Religion Classes at Russian Schools: Reasoning and Thoughts

Abstract

The problem of religious revival in Russia and the development of Russian re-ligious culture after the fall of the Soviet ideological system in 1991 is one of the urgent and intensively developed problems of modern social philosophy. In a country where for several decades all forms of religious life were banned, and any religiosity was subjected to obvious ( Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev) or hidden (in the last years of the USSR) persecution, religious consciousness was not only not suppressed. But it is also awakened with unprecedented strength before, becoming one of the determining factors of the political and spiritual life of the entire post-Soviet space. The full significance of this phenomenon has not yet been revealed by history and philosophy, but without understand-ing it now it is impossible to imagine the dynamics of the processes taking place in our country. One of these processes is the adaptation of the educa-tional space of Russia to the new spiritual picture of society, and the most im-portant aspect of it can rightly be considered the discussions around the newly introduced school discipline "Fundamentals of religious culture and secular ethics", reflecting almost in its entirety the modern ideological state of the Rus-sian pedagogical community, and, in part, and society as a whole. This article is an attempt to answer the questions: how was the current concept of school religious education formed? Should it be religious or religious studies and cul-tural? What are the main principles of this concept? How does the practice of its implementation comply with these principles? What is the perception of this innovation in Russian society, and, in particular, in the educational space? And finally, what are the prospects for this new trend in Russian education? To solve the problem, such methods as analysis, synthesis, induction, deduc-tion, and the unity of the historical and logical were used. In the course of the research, the main approaches to teaching the fundamentals of religious culture that take place in the Russian educational space (secular ethics included in the new course were initially viewed as a politically correct appendage to its main religious content) were identified, the main trends in Russian educational poli-cy related to the problem of religious culture and its compatibility with the principle of secular education, identified some prospects for further research. An analysis of the problem leads to the conclusion that, on the one hand, the need to integrate religious education into the educational system of Russia is long overdue, on the other - that the current solution does not suit any of the parties to this process. The principles of selectivity and confessional orienta-tion of the modules of the new discipline cannot be fully implemented, the con-tent of the curricula does not correspond to the goals of religious studies, a clear understanding of which, moreover, is lacking