ENSINO RELIGIOSO NA ESCOLA: O PAPEL DAS CIÊNCIAS DAS RELIGIÕES.

Abstract

This study has been to analyze the religious teaching and defending the role of the Science of Religions in the process. To this end, we carried out a literature search, analyzes integrative, systematic and quantitative and qualitative study of scientific publications produced between 1978 and 2009. The results showed 207 studies available, most of them on the website of the Permanent National Forum of Religious Teaching, intensified in the last ten years in the institutions of the Southeast and Southern Brazil. The analysis of publications identified three groups of studies that discuss religious education: a minority that disagrees with the religious education at school, a group that says satisfied with the current situation and a larger group advocate changes in legislation, training of teachers in curriculum and teaching of religious education. The study revealed a higher religious and inter-disciplinary, which is presented as a discipline that collaborates with other sciences, which justifies the need to understand the religious education through the constructs theoretical-philosophical/sociological religions. The authors agree that religious teaching is necessary and should include the differences among religions. Within this perspective, this study examined the role of the Science of Religions as an alternative to religious education, taking into account the principles of scientific, integrality, supraconfessional, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, subjectivity, contextuality, of falsification and flexibility. Faced with the current religious teaching, the Science of Religions can play a neutral and without comparing religions together. In conclusion, this study, that the last thirty years much has been published on religious education, however, there is a need for teacher education to the Brazilian religious education, taking into account all its complexity by means of Sciences of Religions.