CNR-ISEM has published the proceedings of the workshop in Rome, January 10/11, 2019 on “The presence and the quality of the religious history in the school texts for the high school and in the most important tests of general history edited in the last three decades”.

The workshop marks the first step of a Joint Research Activity, whose aim is to consider the impact of the integrated system of services that ReIReS offers to scholars and of their use on the domain of historical religious studies.
The Workshop addressed the state-of-the-art of the relation between the development of historical religious studies and the educational programs in Europe. It focused on the relevance that education has in the construction of a common European cultural space, and it examined how far the new and innovative progress in the understanding of religious history, which comes from the possibilities granted by ReIReS, could have an impact in reframing the education programs and enriching education as a process of knowledge transferred from academia to a larger audience.

The workshop’s challenge was to contribute to remember to all stakeholders and political decision makers the relevance of a correct knowledge of European religious history to better understand the long-term development of the cultural pillars of contemporary Europe. A careful attention to religious history in educational programs is a necessary basis for a full understanding of the plurality and variety of European culture and for the assumption of this variety as a common cultural background. For this reason, the dissemination of a proper knowledge of European religious history in schoolbooks could contribute to alleviate the religious illiteracy that we see in our society.