Values in the Curricula of Religious Education and Social Studies in Primary Schools in the Context of Local-Universal Dilemma

Abstract

This study aims to identify the approach of teaching curricula of primary courses of religious education and social studies values and to determine the weight of values found in these programs with regard to various aspects such as being open to novelty-conservatism, individualism-being social, nationalism-universalism, self-expansion-self transcendentalism. To do this, the general approach of these curricula to values has been identified based on the relevant literature and programs, values categories have been established based on Schwartz's values theory and the programs have been scanned with categorical contents analysis technique. The reason why Schwartz's values theory was taken as the basis of category formation is that this theory offers many resources to analyze the relationships between local and global values that are known to have taken place in recent years in our education. As a result, both of the curricula were found to indicate a tendency from local values towards universal values with the changes made in recent years, and social studies were found to be ahead of religious education in terms of reflecting these tendencies in the content of the program.