How Far Can Religious Education Contribute to Multicultural/Intercultural Education?

In this article the emergence in Britain (late 1960s) of a secular religious education (RE), utilising material from the religions of the world and referring to its role in multicultural education in the 1970s will be given. Developments in the history of the relationship between multicultural and antiracist education (till early 1990s), when new critical approaches to multicultural education appeared, will be discussed. Policy discussions internationally are now recognising the importance of the religious dimension to intercultural education. New interpretive and dialogical pedagogies of religious education share similar analytic stances towards culture and religion and similar critical and reflexive methodologies to recent approaches to multicultural/intercultural education. Thus, religious education employing these pedagogies can make a direct contribution to an intercultural education working to promote social cohesion.