’s report is the suggestion to change the name of ‘Religious Education’ to ‘Religion and Worldviews’. This proposal has generated considerable debate; a fact which is not surprising considering the decades-long prevalence of definitional questions in the academic Study of Religion. Indeed, questions around definition have been picking up at a critical, postmodern pace since the 90s onwards, further intensifying discussions (McCutcheon, 1997; Fi