The Times: Religion-free education in UK may be made illegal

In today’s The Times, there’s an article about how the Religious Education Council is attempting to eliminate parents’ right to remove their child from religious education classes.

From the article:

Plans to prevent parents removing their children from religious education lessons violate human rights, the National Secular Society has said.

The proposal to review the right of parents to excuse their children from RE at school on grounds of “conscience” came from the Religious Education Council this week.

…

The National Strategy for Religious Education, funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), proposes to make it illegal for parents to remove their children from religious education lessons.

At present, all state schools in the UK are required to teach religious education as part of the national curriculum but parents can opt to take their children out of lessons. But the strategy proposes a review of the right of parents to withdraw their children from religious education as a matter of “conscience”.

It seems awfully convenient that the religious have expressed their desire to discriminate against homosexuals as a matter of conscience, yet are not willing to extend that very same reasoning to a parent’s choice regarding the education of their children. This “do as I say, not as I do” attitude is an expression of pure hypocrisy.

From the strategy itself, we have this reasoning:

The growth in this country of Islamic self-consciousness, in its majority expression of asking for an end to discrimination and for its religious culture to be taken seriously and in its distorted form exemplified by 7/7, poses a considerable challenge to wider society. In response, it is easy for anti-discriminatory approaches to concentrate on race and ethnicity, but to fail to recognise the strength of religion as a key defining feature. Until the predominant culture fully recognises and appreciates the seriousness with which Muslims treat their faith, Muslims will continue to feel alienated.

If anything, event like the bombings in London on the 7th July 2005 and muslim protests against cartoons in a foreign newspaper exemplify the seriousness with which muslims take their religion. I don’t think any thinking person in the UK has any doubt about that.

It continues:

Whilst the issue is perhaps most starkly evidenced by Islam, other minority groups are affected and some still are. Christians too are looking for more deliberate attention in schools and colleges to deeper questions of meaning and purpose in both personal and social life and to religion’s part in them.

So now christians are wanting schools to provide deeper meaning for them through their religion. How will forcing religious education on non-christians imbue their own faith? Do christians think that, if their faith in their religion isn’t strong enough, that having others around them being compelled to listen to religious claptrap will allow them to reinforce their faith by some kind of proximate osmosis effect? This is just a sham contrivance, and stinks of that old “no morality without religion” claptrap.

One of the aims of the strategy is:

Improve the quality of the RE taught in community schools so that faith communities can feel confident that their faith is being accurately and sympathetically portrayed.

So how does one measure this supposed accuracy of portrayal? If, for each of the individual religious, there was one single authoritative definition of what it means, and each individual adherent followed precisely the tenets of their religion, then this might be a fair enough goal. But this isn’t what we see in society. There are major divisions, and hundreds of sects, subsects and cults galore, each preaching that they, and they alone, have the correct interpretation of generic labelled religious scriptures. So, educating these kids about which versions precisely will be enough to be considered an “accurate” portrayal? I doubt that each sect would receive equal treatment, and there certainly wouldn’t be time to cater for them all.

The strategy also makes note of where the influence for this particular impetus for an all-inclusive religious education comes from (my emphasis):

The unanimity of support for it [all-inclusive religious education] from the RE associations and faith communities was unprecedented.

No shit, really? I would never have guessed that a call for forced religious education would come from religious education associations and religious groups. I’m completely astonished by this revelation. And I’m being sarcastic as hell.

This strategy is fundamentally flawed, but because the people promoting it have a dogmatic vested interest in achieving the goals set out in the strategy, it seems that they can’t see the wood for the trees.

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