Religious education was established as a compulsory curriculum requirement in all schools by the 1944 Education Act. It was intended to provide instruction to all pupils in the basic tenets of the Christian faith and ensure that every successive generation of pupils understood the role of Christianity in British history and the national sense of British identity. In examining the sociohistorical context in which this groundbreaking education act emerged it is evident that at that time religious education had a very clear purpose and unambiguous raison d'être. It was a key element in the socialisation process of children which familiarised them with the prevailing societal norms of behaviour, social values and dominant beliefs. By the second decade of the twenty-first century this certainty about a rationale for RE had been lost. Widespread confusion had developed about what the point of religious education actually was, and inspections of RE teaching revealed the subject to be in a parlous state (OFSTED in: Religious education: realising the potential, 2013; in: School inspection handbook, 2019). In 2016 the Religious Education Council of England and Wales established the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) in an attempt to bring some clarity back into the subject. In the years between 1944 and 2021 social norms, values and beliefs had changed significantly and consequently the world RE teachers were seeking to socialise children into was and is very different. The solution proposed by the CoRE is to concentrate on teaching 'worldviews' to prepare pupils to respect the diversity of beliefs in contemporary society. Far from saving the subject, however, this shift of focus can be seen in many ways which are explored in this paper to be more likely to hasten the end of RE as a curriculum subject and to accelerate its replacement by an enhanced form of citizenship education.

1944 年的《教育法》将宗教教育确立为所有学校的必修课程要求。它旨在向所有学生提供基督教信仰基本原则的指导，并确保每一代学生都了解基督教在英国历史中的作用和英国民族认同感。在考察这一开创性教育法案出现的社会历史背景时，很明显当时宗教教育有一个非常明确的目的和明确的存在理由。它是儿童社会化过程中的一个关键因素，使他们熟悉普遍的社会行为规范、社会价值观和主流信仰。到 21 世纪的第二个十年，这种关于可再生能源理论的确定性已经丧失。对宗教教育的真正意义已经产生了广泛的混淆，对 RE 教学的检查显示该主题处于危险状态（OFSTED 见：宗教教育：实现潜力，2013 年；见：学校检查手册，2019 年）。2016 年，英格兰和威尔士宗教教育委员会成立了宗教教育委员会 (CoRE)，试图让该主题重新变得清晰。在 1944 年至 2021 年间，社会规范、价值观和信仰发生了重大变化，因此，RE 教师试图让儿童融入社会的世界过去和现在都大不相同。CoRE 提出的解决方案是专注于教授“世界观”，让学生为尊重当代社会信仰的多样性做好准备。然而，远没有拯救这个主题，