Religious Education is an area of the curriculum that often provokes many strong opinions. In this chapter, I propose to look more thoroughly at exactly what Religious Education is in relation to its history alongside its implications in the Key Stage 2 classroom. For the purpose of this dissertation I will concentrate on education rather than daily worship due to the relevance of the integration of this fundamental learning area into Literacy.
             RE is not, as might appear first glance, one subject among others in the school
             Curriculum of England and Wales. It has been influenced not only by its history, for that would be true of any curriculum subject, but by the peculiar identity of.
             the UK, the position of the Church of England, the experiences and views of
             senior politicians, the attitudes of the public to religion and by the rapid social change of the last fifty years.
             The current education system can be traced back to a time when the only form of school was Sunday school and the only widely available text was the Bible. In 1870 education became compulsory for all. Established schools continued to teach Religious Instruction, and schools that were formed to accommodate the new enrolments also based their learning around religion, although in a non-denominational format. Since the Education Act of 1944, parents have been given the right to withdraw their children from religious experiences in a school context, whilst teachers have been permitted to withdraw from or decline to teach this subject if they felt it to be personally inappropriate. Attitudes towards the content and application of this subject have developed in keeping with our modern multi-cultural society, with every child in full-time education being legally entitled to experiences within Religious Education up to the age of eighteen. Syllabuses have been compiled by Local Education Authorities (LEA) to comply with the legal requirements laid out in the 1988 E...