A New Look at the Religious Basis of Curriculum: A Basis for Theorizing in the Field of Curriculum Studies

As a possible way of improving curricula, it was hypothesized that the role of religion in curriculum development needs to be revisited. To this end, experts’ views on religious foundations of curricula were sought, identified, analyzed, and conceptualized. The results show that the experts’ views on religious foundation of curricula is mostly affected by their standpoint on both curriculum and current perceptions of its religious foundations. This was taken to be the experts’ reaction to their understanding of the very concept of curriculum. Some consider this concept to be equivalent to curriculum development, while a very few think of curriculum as a field of study and as a result includes curricula’s religious foundations. The former limited view of curriculum and its dimensions has led to a limited impact of religion on curriculum. Therefore, both understandings of curriculum and its religious foundations need to change in order to maximize the role of religion in curriculum. Considering curriculum development as a science could lead to the identification of fundamental roles that religion, as a semantic network of reasoning, can play.