Protestant Children, Missions and Education in the British World

The British Protestant children’s missionary movement of the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth century was an educational movement, wherein philanthropy and pedagogy went hand in hand. Bringing an educational lens to bear on this group provides a more cohesive interpretive framework by which to make sense of the various elements than hitherto has been considered. As such, the Protestant children’s missionary movement emerges historically as a much more complex entity than simply a means of raising money or cramming heads full of knowledge. Across a range of geographic settings it acted as: a key site of juvenile religious and identity formation; a defining vehicle for the creation and maintenance of various types or scales of community (local, denominational, emotional, regional, national or global); a movement within which civic and religious messages were emphatically conflated (especially with respect to nation and empire); and in which children both participated in imperial or quasi-global networks of information exchange (especially as consumers of missionary periodicals) and became informed, active and responsive agents of missionary support in their own right.

Religious Education and the Anglo-World

Focusing on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, “Religious Education and the Anglo-World” historiographically examines the relationship between empire and religious education. In each case the analysis centres on the foundational moments of publicly funded education in the mid- to late-nineteenth centuries when policy makers created largely Protestant systems of religious education, and frequently denied Roman Catholics funding for private education. Secondly, the period from 1880 to 1960 during which campaigns to strengthen religious education emerged in each context. Finally, the era of decolonisation from the 1960s through the 1980s when publicly funded religious education was challenged by the loss of Britishness as a central ideal, and Roman Catholics found unprecedented success in achieving state aid in many cases. By bringing these disparate national literatures into conversation with one another, the essay calls for a greater transnational approach to the study of religious education in the Anglo-World.

Psychological Perspectives on Religious Education

In this publication the contributions made by the individual differences tradition of psychology over the past 50 years to research in religious education are reviewed and assessed. In this context religious education is conceived broadly to embrace what takes place in schools, within religious communities, and within households across the age span. The opening section roots the analysis within the tradition of developmental psychology and the research that flourished in the area of religious development during the 1960s. It is from these foundations that current interest in the individual differences approach emerges. Subsequent sections examine the centrality of the attitudinal dimension of religion, discuss the place of personality in the individual differences tradition, explore sex as a core individual difference in religion, map the correlates, antecedents and consequences of individual differences in religious affect or attitudes, review research into the distinctiveness and effectiveness of church schools and the family in religious nurture, identify the factors that account for individual differences in attitude toward religious diversity, explore the relevance of the individual differences tradition for adult religious education, and explore the implications of the individual differences tradition for biblical hermeneutics and discipleship learning.

Religion and Education: Framing and Mapping a Field

This publication makes the case for ‘religion and education’ as a distinct, but cross-disciplinary, field of inquiry. To begin with, consideration is given to the changing dynamic between ‘religion and education’ historically, and the differing understandings of religious education within it. Next, ‘religion and education’ is examined from methodologically specific perspectives, namely the philosophical, historical and sociological. The authors outline the particular insights to be gleaned about ‘religion and education’ on the basis of their commitment to these methodological standpoints. Overall, this publication is concerned with demonstrating the scope of the field, and the importance of having a range of disciplinary, and interdisciplinary, perspectives informing it.