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The notion of worldview figures prominently in the recent discourse surrounding Religious Education (RE) in English schools following the publication of the final report of the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) in 2018. This article reflects on the veracity of this initiative. It begins with an autobiographical reflection on the impact of worldview on the author's development as a scholar. Then, the work of several critics of CoRE is discussed and a more nuanced understanding of worldview is developed as a result. Finally, the pedagogical implications of the shift to worldview are explored by drawing on the personal development approach of Michael Grimmitt and the responsible hermeneutics approach of Anthony Thiselton.

PASSIONATE RELIGIOUS COMMITMENT is often viewed as a problem in education because believers are thought to impose their views on others in the belief that they are public truth. This article examines two case studies and concludes that this concern is real. An influential response is to argue that religious commitment should therefore be a private matter. However, using ideas from a significant English report on Citizenship Education, I argue that if teachers can make the distinction between secured public truth and controversial public truth, this difficulty with passionate religious commitment is overcome.

My first degree was in the natural sciences, during which I accumulated knowledge but thought little about the nature of that knowledge. The normative view that I unconsciously absorbed was a positivist realism that simply assumed that the world was exactly as scientists saw it. And that was how I held my Christian faith as well. Truth was what I read in the pages of Scripture (or at least what I was told that I read there by my Christian gurus). The notion of interpretation in either science or Christian faith never crossed my mind. And then I came across Thomas Kuhn (1962) and his notion of scientific paradigms. My good fortune was to have the opportunity to study a module on the philosophy of science as part of my science degree. Suddenly it dawned on me that my assumed, common-sense realism might actually be naı¨ve. I was introduced to Imre Lakatos' (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970) notion of a scientific research programme, which was his attempt to square the circle between Kuhn's seemingly subjective paradigm notion and Karl Popper's (1992) more objective idea of falsification. I even found out that there are anarchic philosophers who thought that science was a human construction (Feyerabend, 2010). Maybe what I thought were literal, objective descriptions of reality might be fictions of the human mind. As I moved from learning science to teaching science, two further challenges impacted on my developing thinking. The first was that education might itself be more problematic than I thought. When I was training to teach, my professor, Paul Hirst, was a leading figure in the London School that pioneered the notion that sophisticated education (the version he advocated) was purely rational whereas Christian education (the vocation that I believed I was called to) was primitive, because it rested on contested beliefs (Hirst, 1981). The second was that I did not yet know how to rescue my Christian faith from the bog of relativism into which it seemed to be sinking. My response was simply to get on with the job. I threw myself into extra-curricular Christian activity, invested time and energy in Christian schools' work organizations like Youth for Christ, and started to teach Religious Education as a way of sharing my Christian faith.

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