Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) - Fewer and fewer schoolchildren in North Rhine-Westphalia are taking part in Christian religious education. According to School Minister Dorothee Feller (CDU), the number of students participating in Catholic and Protestant religious education fell by a total of around 379,000 from 2012 to 2021. Feller announced this at a press conference in Düsseldorf on Monday.
At the same time, according to the Ministry of Education, the number of students in Islamic religious education rose from around 2,000 participants in 2012 to around 24,000 in 2021. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia has been offering Islamic religious education since the 2012/13 school year and is continuously expanding this range.
Since 2018, Protestant and Catholic children have been able to be taught together at primary schools and lower secondary level in NRW. Since 2018, the number has risen from a good 40,000 to more than 108,500 participants. At the beginning of the 2021/22 school year, a total of 275 primary schools (almost 10 percent) and 261 secondary level I schools (11.5 percent) took part in so-called denominational-cooperative religious education.
The largest archdiocese in Germany in Cologne had not previously participated. But now there will also be joint religious education there from the 2023/2024 school year.
"This model is precisely our answer to the fact that we have a religiously plural society," said a spokesman for the Catholic Office of North Rhine-Westphalia. It is clear to him "that we are of course increasingly becoming a minority and that we must therefore cooperate on this issue in order to guarantee religious instruction."
The success of the teaching model has now been measured in a study by the two professorships for religious education at the University of Siegen. "Actually, all actors in this game are largely satisfied with the denominational-cooperative religious education. There are very few critical voices," said theologian Ulrich Riegel. School Minister Feller also assessed the results positively and praised the cooperative teaching as "lived ecumenism".
