The Teaching of Religious Education in Public Schools in the Nordic Countries of Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Christianity has constituted the cultural and ethical foundation of Europe. In the European Union (EU) a general regulation does not exist concerning religious education (RE) in schools, although there is a guarantee to parents that their children should be educated in agreement with their religious convictions. Using the research methodology characteristic of Comparative Education, we analyzed the constitutions and distinct facets of religious education in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The legal framework has been gleaned from these countries’ respective constitutions, in which moreover the right to religious freedom is explicitly embodied, except in the case of Norway where it is implicit. In the constitutions of Denmark and Finland, clear references are made to compulsory schooling free of charge (art. 76 and art. 16, respectively), whereas the Swedish constitution only alludes to the Government’s responsibility in the area of education (art. 7.1) and the Norwegian constitution focuses on the education of the King (art. 47). In the four countries under investigation we found that the question of religion and morality was treated with special attention. With respect to freedom to choose whether or not to take RE, while it was a compulsory subject within the school curriculum in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, since 2007 pupils in Norway have been allowed to refuse to take “Christianity, religion and philosophy”.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".