L’«ora di religione». Una chance per la formazione e per la scuola

This paper starts from the idea that the teaching of religion in schools can play a significant role not only in educational pathways for young people, but even more in redefining the primary role of schooling. In reconstructing the history of the relationship between the Italian State and the Catholic Church within the Italian educational system, and emphasizing that this issue has been instrumentally manipulated and turned into a mere political and ideological one, the teaching of religion must be placed back at the heart of the general pedagogy discourse. Within this rediscovered approach, it is possible to recover the most appropriate terms of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary critical analysis and debate, which are aimed at revitalizing both the theory and the practice, the epistemology and the methodology of education, in the light of the real and complex experience of human beings and their development.