Worldviews - A Threat to Religious Education but Ignored in Science Education?

The possibility of religious education changing so that it explicitly includes non-religious worldviews, to the extent that the subject itself changes its name, is deeply contentious. It has unsurprisingly been welcomed by humanists (secularists) who have long been frustrated at their inability to colonise religious education and has been seen by some within the religious education community as a way of rescuing the subject from its perceived decline. Others, though, have raised objections to the proposal. In this chapter it is examined why the proposal that worldviews play a much greater part within religious education has been so contentious when comparable calls for worldviews to play a greater part within science education have had little influence, to the extent of frequently being ignored. I situate these debates within recent calls for school curricula to focus on Big Ideas both in science education (Wynne Harlen and colleagues) and religious education (Barbara Wintersgill and colleagues). It is concluded that the reasons for these differences between religious education and science education with respect to the perceived importance of worldviews are primarily to do with how these two subjects see themselves and are seen in the school curriculum, and to the place that religion and science occupy more generally in society but that neither subject should envisage changing its name