Francisco Giner de los Ríos' Conception of Religious Education: Insights Afforded by an Unpublished Text

Abstract

Francisco Giner, the founder of Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) (Free Education Institution) in Madrid, gave much importance to the religious education of his pupils without taking into account any particular religious faith or creed. He also considered that dogmas and particular faiths should be banned from school. Indeed, he believed that it was necessary to bring up young people in a kind of religion that would be above the concrete faiths. He reached this conclusion after abandoning the Catholic faith, which he considered as an ally to barbarism, arrogance, wickedness and ignorance, since it created a conflict between obedience to dogma as ordered by bishops and freedom of conscience defended by the “Krausutas”.These beliefs created a strong confrontation between the ILE and the Catholic church in the educationalfield. The church interpreted Giner's proposal as the beginning of the dechristianization of Spain. Nevertheless Giner was an essentially religious spirit who believed that the only aim of the school was to awaken in the child the common element that all positive religions have, encouraging the maximum respect for all the different faiths. This article presenb an unpublished text of Giner on religious education that shows the transition between his first religious writings, in which he mentions the reasons for his dissidence, and his later writings in which he defends religious non confessional teaching in school