An Assessment of the Goals of Religious Training of the Adolescents through Enjoyable Approach

Bearing in mind the fact that we live in a society which follows religious principles and rules, the recognition of the goals of religious education, especially from the viewpoint of Islam, is a significant necessity of educating people properly towards the path of prosperity. Since a great part of education takes place in schools, the educator have to be familiar with the goals of religious education, by recognizing that they can follow the right path towards educating the learners. This study is aimed at investigating the goals of religious education of adolescents through enjoyable approach. In terms of purpose, this is a practical research which follows a qualitative content analysis method. Its statistical population includes the Holy Qur'an and narrations (source books containing hadiths and narrations), and the views of scholars of religious education fields. First, the researchers derived the data by reviewing the Islamic texts. Then, they performed data analysis in three open, axial and selective coding stages, and in the next stages, they made categorization, integration and refinement of the codes resulting in the central category of “the goals of an enjoyable religious education”. The findings indicated that the most important mediating goals of religious enjoyable education containing reinforcement of the spirit of truth-seeking, theism and enhancing  faith in God; moral goals including self-knowledge, self-knowledge and self-purification; scientific and educational goals containing reinforcement of the spirit of rationality, thinking and research, training the spirit of contribution and cooperation, raising  the spirit of constant education and the spirit of book reading, all of which are in line with the goals of achieving the ultimate objective of intimacy to God.