Worldviews among non-religious pupils – implications for religious education and worldview education

Abstract

During the last decades of the 20^th century, worldviews (“livssyn”) were included as a topic in the syllabuses of Religious and Moral Education in Norwegian primary and secondary schools. There is still a need to clarify aspects of the concept of worldview. One such aspect is how worldviews are experienced and understood by pupils who define themselves as non-religious. This article is a contribution to increase our knowledge of this aspect. The article investigates how secular pupils describe their own worldview and what implications this understanding might have for the understanding of worldview as a concept and for religious and worldview education in Norwegian schools.

The article is based on interviews with four teenagers who defined themselves as non-religious, and who were recruited as informants based on their participation in a secular humanist confirmation course and ceremony. The results show that the informants’ understanding of worldview basically mirrors the presentations given in the research literature, emphasizing issues such as view on life and humanity, existential questions, practice, moral values, and meaning making. Like the literature, the majority of informants also apply a concept of worldview that gives space for both secular and religious as well as organized and personal notions of worldview. The informants accentuate some aspects in ways that are less articulate in the literature. Some infor­mants underline the need for independence from established worldview traditions and for expanding the borders of secular worldviews, for example related to the question of life after death. The informants also display how even personal worldviews may have a substantial practice dimension. Based on these findings, the article suggests that there may be a need to clarify the concept of worldview in the syllabuses and the education, in particular with regard to the relationship between organized and personal worldviews and the role of the pupils’ personal worldviews in classroom work.