Educational and professional preparation of humanities teachers in the madrassas of North Macedonia

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to provide a differentiating analysis of the practices in European countries related to the inclusion of religious teaching in education cycles of primary and secondary schools. The positive methods of religious teaching and belief elaborate under the legislative and psycho-pedagogical prism. We are all witnesses that, since 1994, in the Republic of North Macedonia, we have had a flood of educational projects, such as "One Student, one Computer,"; "External, Evaluation,"; "State Matura,"; "Electronic, Diary," "Working in small groups" and many other similar experiments. The dilemma is how many of these projects we implement and include in the religious education system, respectively, in madrassas when religious education has yet to exist as a subject. Usually, there is some elaboration of religious teaching as a subject or as an aspect of another topic, such as history, literature, philosophy, and similar ones. However, it is difficult to find a country in which the policy separation of religion from the state, or the national policy of the education system, achieves the complete exclusion of faith, both from the procedure and the practice of schooling. The subject of humanities teachers' educational and professional preparation (with the pretext of religious subjects) in the Republic of North Macedonia became particularly important after the fall of communism. It was, until then, treated as a taboo subject. The two processes - the revival of religion after the fall of communism and the crisis of secularization (separation of religion from the state), were the preconditions for raising the issue of introducing religious education in public schools. The Ministry of Education and Science, under pressure from the Islamic Religious Community of Macedonia and KOM, began to accelerate the work to include certain religious content in public education. In the school year 2010-2011, they included a subject on religion studies in primary schools; the subject was introduced for the 4th grade (after the ex-6th grade) and was called "Introduction to Religion,"; whose approach is non-narrative and taught by sociologists. It is also introduced a narrative subject, "Ethics of Beliefs," with a narrative approach.