The religious phenomenon in secondary education courses

This research aimed to understand how the religious phenomenon is portrayed in secondary school programmes, based on Philosophy and Sociology textbooks selected through the 2011 National Textbook Programme, considering that for the first time, works related to the two subjects were made available in the programme for selection by teachers. The introduction presented the object of the research, the guidelines of the national textbook programme, and the works under study. We then presented the theoretical discussion for the definition of the religious phenomenon based on Eliade and Durkheim studies, aiming to support the importance of the theme’s presence in secondary school programmes. In the last part, we defined the methodology to be used, based on qualitative research, when we were able to record the opinions of teachers who teach sociology and philosophy, comparing them with the views of the authors of the textbooks, enabling a comparison with the defined theoretical basis. Finally, the conclusions pointed to several difficulties in the preparation of textbooks, covering the dimensions of concepts, ideology, politics, and economics.