A Study On The Relation Between Religion And School Education In The Secular Age

Religion and education can be described as a pair of twin sisters. At the beginning of human birth they start breeding, and in the future development of human society they are in the interdependent. They have played an enormous role in the progress of people's spiritual world and the heritage of human civilization. At the late Middle Ages, the development of the commodity economy, the renaissance movement, the reformation and the progress of the modern natural sciences has profoundly impacted on the traditional relationship between religion and education, which provided a spiritual power for education freeing from the religious control. On this basis, The Enlightenment thinkers raised the banner of rationalism and launched a more profound critique against the feudalistic church influence and the religious education, they wanted to try to set up a scientific system of philosophy based on rational and secular education to fill the the catholic theology and religious education that have been overthrown.The thought of education secularization becomes the main guidance of the education development.With the unfolding of the Enlightenment and the decline of church authority, education began to shift from the church's monopoly to the state's running. The success of the French Revolution opened a forerunner of French national education system. Subsequently, Britain, Germany and the United States also began trying to set up national education in the late 18th century, and all of them made progress in line with respective national conditions. To the industrial age, the public educational system was established in these main capitalist countries, and they occupied a dominant position, at the same time, the religious curriculum in the schools become more and more less. But because of every contry has different historical and cultural backgrounds, different nationality and different religious questions, the various countries formed four different modes of the relations between religion and education. Such as radical exclusion mode, moderate separation mode, positive accommodate mode, coordinated partnership model. Along with technical further development and economic society globalization trend deepening, the relationship between religion and education of the contemporary western countries have emerged many new issues, such as how to deal with religious pluralization, religious policy should be"left"or the right questions and so on. The various countries'government and the scholars also put forward many new ideas and countermeasures.Since modern times,under the influence of the introduction of western learning to the east and the west nation-state's ideological trend of education secularization, the chinese government also adopted the secularization education road to approach during the process of china's education modernization.The Republic of China government established the modern school edition system first time in the chinese history, and introduced the educational system secularization thought which had proposed by the west contries in the education modernization process, thus formulated the policy of the separation of the education and the religion and the policy of religious belief freedom that is suitable on our country in the legal laws and regulations, and made it specialize. At the same time, the Republic of China government, in view of actual situation of different nationality and the different religion at that time, adopted the different concrete policy pattern to deal with the problem of different religions and their relations with modern school education, which made the relationship between religion and school education show a variety of mode.At the beginning of New China, various social domains had the revolutionary transformation; the religious question has not been exceptional, Christianity and Catholicism's"Three-Self"innovation movement was pushed in the anti-imperialist movement, Tibetan Buddhism and Islamism had a democratic reform of religious system. At the same time, in handling problems of relations between religion and education, Chinese Communist Party and the government implemented the policy of separation of education and religion in accordance with the religious concept of Marxism-Leninism and the former Soviet Union's experience. During the Great Cultural Revolution period, China experienced a winding process and paid a heavy price in handling problems of religion. The new time, after the profound reconsidering and the scientific summary, the party and the government has formed the Chinese Marxism religion view, and has rationally chosen the education secularization and the privatization of religious belief; put the religious freedom and the separation of religion and education as our basic religious policies and legal principles. With the continuous implementation of religious policy, the concrete question and duty also unceasingly proposed, which impelled the religious policy unceasing consummation and the development in the new time.The first-hand material of positive cases comprehensively and richly show present situation of our country's relations between religion and the education. There is no single religious knowledge education curriculum in our country's Elementary and Middle schools education, but the humanities and social science disciplines contain the content of religious knowledge to varying degrees. Some villages in the Christian faith exist the situation that massive children and youth students go to Christian"Sunday School". These students have a dual reduplicated identity, not only are students in the ordinary school, but also are the"students"in the Sunday school. Nowadays,between the temple education and the school edition still has certain contradiction and the conflict at the Tibetan nationality areas,such as some young people would rather enter the temple than go to school, this situation is caused by a variety of reasons, such as the lack of awareness and understanding of Tibetan farmers and herdsmen to the modern school education, and the national cultural superiority of temple education etc. Arabic school in ethnic minority areas is a private nationality secondary vocational school that pays equal attention to the national religion knowledge and the modern scientific knowledge, and teaches Chinese and the Arabic together. This kind of school has a distinctive dual nature, that is to say, it has both the Islamic cultural education characteristics and the many features of modern education, which gives a positive adjustment to bipolar orientation of the Hui educational needs in many aspects. The question that the four cases have reflected the relation between religion and the school education in our country is worth us thinking deeply.After comprehensively researching the relations and policy between religion and school of the modern main western countries and China, and at the basis of the paradigm of many western religious sociologists'secularization, the study summarized the model of the relation between religion and school education in the secular age, and explained a very complex relation between the religion and school education after the secularization of educational system. Policies about the relation between religion and education that is made by modern western countries and China realistically show that the religion gradually goes out of the public schools and become a private things, and secularization becomes a historical trend of the educational development. But secularization of educational system is not non-religious; religion as a culture of human society is still widely exists in the school education. So the religious problems in the school education will continue to exist for a long time, this requires that all sectors carry out rational and consider the relation between religion and education, and do a reasonable arrangement, balance and adjustment under the guidance of secular orientation. On the one hand, regardless of going on how far the road of educational secularization, all countries has to retain religious cultural and knowledge education in the public school education in varying degrees; On the other hand, that the religion adapt to the social development is the requirements of religion own In order to survive and develop in society.