Education as socialisation: a historical-legal revision of the Catholic influence on Colombian Religious Education

Abstract

The article addresses the influence of Catholicism in the configuration of the academic subject Educación Religiosa (Religious Education, RE) in the Colombian system of public education. As its core idea, it defends the argument that a positive curricular determination in this direction would be connected with the country’s main tradition of nation-state building. To substantiate this claim, it offers a reconstruction of the political role of the Catholic Church in the country’s main historical periods. This revision will correspondingly highlight the socialising role of Christian conservative morality as underlying the centrality of the Catholic church in the country’s educational history, traversing both liberal and conservative administrations. This section is followed by a revision of the main legal sources structuring re in Colombia after the 1991 Constitution. Here, conclusions will highlight the need to appreciate this curricular area as presenting a continuity of the aforementioned socialising role of Catholic doctrine and morality in Colombia, all despite the threshold of state secularisation brought about by the aforementioned Carta Magna. In particular, this function would be developed by RE via its legal configuration as a parental right of the spiritual and cultural determination of its offspring, framed and sealed by the concordats between the State and the main Christian organisations of the country. Similarly, the legal definition of the RE teacher will evidence an important margin of institutional influence exerted by the Catholic and the main Christian Evangelical churches. In the end, this academic subject could be seen as reflecting the constitutive historical tensions of the Colombian religious and educational cultures, especially in connection with the role performed by conservative Christianity in its state-building processes. In this regard, the harmonisation of this subject with constitutional provisions in terms of freedom of belief and state neutrality towards religions would exhibit important curricular space.