Гуманитарные Ведомости. Выпуск 4(8).2013

Гуманитарные ведомости ТГПУ им . Л . Н . Толстого № 4 (8), декабрь 2013 г . 108 Keywords: Religious education, religious minority, religious pluralism, freedom of conscience According to the UN Convention on children’s rights, religious education in a poly- confessional society can only be considered successful if the child is brought up in a spirit of “readiness for a responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, sexual equality, and friendship among nations, and ethnic, religious and national groups.” I would like to stop here for a while. Before thinking of the treatment of religious minorities in Religious Education, I would like to ask WHY? Why we should analize so deeply this sort of education? Is it only the task of religious education to educate such a person? What about secular education? In my country this Question is very acute. There are many people who thinks the secular education can realize all these goals for sure, and the history of Sovjet educational system is a very good evident of this fact. I remember the reaction of Texan citizen about me, educated in Sovjet time: they looked at me with very clear natural Question in their eyes: how is it possible to grown up without religious education? And by the way, that was my own goal to understand: What is it, the religious education, and why the modern world need it? As Juan Navarro points out freedom of education in Argentina is understood generally as the right to exercise the rights to teach and learn according to one’s own religious tradition. Parents in many situations can choose for their children religious education at a confessional private school, or they can choose to send their children to state schools. What is lacking is the right to choose at the same time religious or secular education in state schools, where the religious issue is excluded even if the great majority believes in a God. Education is incomplete for that reason, and many cultural trends, religious as well as secular, are not able to be understood. In order to study the evolution of religion and its institutions in a modern multicultural society, it is important to scrutinize the influence of globalization in general, and immigration processes in particular. When national and cultural characteristics are obliterated, religion becomes the only way to express national and cultural identity both for native citizens and for immigrants. The reality is that there are no modern societies that are completely homogenious religiously. As Cole Durham in his Introduction notes, the easy of travel, the pull of economics opportunity across borders, and population shifts due the war and other factors have all combined to create a world in which every country has substantial religious diversity, including a growing percentage of the population that lacks religious belief or is religiously indifferent. A meta-analysis the Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity (Miron Zuckermann, Jordan Silbermann, Judith A.Hall), (USA) of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the